Georgia, Chatham election officials target ‘potentially vacant’ homes

When Savannah resident Diane Petzold checked her mail one day last winter, a letter from the county voting registrar shook the poll worker and committed voter. 

“The Chatham County voter registration office received notification that your address listed in your voter registration file is listed as potentially vacant,” began the January 27 letter. It included instructions to update her address in voting records.

The notice set off alarm bells for Petzold. She’s lived in the same house on East 48th Street for years and nothing about her residency had changed.  

Who, she wondered, reported this information about her, but not her husband, who lives in the same house? How many people in Chatham County got similar letters?  Was someone or some organization targeting her heavily Democratic-leaning neighborhood? 

“Why wouldn’t my husband also get a letter like that?” Petzold said. “This is just not correct.  There’s something wrong, I mean, we’re pretty positive something’s wrong here.”

An investigation by The Current GA revealed that approximately one in every 200 people on the Chatham County voter roll received a similar letter in recent months, a total of 1,313 addresses flagged as “potentially vacant” among nearly 234,000 registered voters.

Chatham election officials say that the letters they sent were not nefarious — and no voter registration has been canceled ahead of the May 19 primary as a result of the letters.

The letters result from a new routine to maintain voter lists initiated by the Georgia Secretary of State and shared with counties to help maintain accurate, up-to-date voting rolls.

The experience, however, angered Petzold and illustrates just how fraught the 2026 vote could be in this swing state.

New, intense reviews after 2020

Elections in Georgia can turn on small margins among the state’s approximately 7.4 million potential voters. President Donald Trump tried and failed to force Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to commit voter fraud and “find” 11,780 votes to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state.

Trump and many allies still insist that the election outcome was false — despite the proven facts — and his Department of Justice and FBI are attacking deep blue Fulton County over the results. 

Heading into the 2026 elections, people like Petzold are worried about whether their votes will be quashed or invalidated. GOP-affiliated activists have challenged thousands of Georgians’ voter registrations since 2024, including in Chatham County, when the Republican-led state legislature gave them more scope to do so. 

The new data received from the state surprised the chairman of the Chatham County Board of Registrars.

“This record review thing just presented a whole new ball of wax,” said Colin McRae, who’s been on the voter registration board for more than 20 years. 

During his tenure, he said he’s never seen a state record-flagging initiative of this kind and that his office doesn’t have the staff to physically check on 1,313 addresses.

Voting list maintenance

Although conspiracy theorists have disseminated false claims about Georgia’s election administration, the Secretary of State’s office plus local election and registration offices in 159 counties continually and actively clean and maintain the state voter roll.

Officials need to know where people live, when they move or die, who’s 18, who’s finished a felony sentence, who’s changed their name, how people spell their names. 

On any given day, something is out-of-date or incorrect on the list. But corrections and updates require a human touch, record research and time.  

Last year, the state election office in Atlanta started using new software called the Georgia Registration Review Application to help prioritize records for humans in county offices to review. 

“Verifying the validity of registrants’ addresses is a necessary part of the voter list maintenance procedures that keep our voter registration data accurate and up-to-date,” Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, wrote via e-mail. “It’s processes like these that protect the public trust from election deniers and conspiracy theorists.” 

Postal service pulls ‘potentially vacant’ lists

The state’s new software electronically pulls U.S. Postal Service records that document every mailbox in the country to help test accuracy of voter addresses. The USPS tracks whether a location is a business, a P.O. Box or a shipping store, none of which Georgians can use as their residence for voting purposes.

USPS also flags potentially vacant addresses.

“Postal carriers set this indicator when a delivery point becomes vacant, typically within 90 days of the vacancy. Once the address is reoccupied and mail delivery resumes, the vacancy indicator is removed,” said USPS spokesperson Nikolaj Hagen via e-mail.  The database is updated every week.

Georgia’s software compares the USPS records of vacant addresses to its own records of voter addresses. The software then flags any matches.

In December 2025 and January 2026, the state software flagged 1,313 Chatham County addresses as potentially vacant, according to the county voting registrar’s office. That’s address for about one-half of one percent of the county’s nearly 234,000 voters. 

Once a record is flagged, the county election office staff can log into the state software and start reviewing voters’ records. The state recommends that local election officials reach out to voters whose homes are flagged as potentially vacant. 

That’s what the Chatham office did. Staff wrote and mailed just over 1,300 letters, including one to Petzold. 

Of those voters contacted, 53 had updated their residency records, as of May 6, according to the county registrar’s office, while 314 letters were returned to the registrar as undeliverable.  

The registrar’s office had no reply to 946 letters. In such cases, the state recommends further investigation before initiating list maintenance.

McRae emphasized that “not a single registration has been canceled as a result of that flagging process.” 

But the exercise has him concerned about public trust. He doesn’t want anyone to be put off from voting, and he concedes that the flags, letters and interaction could be daunting to voters.

“If it causes one person to think they’re no longer eligible to vote, then it has been at cross-purposes with what our overall mission is,” McRae said. 

‘If it causes one person to think they’re no longer eligible to vote, then it has been at cross-purposes with what our overall mission is.’

Colin Mcrae, chairman Chatham County Board of Registrars

Petzold was more angry than daunted by the letter. She worries that the system will stymie voter turnout.

She doesn’t understand why she would have been a target of such a letter. She said that her USPS letter carrier and a postal supervisor told her that her home is not flagged as vacant.  

She’s unsatisfied with what she’s heard so far from election officials.  “I’m like: ‘I work for you guys’,” Petzold said.

In reaction to Petzold’s experience, Hassinger, the spokesman for the Secretary of State’s office, said  they are grateful for the services that poll workers provide. 

“We couldn’t run an election in Georgia without them, so the first thing I would say would be “‘thank you,’” he wrote. “Every single voter in Georgia should be concerned about election integrity and be able to trust the election process to deliver accurate and trusted outcomes, but especially the poll workers who have to defend that very process and the subsequent results more often than most people.”

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Explainer: Examples why humans step in

Humans and computers struggle with different kinds of questions.

This date has at least two problems: Feburary 29, 1981

In a split second, a human can judge and fix the typo in “February.”  Humans know there are only 12 months and that the second one is notoriously hard to spell. 

A computer program like Word or Google Docs can quickly tell that “Feburary” is not in its internal dictionary. But the computer can’t make judgments about what to do next, it can only follow instructions: a human programmer or human typist must tell it how to handle “Feburary.” Some programs are set to auto-correct the typo. Some are set to flag it with an underline.

But the other error in this date will cause a human to struggle, while a computer moves faster. February didn’t have 29 days in 1981. Humans won’t remember offhand which Februarys had an extra day 45 years ago. We’d have to hunt around for an old calendar.

But computers come pre-packaged with perpetual calendars of the past and future: a list of dates that are valid. A programmer can send a computer a few lines of code and a list of seven million dates and in a matter of seconds, the computer will flag any that aren’t real dates. 

So if Feburary 29, 1981 is the wrong date, what is the right date? February 28, 1981? February 29, 1980? Something else?

That’s when a human must step in and use an email, a phone call or even a letter to figure out the facts.