ATLANTA — As of Monday night, more than 300,000 voters have been purged from voter rolls.

A federal judge declined to issue a temporary restraining order on the Secretary of State’s plans to purge the thousands of voters.

U.S. District Judge Steve Jones said Monday court will reconvene on Thursday to further examine the issue, but he will not stop voters on the list from being purged as planned.

Fair Fight Action — a voting rights advocacy organization founded by Stacey Abrams, 2018 gubernatorial candidate — filed the motion in district court asking the federal judge to stop the Secretary of State’s office from purging voters.

According to court documents, the motion is to halt the removal of 120,561 Georgia voters from rolls under the state’s “use it or lose it” provision.

Plaintiffs argued that voters within the subgroup were not given the correct time period outlined in updates to HB 316 — the state’s overarching election code legislation — to contact elections officials to have their name removed from the inactive list.

Other voters being purged on the basis of inactivity never filed a forwarding address or had mail returned to sender indicating they had moved away.

“In the meantime, there will be irreparable harm to those people who haven’t done anything but exercise their right to not vote,” Paul Smith, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center, said.

Jones was not convinced and questioned why the plaintiff’s waited until the day voters were set to be purged to file the motion.

Bryan Tyson, secretary of state’s counsel, said that there is a misconception when using the word “purge” that records of inactive voters will be wiped, which is not true. The voters are changed in status in the system.

Tyson said that federally mandated voter maintenance is only allowed every odd year and not within a 90 day period before the Presidential primary. The clean-up needs to take place before Christmas Day or maintenance will not happen until 2021.

Jones decided that the purge could continue, and if he ruled against the voters being removed on Thursday, the Secretary of State’s office would need to reverse the process.

Adding voters who were purged back onto registration lists, Tyson said, would take as little as 24 to 48 hours — but stopping the purge from happening would have been more challenging and would have required a manual reset. 

Jones set the next hearing on the preliminary injunction to Thursday at 2 p.m.