ATLANTA — The voting rights group launched by Stacey Abrams earlier this year, Fair Fight Action, is launching a legal move to try and stop a mass purge of Georgia voter lists due to begin today.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger mailed notifications to more than 300,000 voters in November that their registrations were at risk of being canceled, the Associated Press reported.
As a 30-day period for recipients of those letters to respond ends, the state will begin purging the voter rolls starting Monday, a spokesman told the AP over the weekend.
Fair Fight Action announced Monday morning it was filing an emergency motion in federal court to at least temporarily preempt that process.
The group said on Twitter it had "filed an emergency motion in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia seeking to prevent the State of Georgia from conducting an imminent massive, illegal purge of voters from the rolls."
Abrams' group is joined in the lawsuit by a number of churches, including Ebenezer Baptist Church.
The legal motion asks the federal court to bar the purge at least until Fair Fight and the churches can prepare to file for a preliminary injunction.
Fair Fight Action is arguing that the state has identified for removal from the voting rolls more than 120,000 individuals who have not had any legally defined contact with election officials in the last seven years and have not responded to the notices seeking confirmation of their address.
The group says Raffensperger's office "is treating those facts as a proxy for proof that these voters have moved to a different county or state" but that under a Georgia House bill signed into law this year, that status change may only happen with nine years of no contact.
Raffensperger, according to the document, is arguing the new law does not apply to people who passed the seven-year mark before the bill became law.
"H.B. 316 was signed into law with the express purpose of making Georgia’s elections more 'secure and fair' in large part by lengthening the period of inactivity required before a voter could be purged," the motion states. "H.B. 316 - which expressly repealed all prior contrary laws - is current, governing, law and (Raffensperger) is obligated to comply with it when purging the voter rolls."
Raffensperger's office said it does not comment on pending litigation.
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