A federal judge has temporarily reopened voter registration Thursday, ahead of a congressional runoff election in Georgia's 6th district.



According to a report by AJC.com, the decision was made by U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten as a part of a larger lawsuit that examined whether Georgia violated federal law by reducing the amount of time state residents had to register to vote.



Voter registration was closed on March 20, despite the runoff contest being scheduled for the end of June.





It argued that the registration cutoff was premature, the AJC reported, and that state residents should have been allowed to register for two more months.

Focus has been heavy on the race in recent months, with the top two jungle primary vote-getters — Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel — set to face off on June 20.

Ossoff came two points short of capturing the majority vote required to win the election outright.

Handel, who came second in the preliminary contest, now enjoys full GOP support, including the direct backing of President Trump and his administration.

Batten ruled that the voter registration for the final stage of the runoff election will be open until May 21.

The lawsuit was filed by The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represents multiple civil rights and voting rights organizations. </s> Ya think there will be more motivation for Democrats to vote after today? Yep. Buzzfeed:

A federal court on Thursday ordered Georgia officials to extend the voter registration deadline through at least May 21 to be eligible to vote in the special election runoff in Georgia's sixth congressional district between Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff.

The Georgia NAACP and others argued in a lawsuit that the rules violate the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which bars states from having registration deadlines greater than 30 days before an election.

On Thursday, US District Judge Timothy Batten held a hearing in the case — and sided with the challengers and against the state. </s> U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten ruled on Thursday that Georgia violated federal law by cutting off new voter registrations well before the June 20 runoff election in the 6th congressional district, and ordered state officials reopen voter registration through May 21.

The suburban Atlanta district is in the spotlight due to a runoff election that many view as a way to measure President Trump's influence. In April, Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel were the top two candidates in the special election to replace Tom Price, now the secretary of health and human services, and they will go head to head in the runoff. Batten ruled that Georgia violated federal law by setting the registration deadline as March 20, 30 days before the first round of voting, and now any district resident registered by May 21 can cast their ballot in the runoff election. This only applies to the June runoff election, Batten ruled, and the state does not have to publicize this order. The lawsuit was filed by several civil rights advocacy groups.

Handel's campaign is not happy about the fact that more people will be able to cast ballots in the runoff election, with spokeswoman Kate Constantini calling the lawsuit a "partisan attempt to change the rules for a nakedly partisan outcome." Ossoff told The Associated Press he encouraged "all eligible voters to ensure that they are registered and make their voices heard on June 20 and in all elections, regardless of their party or political persuasion." Catherine Garcia </s> It may or may not matter in the results of the June 20 runoff for Congress in the sixth district of Georgia. But it could not hurt the field-heavy Jon Ossoff campaign that a federal judge has struck down the state’s early deadline on voter registration for the runoff, reopening it until May 21, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported:

It probably tells you everything you need to know about the likely impact that Ossoff praised the judge’s decision while opponent Karen Handel attacked it. Meanwhile, Georgia’s Republican secretary of State, Brian Kemp (a candidate for governor next year) called the underlying suit “a political effort by liberal groups to attack him as a Republican officeholder.”

As voting-rights expert Ari Berman noted, registration is on the rise in Georgia:

There’s some rough justice, moreover, in Handel being negatively affected by the dismantling of a barrier to full voter participation:

This is a do-or-die election for Karen Handel, who lost statewide primary bids in 2010 and 2014. Her political career may yet live by the voter-suppression sword and die by the voter-registration sword. </s> ATLANTA (AP) — A federal judge has ordered Georgia officials to reopen voter registration in a suburban Atlanta congressional district ahead of a runoff in a heated special election.

Georgia set the registration deadline for March 20, which was 30 days before special election in April. Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel, the top two vote-getters, advanced to a June 20 runoff in the typically conservative but now competitive district.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten ruled Thursday in favor of advocacy groups who argued that Georgia violated federal law by preventing more new voter registrations before the runoff. He ordered the state to extend the deadline to May 21.

State election officials argued a runoff is a continuation of an initial election under Georgia law and warned last-minute changes would be difficult. </s> Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff arrives with Alisha Kramer to greet supporters at a campaign office on April 15, 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia. After 12 years, Jon Ossoff, a Democrat running to fill Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price's now empty House seat, is finally engaged to Alisha Kramer, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution .

Start the conversation, or Read more at The Washington Post. </s> Karen Handel, the Georgia Republican running in a special congressional election, insists her constituents should be angry over a federal judge's decision to let more people register to vote in a June runoff. U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten, who was nominated by former GOP President George W. Bush to the federal bench, ruled last week that Georgia had to extend its voter registration deadline until May 21 for the runoff contest between Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff.

Start the conversation, or Read more at Switched. </s> Voter registration for the 6th Congressional District runoff election on June 20 has been reopened at the order of a federal court. Registration will remain open through May 21.

The Georgia Secretary of State had previously declared that only people who had already voted in the April 18 special election could vote in the runoff. A group of civil rights organizations filed a federal lawsuit saying that violates the National Voter Registration Act.

In a May 4 order, Judge Timothy Batten of the U.S. District Court for North Georgia agreed and ordered the reopening of voter registration.

“Would-be voters in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District were denied a full and fair opportunity to register and vote under the prior law,” said a written statement from Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represented the civil rights groups along with a team of private attorneys. “Today’s decision extending the voter registration deadline helps ensure that eligible voters will be able to participate in the upcoming runoff election, and in all future runoff elections for federal office. States like Georgia must stop taking actions that suppresses the rights of voters.”

In the June 20 runoff election, Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff are battling for the seat in Congress. The 6th Congressional District includes parts of Brookhaven, Dunwoody and Sandy Springs.

For voter registration information, see the Secretary of State’s website at mvp.sos.ga.gov/MVP/mvp.do. Citizens with any questions about the reopened registration period can call Lawyers’ Committee-administrated “Election Protection” hotline at 866-678-8683.

The court’s order was a preliminary emergency injunction, not a final legal decision. In the injunction order, Batten wrote that he issued it due to the civil rights groups’ likelihood of winning the case and the seriousness of people possibly losing their legal right to vote. </s> In a congressional special election in suburban Atlanta last night, Jon Ossoff, a thirty-year-old Democrat, won far more votes than any Republican challenger, but not quite enough to avoid a runoff with a former Georgia secretary of state named Karen Handel. The progressive energy of the first months of the Trump Administration had gathered behind Ossoff, and his campaign raised more than eight million dollars, an astonishing amount, much of it in small donations from around the country. Some of the progressive enthusiasm had to do with the sense of possibility—prosperous Southern suburbs trended toward Hillary Clinton in the Presidential election—but it was also about the sheer thrill of planting a flag in enemy territory. The seat, in Georgia’s Sixth District, was once held by Newt Gingrich. Speaking around midnight, Ossoff conceded that the election might soon move to a runoff. “But let me tell you this,” he said. “There is no doubt that this is already a victory for the ages.” His chances in the runoff, two months away, are something like fifty-fifty.

Ossoff, who was raised in the district and attended Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, looks his age, with an undergraduate’s flop of hair, and for much of the campaign his youth had been the main talking point about him. Republicans spent a million dollars to air an advertisement that featured Ossoff playing Han Solo in a video made by his college a-cappella group. But Ossoff’s youth also gave him an outsider sheen, which helped to amplify his appeal to grassroots progressives. One biographical detail, much repeated, was that Ossoff owns only two suits, one gray and one blue.

Despite these sartorial restrictions, Ossoff has spent most of his working life on Capitol Hill, as a staffer for the Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson, who represents Georgia’s Fourth District, also in the Atlanta suburbs. Ossoff managed the identity-politics currents of the Democratic Party adeptly. His early campaign literature showed him linking arms, Selma-style, with the civil-rights hero and longtime Congressman John Lewis, of Georgia’s Fifth, whose endorsement he had secured. When he was attacked for living just outside the Sixth District, he pointed out that he was doing so to “support” his girlfriend, Alisha Kramer, who is finishing up medical school at Emory.

Ossoff has a precision most first-time candidates lack. When asked by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews what he made of President Trump bombing Syria, Ossoff said, enunciating his consonants, “Well, I think if U.S. intelligence confirmed that the Syrian military struck civilians with chemical weapons, then a swift, punitive, limited strike was a reasonable response, but any further action would require congressional approval, and we can’t get drawn into the ground there.” It didn’t seem strange at all, once you got past the Han Solo stuff, that Ossoff would be the face of the Democratic Party. He is exactly the kind of figure that the institutional Democratic Party has launched toward office for decades. What did seem strange was that he has become the face of a broader cultural phenomenon: the resistance.

It hasn’t been obvious, during the initial months of the Trump Administration, what form the furious opposition to him would take. The new President had campaigned as a populist, and he took an obvious glee in insulting his party’s graybeards and its pieties. But the new President’s early failures—his hastily designed travel ban and attempt to replace the Affordable Care Act, and the widely reported bickering and chaos among the White House staff—have quickly dulled the transformational gloss. The underlying drift of Trump’s policies has been toward a much more familiar, and less popular, conservatism. The President, who is by historical standards extremely unpopular, was active in the Ossoff election, but only as a tweeter of Republican talking points. One of Ossoff’s slogans was at once pointed and helpfully broad: “Make Trump furious.”

One big question about the Democratic Party after the 2016 election was how significant the rift between Bernie Sanders’s supporters and Hillary Clinton’s would continue to be. But the new Administration’s failures have allowed the Party’s center to hold. Institutional Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Adam Schiff have become leaders of the anti-Trump resistance in Washington. The Party is moving to the left, but it has not adopted the Sanders campaign’s agenda. Much of the grassroots energy and financing for Ossoff and the other Democratic special-election candidate, James Thompson, of Wichita, Kansas, came from the progressive community Daily Kos, but even there the sentiments toward the Sanders wing are complicated. When Sanders tweeted out criticism of the Democratic Party for failing to put more money into Thompson’s candidacy, David Nir, the Daily Kos political director, noted that Sanders’s robust fund-raising organization had sat out the Kansas race.

The Party isn’t Sanders’s, at least not yet. But, in the eventful interim between Barack Obama and whoever comes next, Ossoff has found the center of gravity in the Party, in a broad resistance to Trump that does not abandon the Party’s basic optimism about social pluralism, or the melding of business and social justice. The Democrats are moving to the left by increments, but there is not yet evidence of the kind of ideological lurch that gripped the Republicans during the Tea Party era.

The runoff election between Ossoff and Handel in the Georgia Sixth will be a more basic test of the partisanship in that district. But, if Democrats continue to do better than expected in special elections in conservative districts, it will likely mean that more talented liberals will run for office, and fewer talented conservatives. Georgia is particularly fertile recruiting ground for Democrats, with Atlanta’s mayor, Kasim Reed, one of the Party’s most adept politicians, available as a potential candidate for statewide office. Sally Yates, the former deputy attorney general who led the legal resistance to Trump’s Muslim travel ban, is at home in Georgia as well. Surely both have followed Ossoff’s campaign, and noted how a savvy Democrat could position himself both as the face of the national resistance and a defender of the center of American life. They must have noticed how a liberal Democrat, running in a historically conservative district, could become a campaign’s main character.
The campaign of Jon Ossoff wins a lawsuit extending voter registration.