A Georgia state court will hear De La Fuente v Kemp, Fulton County Superior Court 2016-cv-279793, on Monday, September 26. The issue is the validity of De La Fuente’s independent presidential petition. He submitted 14,500 signatures, and 7,500 were needed. The state said only 2,964 of his signatures are valid.
De La Fuente says that the various Georgia counties used inconsistent methods to validate signatures. He says Fulton County, which contains Atlanta and where the bulk of his signatures were gathered, refused to validate signatures of voters who are on the inactive list. Georgia law is clear that voters on the inactive list may sign. De La Fuente also says that when the signature was difficult to read, but the signer’s address and date of birth were clear, the county refused to use the address and date of birth information to find the signature. Because the list of registered voters is computerized, this would have been easy for the county to do.
The Secretary of State says the petition validity doesn’t matter, because De La Fuente missed the July 1 deadline for submitting his presidential elector candidates. A federal court had last month refused to set aside that Georgia law, but the federal judge was influenced by the fact that the state had told him De La Fuente didn’t have enough valid signatures anyway. That case is now in the Eleventh Circuit, 16-15880. Obviously if De La Fuente can show that he does have enough valid signatures, the federal court would then take his deadline challenge seriously.
There is a lot of confusion about “inactive voters” which is the term that the federal government has imposed. An “inactive voter” is one that the election officials can’t make contact with (such as sending something to the address and having it returned as undeliverable). You can’t remove anyone from the voting list, unless you have affirmative proof that they moved, and most people don’t give notification when they move.
When Orange County, California did its purge, they got commercial mailing lists, and sent out postcards to people, who could then send it back to confirming they had move to Arizona or Idaho or wherever. Otherwise you have to put them on the inactive list for two general elections before they can be purged. Someone who simply never votes is not “inactive” so long as the election officials don’t try to contact them. If an inactive voter shows up on election day, they simply get removed from the inactive list.
When Arizona was changing their petition requirements, they made a change to exclude inactive voters from counting in the denominator. The legislators could not understand why someone who had been inactive could not sign a petition as they went into patriotic mode about how someone who hadn’t voted had been brought back into the political process. Finally, a white-haired lady from the Maricopa County elections office who probably was working elections when Carl Hayden was running got up and explained what an “inactive voter” was. The legislators then got defensive and wanted to know why they were referred to as inactive voters.
It is somewhat surprising that De La Fuente had that many signatures from inactive voters, unless they had moved. But if that is the case, they might have problems voting in November.
It’s almost impossible to have 20% validity, so I have some skepticism over Georgia’s interpretations of a valid signature.