Close to 100,000 Voter Registrations Were Challenged in Georgia — Almost All by Just Six Right-Wing Activists
by Doug Bock Clark,July 13, 7 a.m. EDT
The recent transformation of the state’s election laws explicitly enabled citizens to file unlimited challenges to other voters’ registrations. Experts warn that election officials’ handling of some of those challenges may clash with federal law.
On March 15, 2022, an email appeared in the inbox of the election director of Forsyth County, Georgia, with the subject line “Challenge of Elector’s Eligibility.” A spreadsheet attached to the email identified 13 people allegedly registered to vote at P.O. boxes in Forsyth County, a wealthy Republican suburb north of Atlanta. Georgians are supposed to register at residential addresses, except in special circumstances. “Please consider this my request that a hearing be held to determine these voters’ eligibility to vote,” wrote the challenger, Frank Schneider.
Schneider is a former chief financial officer at multiple companies, including Jockey International, the underwear maker. His Instagram page includes pictures of him golfing at exclusive resorts and a dog peeing on a mailbox with the caption “Woody suspects mail-in voter fraud” and the hashtag “#maga.” On Truth Social, the social media platform backed by former president Donald Trump, Schneider’s posts have questioned the 2020 election results in Forsyth County and spread content related to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that holds that the Democratic elite are cannibalistic pedophiles. In January 2023, he posted an open letter to his U.S. representative-elect encouraging “hearings to hold perpetrators accountable where evidence exists that election fraud took place in the 2020 and 2022 elections.”
The March 2022 voter challenges were the first of many from Schneider: As the year progressed, he submitted seven more batches of challenges, each one larger than the one previous, growing from 507 voters in April to nearly 15,800 in October, for a total of over 31,500 challenges.
Vetting Georgia’s voter rolls was once largely the domain of nonpartisan elections officials. But after the 2020 election, a change in the law enabled Schneider and other activists to take on a greater role. Senate Bill 202, which the state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed in 2021, transformed election laws in response to “many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud,” as the bill stated. Many states allow challenges, but officials in Georgia and experts say that in the past challengers have typically had relevant personal knowledge, such as someone submitting a challenge to remove a dead relative from the rolls. Georgia, however, is unusual in explicitly allowing citizens unlimited challenges against anyone in their county.
At first, voting rights groups were vocal about other aspects of SB 202, such as restrictions on absentee ballots, paying less attention to the 98-page bill’s handful of sentence-length tweaks that addressed voter challenges. The change to the challenges rule was “the sleeper element of SB 202,” said Rahul Garabadu, a senior voting rights attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.
Media outlets have reported on the high number of challenges and numerous cases of voters feeling harassed, impeded or intimidated by being placed into “challenged” status. But the outsized role of the small group of people making the challenges was less clear. ProPublica was able to determine that a vast majority of the challenges since SB 202 became law — about 89,000 of 100,000 — were submitted by just six right-wing activists, including Schneider. Another 12 people accounted for most of the rest. (ProPublica obtained data for all challenges logged in 30 of the state’s 159 counties, including the 20 most populous.) Of those challenges, roughly 11,100 were successful — at least 2,350 voters were removed from the rolls and at least 8,700 were placed in a “challenged” or equivalent status, which can force people to vote with a provisional ballot that election officials later adjudicate.
Challenges from right-wing activists have proliferated in Georgia despite strict federal laws governing how voters can be removed from rolls. That’s in part because state and local election officials have struggled to figure out how to reconcile SB 202 with federal protections. This has resulted in counties handling challenges inconsistently, sometimes in ways that experts warn may have violated federal law, something they say may have been the case with Schneider’s March challenges.
In the run-up to the 2022 election, voting rights advocates warned that some challenges might create insurmountable barriers to people casting a ballot, such as by removing them from the rolls. But there were no published accounts of Georgians who ultimately did not cast a ballot as a result of being challenged. Schneider’s March challenges did lead to this kind of harm in at least one instance: An unhoused voter found his removal from the rolls too high a barrier to allow him to re-register in time to vote.
Schneider would not agree to an interview and did not respond directly to ProPublica’s written questions. In emails, he stated that challenges “only are acted upon” if the elections board approves them and wrote, “I have not been made aware of anyone that couldn’t vote based on anything submitted, if true.”
Even some voters who managed to remain on the rolls were still forced by challenges to fight to remain registered. In Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, an immunosuppressed cancer patient had to drive nearly two hours round-trip to a crowded hearing to defend his right to vote. At the same proceeding, a Black woman likened her challenge to voter intimidation.
“There is a clear imbalance of power between the individual bringing the challenges and the county and voters,” said Esosa Osa, the deputy executive director of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights advocacy organization. Elections officials and voters, she said, “currently have very little recourse once challenged, regardless of the merits of the challenge.”
Some activists have justified their efforts by claiming that people might exploit flaws in the voter rolls to commit fraud — for example, by voting under the name of a deceased person still on the rolls. Officials in multiple counties told ProPublica that they did not know of any instances of challenges resulting in a successfully prosecuted case of voter fraud. A spokesperson for the Georgia secretary of state’s office said it does not track this data.
ProPublica did find that challenges sometimes identified errors in the voter rolls, which are dauntingly complex databases that are forever evolving as people register, move, die or otherwise change their statuses. Many of these corrections would have happened anyway in the routine maintenance process, officials said and records showed, though sometimes at a pace slower than if activists submitted challenges.
“If all these challengers are finding is inconsequential errors that do not affect election results on the whole, but they’re placing real and harmful burdens on voters, then you have to wonder why they’re really doing this,” said Derek Clinger, a senior staff attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “It’s doing more harm than good.”
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