Today was the last day to register to vote in Georgia. I am paranoid about my vote, and always check that my husband and my registration is still valid four weeks before any general or primary election, and today I posted a link to the GA Secretary of State's page where voters can check their registration.
To both my horror and joy (joy since we were in time to fix it), my coworker checked her registration found that she was not registered in the metro county where she lived, but registered in rural Monroe County, where she has never lived, and had apparently already requested an absentee ballot.
It's not clear whether or not this is voter fraud, but one thing is clear: Republican's disingenuous focus on photo ID as a way to prevent voter fraud has left the door wide open for the most common kinds of fraud.
She called the registration office. They seemed relatively unconcerned, and said they would call her back. When 2:30 rolled around and they still hadn't called back, my friend raced out the the county voter registration office (there's only one, of course, and since she lives in a different county than where she works, she ended up having to take the rest of the day to ensure that she could still vote). The people at the office seemed to have little interest in how this had happened; she did call the Secretary of State's office to report possible fraud.
It's a mystery how my friend, who has lived at the same address for several years and voted in every election, somehow had her registered address switched to some address down in Monroe County, and how an absentee ballot was issued to someone with her name at that address. I am not crying fraud, because it may be that there was some kind of clerical mistake. But it could also be fraud.
Georgia has said it wants to crack down on fraud. It has one of the oldest and strictest voter ID laws, passed back in 2007. Yet as most people who have been paying attention know, in person voting fraud is not a problem; the real problem is fraud with absentee ballots, which many Republicans have worked to expand, not crack down on.
Georgia should know something about this by now.
Some conservatives have even been honest about this, admitting that Voter ID efforts have much more to do with suppressing Democratic votes than with preventing fraud.
So while certain demographics are deterred from voting, the kind of fraud--which may be involved in my coworker's almost-lost vote--has not been very interesting to Georgia's legislators.
Protect yourself, wherever you live, by always checking your registration, no matter how long you have lived in the same place and voted at the same precinct. Check here, and don't be surprised on election day.