Young people could decide the Georgia runoff races for US Senate

In Georgia, about 23,000 young people were not old enough to vote in the super-close general election this year, but will be eligible to vote in the runoff election for U.S. Senate in January 2021 -- if they register to vote by December 7, 2020. At least one, and possibly two, Senate seats will be decided in that election.  Control of the U.S. Senate could hang in the balance.

With a record turnout by young people in the general election, now is the time for all high school seniors and recent graduates to register to vote if they will be 18 by the runoff election on January 5, 2021.

Young people are allowed to pre-register to vote in Georgia if they are 17-1/2, and those who are pre-registered are eligible to vote as soon as they turn 18. In this case, the next election for many of these young people will be the January U.S. Senate runoff.

Don’t let confusing language in the Georgia election code or the Georgia constitution fool you into thinking that young people cannot vote in the runoff if they were not already 18 and registered in time for the general election.

These state law sources say that the runoff is a “continuation” of the general election and that only those who were registered to vote in time for the general election can vote in the runoff. If that was the end of the story, then the 23,000 young people turning 18 after November 3 and before January 5, as well as all the people who were already 18 but simply did not register before the general election, would be completely out of luck.

But there is more to the story.

The National Voter Registration Act prevents states from maintaining a voter registration deadline longer than 30 days in advance of a federal election. Federal law overrides Georgia’s state law provisions that would otherwise prevent young people from registering now to vote in the runoff in January.  

This is not just a hypothetical answer to an unresolved question that the courts will have to decide at some point in the future. The issue has already been decided through a lawsuit brought by the Georgia State Conference of the NAACP (represented by the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law) in 2017. The judge granted a preliminary injunction preventing Georgia from maintaining a deadline more than 30 days prior to a runoff for federal office, and the state accepted the ruling and signed a consent judgment obligating the state to follow federal law in the future.

The Georgia Secretary of State recognizes the force of this ruling and has marked December 7, 2020 as the deadline to register in order to vote in the January 5, 2021 runoff election.

High schools in Georgia are required by law to provide assistance with voter registration to their students, but compliance is inconsistent.  In addition, between the pandemic and the prior October cutoff to register to vote in the general election, many high school students and recent graduates who are qualified to vote in the runoff are not yet registered. 

The margin separating the U.S. Senate candidates is narrow. Efforts by young people could decide who will win.