Tens of thousands of illegal votes could be cast in Georgia, analyst warns

"When people just make stuff up, there’s not a lot you can do (with) that," Raffensperger said of Davis, who's been working with Georgia's election files for four decades and sits on a state Republican Party elections task force. 

Davis isn't warning about illegal votes by non-U.S. citizens, convicted felons, dead people, or people registered at bridges. He's talking about a weakness in elections integrity that the state blames on federal voting rights protections: Registered voters who move out of their counties, fail to update their registrations as state law requires, but then vote anyway at their old precincts, helping decide congressional seats, sheriffs, school boards, city councils and other races that aren't theirs.

It's been happening for years, Davis contends. Based on voter roll data compared against U.S. Postal Service change-of-address filings, he estimates 35,000 people violating residency requirements may have voted in the 2020 presidential election, nearly 26,000 potential violations in the 2022 gubernatorial election, and over 36,000 in the 2024 presidential election.

More than 9,600 potential unqualified voters may have already taken part in this year's May primary and June runoff, with close to 2,000 of them possibly living out of state, Davis's estimates show. He identifies potential residency violations through his paid access to the National Change of Address database.

He predicts nearly 31,000 residency violations in the upcoming races for governor and U.S. Senate, with a projected 4,200 of them voting from out of state. The rest would be in state but in a different county.

"There’s probable cause to investigate all of these if we had the manpower and the budget, but we don’t," Davis told The Center Square, which asked him to run numbers last month amid his public testimony to both the State Election Board and the General Assembly's Joint Election Equipment Specifications and Standards Committee.

While Davis only analyzed Georgia voting records, there is no reason to believe similar patterns of voters who moved voting in their old districts are not happening in other states.

While statistically infinitesimal against Georgia's 7.3 million active registered voters, tens of thousands of disputed ballots would provide groundwork for any candidate who lost by a thin margin to challenge election results, as has happened in the past.

In purple-state Georgia, recent polling shows the candidates for governor running neck and neck or in a dead tie. But election officials seem unlikely to address the problem before the November election.

Raffensperger's office not only refused to explain what's inaccurate about Davis's work, but urged a reporter to steer clear of him. "Personally, I have no interest in what Mark Davis is saying," Robert Sinners, the office's communications director, said.

The Secretary of State said voters who leave their counties without re-registering should be dealt with faster, but expressed frustration with the 33-year-old National Voter Registration Act, which restricts how close to an election voters can be taken off the rolls.

"What it really goes back to is the NVRA," Raffensperger told The Center Square. "It's a federal law, and unfortunately, Congress has done nothing. Let me say that again: Congress has done nothing to update NVRA."

Not definitive proof

Another elections official said she's open to a legislative fix, but disagrees the problem is as big as Davis portrays it. Sara Tindall Ghazal, an attorney, voting rights advocate, and the sole Democrat on the State Election Board, said it takes far more than change-of-address records to establish that someone voted illegally.

Post office records are about mail, not residency, she said, adding people can request that their mail be forwarded months before an actual move. To prove such widespread illegal voting, every person flagged would have to be individually investigated, Ghazal said.

"You have to have further evidence before depriving somebody of a constitutional right," she told The Center Square.

Davis agrees, but points out that a huge chunk of voters he flags for potential residency violations later self-confirm, going back after an election and updating their registrations to the same addresses they told the post office they were moving to originally.

Of the 97,500 voters he flagged in the 2020, 2022 and 2024 general elections, 36,400 of them, or 37%, later updated their addresses to show the moves were permanent, his data shows.

For the 2020 election, the figure is 15,000 that self-confirmed. For 2024, it’s close to 12,000.

Though rarely prosecuted, knowingly committing a residency violation can be a misdemeanor or a felony crime, or both. Voting out of county, or state, is a misdemeanor under Georgia law. Lying on a voter certificate signed before casting a ballot, attesting that you live at your recorded address, can be a felony. If there's a federal election on the ballot, it’s a potential federal crime.

"A lot of these voters know they're not supposed to be voting in the county they used to live in, the one they know they moved out of," Davis told the State Election Board, which regulates how primaries and elections are run and enforces election rules, on Sept. 28.

"They go in there feeling a little guilty," Davis said. "And when they’re presented with that voter certificate already filled out, I think a lot of them instinctively know, 'Well, if I say something about this not being right, I may not get to vote.'"

Before he testified, the board’s executive director, James Mills, introduced Davis as "one of the best experts on residency issues in the state of Georgia."

Davis has served as an expert witness in elections litigation cases since 2002 and is a member of the Georgia Republican Party’s Election Confidence Task Force. He's a contributing writer to The Federalist and makes his living running a data house called Data Productions, which produces specialized voter data for political campaigns as well as political, commercial and nonprofit mass mailings.

The National Change of Address data provides names of residents who, on a permanent basis, have requested to have their mail forwarded to new addresses. Davis then runs the entire state voter database through post office-licensed matching software, which locates any links to permanent mail forwarding requests.

From there, Davis can examine voting histories and determine how many people voted while still registered at their old addresses.

Georgia law gives people who move a 30-day grace period to continue voting at their old precincts, which Davis accounts for by only using change-of-address requests filed prior to the month before an election. So for a November election, he only looks at voters who filed requests with the post office before October.

The law also allows people who moved within the same county, but failed to update their registration, to still vote anyway. So Davis's analysis doesn’t factor within-county moves.

His prediction of up to 30,849 voters with permanent change-of-address forms voting in their former counties in November is based on the percentage he found in 2022, the last midterm general election. That year, he said, 0.75% of ballots were cast by people who may have moved out of their counties of record or out of state.

It's come up before

Alleged residency violations came up in a 2020 challenge after Republican state Rep. Deborah Silcox lost to Democrat Shea Roberts by 377 votes, though a judge dismissed the case on procedural grounds involving improper serving of parties.

Out-of-state and out-of-county voting was also among the myriad claims of irregularities cited by Donald Trump's legal team following his 2020 loss to Joe Biden in Georgia. The claims factored into the lawsuit Trump filed against Raffensperger and were also broached during their infamous Jan. 2, 2021, phone call—though after the point in the call where Trump said, "I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state."

Following the 2020 election, Davis worked with ex-FBI agent Derek Somerville to identify potential illegal votes and challenge those voters' eligibility to their county boards of election before a January 2021 U.S. senatorial runoff. The effort got them sued in federal court by Fair Fight, the voting-rights advocacy group founded by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, which accused them of violating the federal Voting Rights Act by intimidating voters.

Davis, Somerville and the head of a Texas group also engaged in election challenges, True the Vote, ultimately prevailed over Fair Fight in front of an Obama-appointed judge, who ruled their actions did not amount to illegal intimidation. The judge’s ruling called Davis’s and Somerville’s efforts "reasonable."

This year, Trump’s Justice Department launched a criminal investigation concerning 2020 ballots in Georgia's largest county, which saw the FBI seize more than 650 boxes of ballots and elections records from a Fulton County operations center. The investigation has not been publicly closed.

Attorney Brad Carver, who chairs the Election Confidence Task Force and was one of 16 Georgia Republicans who signed the alternate Trump elector certificates in 2020, said of residency violations: "100% it’s a problem."

"If it's a 50/50 race, then it would matter," Carver told The Center Square. "That's what I tell people all the time is, this stuff matters in extremely close races. It certainly mattered to Deborah Silcox."

Still, a recent review of the state's voter roll processes by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts treated residency issues more as a list maintenance task than evidence of widespread illegal voting.

The audit, requested by the Senate Appropriations Committee, looked at noncitizen voting, finding 2,570 potential noncitizens had been placed on active or inactive voting rolls at some point because of Department of Driver Services mistakes, with 407 actually casting ballots.

Overall, the audit found no more than 0.1% of registrations had problems with identity, address or citizenship. The Secretary of State’s office put out a press release afterward declaring Georgia "the best state in the nation for secure, accurate, and accessible elections."

The removal process

Raffensperger is a Republican, but his relationship with the Republican-controlled State Election Board, whose executive director invited Davis to testify, has deteriorated ever since the Secretary of State refused Trump's request in early 2021. 

Davis told The Center Square the state's history with Trump has made potential residency violations "a toxic issue" that "puts the Secretary of State's office on the defensive."

In brushing off Davis, Raffensperger pointed to a 1993 federal voting rights law meant to prevent disenfranchisement. 

"I understand the issue, and that's why I don't understand why these people aren't calling their congressmen, because there's a lot of congressmen that have never done a single thing," he told The Center Square during a voting equipment demonstration for the news media at the Bartow County Elections Office.

The Secretary of State's office also has access to change-of-address data through the Electronic Registration Information Center, shared with 26 other states, and Raffensperger said his office picks up out-of-state moves quickly.

But the federal law requires Georgia to confirm address changes in writing before removing a voter from the rolls. If the voter never responds to the state’s written inquiry, the state must keep them on the rolls until two federal general elections have passed without them showing up to vote. No voters can be systematically removed from the rolls within 90 days of a federal primary or general election, the federal law says.

"The law was drafted in 1992," Sinners, Raffensperger's spokesman, said. "Think about how technology has improved since then. Think about how the mobile society has changed since then. You didn't have remote work. You didn't have people moving around.

"So yeah, the law needs to be updated 100%."

The state audit says Georgia removed 466,000 voters during the 2022-2024 federal election cycles. The highest portion, 174,000, was people who failed to return confirmation notices asking if they still lived at their registered address. The state removed another 35,000 it confirmed as movers.

The audit did not cover whether people who moved county-to-county continued voting at their old addresses.

A proposed fix

Davis told the State Election Board he believes the issue can be rectified within the bounds of the federal voting law. He's pushing for Georgia to adopt a similar process to one Arkansas started last year, allowing voters to transfer their voter registration from one county to another as late as Election Day.

Voters who filed change-of-address forms would be flagged at the polls and asked if their address is current. If it’s not, they would be directed to go vote in the correct county or use a provisional ballot, Davis said.

The Arkansas Secretary of State's office did not immediately respond to a question from The Center Square about how much those procedural changes may have cost taxpayers.

"I'm not trying to prevent anybody from voting," Davis told the board. "I’m not trying to put anybody in prison. I’m just trying to fix a problem."

Ghazal, the lone election board Democrat, told Davis during the meeting that she's willing to help him draft a resolution for the State Election Board to send to the General Assembly.

"I support the legislative fix that Mr. Davis has proposed," Ghazal told The Center Square. "But I get very frustrated when the narrative becomes, our elections are not valid and people are committing felonies, when it's a real overstatement and it's a disservice to the public."