ATLANTA (AP) — Amid a scramble for political supremacy in rapidly changing Georgia, Democrats and Republicans are pointing fingers over the handling of as many 50,000 voter registration forms as the Nov. 4 election looms.
The dispute pits one of the state’s highest ranking Democrats and the minister of the church where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was once the pastor against the Republican secretary of state, with the two sides headed to court this week.
Leaders of the New Georgia Project say the group gathered about 86,000 voter registration forms, focusing on minority, younger and otherwise disengaged citizens. Those would-be voters are likely to lean Democratic, though the organization is technically nonpartisan.
But now the group’s leaders say they cannot find about 40,000 of those names on official voter lists maintained by Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican, with 10,000 more names listed as “pending.”
