Izzy Wade, a recent college graduate from Oregon, helped register voters near the Georgia State University campus Thursday. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder
Recent college graduate and Georgia newcomer Izzy Wade moved to Atlanta to follow her girlfriend, who landed a job at a homeless advocacy group.
When it came time to hunt for her own job, Wade knew she wanted to make a difference as well.
“I was really excited to learn that I could vote here after living here a couple of months, and then I was searching online to find voter registration work because I think that it’s really important in Atlanta,” she said. “Georgia’s a swing state, there’s a big potential for people’s voices to really matter here.”
Dionni Barnett, a recent high school graduate from Clayton County, helped register voters on the Georgia State University campus Thursday. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder
Wade was hired by the Outreach Team, whose website bills the organization as “the national engine of campaigners and organizers powering the progressive movement.”
Wade carried her clipboard of registration forms across the Georgia State University campus Thursday. She said the Outreach Team has been focusing on college campuses, but groups from across the political spectrum have been angling to sign up voters across the state ahead of Monday’s registration deadline.
Georgia, where people can automatically register when they get a driver’s license or state ID, already has a high rate of voter registration. In 2020, as much as 98% of eligible voters were registered to vote, and it’s likely to be high again this election.
“If you do a search for voter suppression, you’re going to find Georgia gets more hits than almost any other state,” David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said during a Knight Foundation election law forum last month.
“And yet, Georgia is not only one of the easiest states to vote in for everybody, it has one of the highest voter registration district rates in the country,” Becker said.
All told, about 7.1 million people are active voters in Georgia, according to the Secretary of State’s datahub.
The final push
For those who aren’t registered, there are groups hustling to reach them before Monday’s deadline.
One of them is Greater Georgia, which was started by former GOP U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler in 2021. Loeffler said in an interview Thursday that conservatives had “yielded voter registration to the left.” Now, voter registration is a part of Greater Georgia’s core mission and not just in the runup to an election.
Loeffler said she suspects Georgia’s historic voter registration may not be quite as high as some think.
Former GOP U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler speaks to Buckhead Young Republican volunteers and Greater Georgia interns at a phone banking event in Buckhead Thursday night. Jill Nolin/Georgia Recorder
“The bigger picture is we have elections that are decided by hundreds of votes, mere thousands of votes, and so every vote counts,” Loeffler said. “And particularly, part of our effort is focused on these local elections and understanding that because they are decided sometimes by tens or hundreds of votes, that we’ve got to make sure everyone’s engaged.”
“And there’s someone turning 18 every day. There’s someone moving to the state every day. And so, it’s a moving target,” she added.
The presidential race in 2020 was famously decided in Georgia by less than 12,000 votes.
Loeffler said the Georgians they contact usually fall into two categories: Young people who reach voting age who already have a driver’s license, and voters who have not cast a ballot in recent elections, becoming inactive.
The prominent Republican dropped into a Buckhead restaurant Thursday evening to fire up a group of interns and volunteers with the Buckhead Young Republicans who had gathered to make last-minute phone calls to Georgians who might be at risk of having to sit out the Nov. 5 election.
“This is all going to come down to Georgia once again,” Loeffler said to the group.
Greater Georgia says it has registered about 40,000 people since its launch and that it has reached more than 100,000 people during its recent campaign but will not know until later how many of them signed up to vote.
Heritage Action for American also announced a voter registration initiative this year that the group says had signed up 50,000 people in Georgia and fellow swing state Arizona as of last month, with a little more than half of them Georgians. The group is the sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, which created the controversial Project 2025 presidential transition plan.
Other groups have long been focused on growing Georgia’s electorate. The New Georgia Project has been working to add more Black and brown Georgians to the voter rolls for the last decade.
“We want to raise awareness for anyone to vote here in the state of Georgia,” said Elijah Grace, the organization’s director of field operations. “I think over the last few years, we have seen upticks in the number of people that have participated and voted. So, I think we will be on the way to another historic election here in Georgia.”
In the final week, New Georgia Project canvassers are having to navigate the added challenges of a hurricane that has devastated several Georgia communities – there were canvassers in Augusta and Statesboro who ware still without power this week – and a plume of smoke from a fire at a chemical plant hangs over the greater Atlanta area.
“We’ve been able to get back into the field as we try to close out this voter registration deadline on a strong level,” Grace said.
Grace said the New Georgia Project has signed up about 54,000 people to vote since Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when the organization kicked off its new registration campaign.
What’s your status?
But even when a voter says they are registered, Grace said he likes to nudge them to double check.
“Sometimes we can’t just take, ‘Oh yes, I registered to vote’ as it is. Sometimes we have to say, ‘All right, are you registered at your current address? Have you moved since you last voted? Have you changed your name or got married since you last voted? Just making sure people think through it,” he said.
Grace said he has encountered voters who have thought they were active but who found out they were listed as inactive. He said it happened to his wife, even though he said she had voted in a recent election.
Voters can check their status by visiting the Secretary of State’s My Voter Page.
“A lot of folks don’t think about the midterms as much as they do the presidential elections and maybe before they realize that it was eight years ago that they last voted,” said Rosario Palacios with Common Cause, which is a nonpartisan voting rights group.
Palacios said she has also noticed “additional obstacles” for naturalized voters, and she said she speaks from experience when she says that.
Palacios, who was born in Mexico and grew up in Gainesville, said she submitted her naturalization certificate when she registered in 2017 – only for the local board of elections where she lived at the time to ask her to resend the certificate later.
“There are challenges like that,” she said. “Paperwork may be misinterpreted or gets lost.”
Voters who encounter problems can call Common Cause’s nonpartisan election protection hotline at 1-866-OUR VOTE, which can also accommodate Spanish speakers.
Voter registration efforts are often just as much about trying to energize voters, though. Early voting in Georgia starts Oct. 15.
The Harris-Walz campaign held an event in Gwinnett County this week focused on encouraging Korean Americans to check their voter registration as part of a broader effort to win over members of Georgia’s Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander community.
These voters are often “swing voters” who are courted by both major political parties, said Michelle Kang, who is a Democratic candidate for a Gwinnett County state House seat and a first-generation Korean-American immigrant. Kang spoke at the Harris-Walz event, addressing attendees in Korean.
“We need to reach out to more AANHPI people, because this election is very tight,” she told a reporter Thursday.
Georgia Recorder reporters Ross Williams and Stanley Dunlap contributed to this report.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.