ATLANTA _ A federal judge is considering a last-minute effort to prevent Georgia election officials from canceling more than 120,000 inactive voters Monday night.
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones called a hearing Monday on a request from Fair Fight Action, an organization suing the state over voting rights, to halt the planned voter registration cancellation.
A Georgia law, known as "use it or lose it," allows registrations to be canceled after voters fail to participate in elections for several years.
"Georgians should not lose their right to vote simply because they have not expressed that right in recent elections," said Fair Fight Action CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo. "Georgia's practice of removing voters who have declined to participate in recent elections violates the United States Constitution."
The secretary of state's office declined to comment.
The Georgia secretary of state's office intended to cancel more than 300,000 registrations Monday: 120,000 who haven't participated in elections since before fall 2012, and 192,000 who either filed change-of-address forms or mail from election officials was returned as undeliverable.
The issue before Judge Jones is whether inactive voters can be removed from the rolls after seven years or nine years.
Georgia voters facing cancellation were declared "inactive" after three years in which they failed to participate in elections, contact election officials, respond to election officials' mail or update their registrations. Then their registrations could be voided after they missed the next two general elections.
A change in state law this year lengthens the period before voters become "inactive," from three years to five years.
Court filings from Fair Fight said election officials should have applied the new state law to the list of voters who had been previously declared inactive.
