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(Reuters) – A federal judge on Monday ordered two Georgia counties to reverse a decision that removes thousands of voters from the rolls ahead of the January 5 runoff elections that will determine which political party controls the US Senate.
The counties appeared to have improperly relied on unverified change of address data to invalidate the records, Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner said in her order filed Monday night in the US District Court for the Middle District of Georgia. .
“Defendants are prohibited from removing contested voters in Ben Hill and Muscogee counties from registration lists based on national change of address data,” Gardner wrote in the order. The judge is the sister of Democratic activist Stacey Abrams, who lost a race for governor of Georgia in 2018.
Most of the registrations the counties tried to rescind, more than 4,000 of them, were in Muscogee County, which US President-elect Joe Biden won handily in November, Politico reported https://politi.co / 2L3MGf6.
Another 150 were from Ben Hill County, which President Donald Trump won by a wide margin, the report added.
Nearly 2.1 million people have voted in the US Senate second-round elections in Georgia that will determine whether Democrats control both houses of Congress and the fate of Biden’s agenda, according to state data released Thursday.
The second round will pit Democratic rivals Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff against Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively.
If Republicans win one or both seats in the Georgia Senate, they will retain a small majority in the House and may block Biden’s legislative goals and judicial nominees.
If the Democrats win both, the House will split 50-50, giving the tiebreaker vote to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Robert Birsel)
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