Those voters had received a notice asking them to confirm that they still lived at their addresses, and they were given two additional election cycles to respond. Those who have failed to do so will receive a final notice next week along with a card they must return to avoid being purged. If they do not respond, their names will be removed.
Fair Fight Action, an advocacy organization founded by Ms. Abrams, said Georgia’s removal of registered voters who had not cast recent ballots was wrong.
“Voters should not lose their right to vote simply because they have decided not to express that right in recent elections,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the organization’s chief executive officer, in a statement. “Anytime a voter purge is conducted, errors can be made, including active voters being wrongly included on the list.”
Last year, in a case where Ohio similarly removed voters who had sat out previous elections, the Supreme Court found that the state had not violated federal law. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the 5-4 majority, said it was not up to the court to determine “the ideal method” for a state “to keep its voting rolls up-to-date.”
Ohio has since struggled to keep its rolls accurate. This year, Ohio’s secretary of state released the names of 235,000 voters it had planned to purge from the rolls in September, but a review of the names by the government and nongovernmental groups revealed that up to 20 percent of the names were there in error.
Florida is another state that voting rights advocates are closely watching.
“Florida has a history of problematic voter purges,” said Ms. Fried of All Voting Is Local.
Until last year, it was among a handful of states that maintained a lifetime voting ban against people convicted of felonies. In 2018, voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing most who had served their sentences to vote, adding to the swing state an estimated 1.4 million potential voters, predominantly people of color.