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Atkinson County questions 95 Hispanics’ right to voteBy Russ Bynum
Now a voting challenge that some call a political vendetta has forced 78 percent of the rural county’s registered Hispanics to defend their citizenship or their ballots won’t be counted in next week’s elections. The American Civil Liberties Union has gotten involved because three men who filed the complaint selected the voters by asking the Board of Registrars for a list of all Hispanics registered in the county. ‘‘There’s a definite concern we have that this sort of action has the purpose or will have the effect of deterring people who are Hispanic from voting,’’ said Gerald Weber, legal director for the ACLU of Georgia. ‘‘Some of the folks on that list were born and raised in the United States.’’ The complaint’s filers say they have evidence County Commissioner Jerry Metts attempted to help non-U.S. citizens to register so they could vote for him in the July 20 Democratic primary. Metts won by 16 votes and faces no opposition in the general election Tuesday. Linda Davis, chief registrar in Atkinson County, said she provided the men with a list of the 121 voters on the rolls who listed their race as Hispanic or Mexican. She said the men decided to challenge 95 of them. ‘‘They asked for all Hispanics. They did not say just Hispanics who had registered for the election in July,’’ Davis said. ‘‘Some of these people have been registered since 1996.’’ Davis said the registrars were required by state law to hear the complaint, and letters were mailed in English and Spanish to all 95 Hispanic voters summoning them to the hearing Thursday night. Frank Sutton, one of the men who filed the complaint, says he has sworn affidavits from several Hispanic men who say Metts came to their homes to solicit votes. When they told Metts they weren’t citizens, Metts told them they didn’t have to be and offered to help them fill out registration forms, Sutton says. ‘‘We discovered quite accidentally that we had a lot of non-citizens registered to vote in Atkinson County,’’ Sutton told WALB-TV in Albany. ‘‘We don’t feel like anybody in the country should vote unless they are a citizen.’’ Sutton did not immediately return a phone call Thursday from The Associated Press. Metts’ attorney, Shea Browning, calls the entire challenge a political witch hunt by supporters of Metts’ primary opponent, Rolland Mitchell Jr. ‘‘These men started this off as a personal thing, thinking they could dig up a little more dirt on my client, and it’s turned into something a lot bigger,’’ Browning said. ‘‘They just selected people based on race.’’ Voters named in the complaint will have to appear before the Board of Registrars to clear themselves but won’t be required to show proof of citizenship. She said some had already come to show birth certificates. ‘‘The burden of proof is on the challengers to prove that they are not citizens,’’ Davis said. But voters who fail to attend the hearing as summoned, even if they’re not proven to be illegally registered, still face having their ballots voided if they go to the polls on Election Day. ‘‘We write ‘challenged’ by their name on the voters list,’’ Davis said. ‘‘If they go to vote ... they get a paper ballot which says ‘challenged,’ and we try to contact them after the vote is counted. If we cannot contact them, then their vote is not counted.’’ Browning said he suspected the challengers would try to use the hearing to further attack Metts’ character, with little evidence that the Hispanic voters caught in the controversy aren’t citizens. ‘‘They don’t have any proof they’re not. There’s no book they can pull out and say, ‘You’re not in here,’’’ Browning said. ‘‘What they’re counting on is these people not showing up.’’ |
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