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WASHINGTON — U.S. senators debated Wednesday how best to resolve a funding cliff within Social Security that will lead to a quarter reduction in benefits in about a decade, absent action from Congress. Democrats on the Budget Committee, led by Chair Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, called for lawmakers to increase taxes on the country’s […]

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by Doug Bock Clark, photography by Cheney Orr for ProPublica

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On March 15, 2022, an email appeared in the inbox of the election director of Forsyth County, Georgia, with the subject line “Challenge of Elector’s Eligibility.” A spreadsheet attached to the email identified 13 people allegedly registered to vote at P.O. boxes in Forsyth County, a wealthy Republican suburb north of Atlanta. Georgians are supposed to register at residential addresses, except in special circumstances. “Please consider this my request that a hearing be held to determine these voters’ eligibility to vote,” wrote the challenger, Frank Schneider.

Schneider is a former chief financial officer at multiple companies, including Jockey International, the underwear maker. His Instagram page includes pictures of him golfing at exclusive resorts and a dog peeing on a mailbox with the caption “Woody suspects mail-in voter fraud” and the hashtag “#maga.” On Truth Social, the social media platform backed by former president Donald Trump, Schneider’s posts have questioned the 2020 election results in Forsyth County and spread content related to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that holds that the Democratic elite are cannibalistic pedophiles. In January 2023, he posted an open letter to his U.S. representative-elect encouraging “hearings to hold perpetrators accountable where evidence exists that election fraud took place in the 2020 and 2022 elections.”

The March 2022 voter challenges were the first of many from Schneider: As the year progressed, he submitted seven more batches of challenges, each one larger than the one previous, growing from 507 voters in April to nearly 15,800 in October, for a total of over 31,500 challenges.

Vetting Georgia’s voter rolls was once largely the domain of nonpartisan elections officials. But after the 2020 election, a change in the law enabled Schneider and other activists to take on a greater role. Senate Bill 202, which the state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed in 2021, transformed election laws in response to “many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud,” as the bill stated. Many states allow challenges, but officials in Georgia and experts say that in the past challengers have typically had relevant personal knowledge, such as someone submitting a challenge to remove a dead relative from the rolls. Georgia, however, is unusual in explicitly allowing citizens unlimited challenges against anyone in their county.

At first, voting rights groups were vocal about other aspects of SB 202, such as restrictions on absentee ballots, paying less attention to the 98-page bill’s handful of sentence-length tweaks that addressed voter challenges. The change to the challenges rule was “the sleeper element of SB 202,” said Rahul Garabadu, a senior voting rights attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.

Media outlets have reported on the high number of challenges and numerous cases of voters feeling harassed, impeded or intimidated by being placed into “challenged” status. But the outsized role of the small group of people making the challenges was less clear. ProPublica was able to determine that a vast majority of the challenges since SB 202 became law — about 89,000 of 100,000 — were submitted by just six right-wing activists, including Schneider. Another 12 people accounted for most of the rest. (ProPublica obtained data for all challenges logged in 30 of the state’s 159 counties, including the 20 most populous.) Of those challenges, roughly 11,100 were successful — at least 2,350 voters were removed from the rolls and at least 8,700 were placed in a “challenged” or equivalent status, which can force people to vote with a provisional ballot that election officials later adjudicate.

Gwinnett County elections supervisor Zach Manifold looks over boxes of voter challenges on Sept. 15, in Lawrenceville, Georgia. (John Bazemore/AP Photo)

Challenges from right-wing activists have proliferated in Georgia despite strict federal laws governing how voters can be removed from rolls. That’s in part because state and local election officials have struggled to figure out how to reconcile SB 202 with federal protections. This has resulted in counties handling challenges inconsistently, sometimes in ways that experts warn may have violated federal law, something they say may have been the case with Schneider’s March challenges.

In the run-up to the 2022 election, voting rights advocates warned that some challenges might create insurmountable barriers to people casting a ballot, such as by removing them from the rolls. But there were no published accounts of Georgians who ultimately did not cast a ballot as a result of being challenged. Schneider’s March challenges did lead to this kind of harm in at least one instance: An unhoused voter found his removal from the rolls too high a barrier to allow him to re-register in time to vote.

Schneider would not agree to an interview and did not respond directly to ProPublica’s written questions. In emails, he stated that challenges “only are acted upon” if the elections board approves them and wrote, “I have not been made aware of anyone that couldn’t vote based on anything submitted, if true.”

Even some voters who managed to remain on the rolls were still forced by challenges to fight to remain registered. In Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, an immunosuppressed cancer patient had to drive nearly two hours round-trip to a crowded hearing to defend his right to vote. At the same proceeding, a Black woman likened her challenge to voter intimidation.

“There is a clear imbalance of power between the individual bringing the challenges and the county and voters,” said Esosa Osa, the deputy executive director of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights advocacy organization. Elections officials and voters, she said, “currently have very little recourse once challenged, regardless of the merits of the challenge.”

Some activists have justified their efforts by claiming that people might exploit flaws in the voter rolls to commit fraud — for example, by voting under the name of a deceased person still on the rolls. Officials in multiple counties told ProPublica that they did not know of any instances of challenges resulting in a successfully prosecuted case of voter fraud. A spokesperson for the Georgia secretary of state’s office said it does not track this data.

ProPublica did find that challenges sometimes identified errors in the voter rolls, which are dauntingly complex databases that are forever evolving as people register, move, die or otherwise change their statuses. Many of these corrections would have happened anyway in the routine maintenance process, officials said and records showed, though sometimes at a pace slower than if activists submitted challenges.

“If all these challengers are finding is inconsequential errors that do not affect election results on the whole, but they’re placing real and harmful burdens on voters, then you have to wonder why they’re really doing this,” said Derek Clinger, a senior staff attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “It’s doing more harm than good.”

In 2018, Joseph Riggs, a longtime Forsyth County resident who identifies as a Democrat, became homeless after struggling with depression and other mental health challenges and began using a P.O. box as his permanent mailing address during what would be years of instability. Still, he made sure to vote in the 2020 presidential election and wanted to vote in the hotly contested 2022 Georgia senate race because he viewed its outcome as affecting social policy that would impact him.

But that spring Riggs received at his P.O. box a two-page letter from the Forsyth County elections office informing him of Schneider’s March challenge and asking him either to appear at a board hearing at 9 a.m. on a workday in June or to send in paperwork justifying his registration at a P.O. box, changing his registration or removing himself from the rolls. Around the time of the hearing, Riggs was living in a tent in the woods, within walking distance of the part-time jobs he was juggling at McDonald’s, Dollar Tree and a gas station. He worried that attending the hearing would require an expensive Uber ride and force him to take unpaid time off work. In the months beforehand, a state election official had also called Riggs to question him about his registration, he said, making him think fearfully of news reports of people being arrested for violating voting laws. And he said he did not remember seeing the option to send in paperwork. Ultimately, he did not contest his removal from the rolls.

Riggs said that after the county elections board removed him, he doubted that he could re-register because the letter and phone call led him to believe he now had no valid address. (According to the secretary of state’s office, unhoused individuals can solve this challenge by giving a residential address that is the “closest approximation” of the location they shelter at, such as a street corner, and then listing a separate mailing address, such as P.O. box. But Riggs was not provided with this information.)

“I was really angry,” he said. “When you’re homeless, your vote is the only voice you’ve got.”

Barbara Helm, who identifies as a Democrat, said she did not see the letter in her P.O. box notifying her of Schneider’s March 2022 challenge against her, as she had been struggling with addiction and homelessness. Nor did she know at first that she had been removed at the same June hearing as Riggs was called to, though election workers sent her another letter announcing her removal. It wasn’t until she contacted election officials during the in-person early voting period in October that she learned that she’d been removed from the rolls and that the window to re-register had closed.

“A lot of people have fought and died for voting rights,” said Helm. “I didn’t even know” the challengers and board “could do that to you.”

Barbara Helm, who lives in Toccoa, Georgia, said she did not see the letter in her P.O. box notifying her of the challenge to her voter registration.

Helm contacted the local Democratic Party about her plight, and its officials took up her case — she was mentioned as an example of voter suppression by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in a debate, though not by name, and her voting difficulties were covered in several news reports. Helm was eventually allowed to vote with a provisional ballot, which she believed only happened because of the attention to her case. (A lawyer for the Forsyth County board, Karen Pachuta, wrote to ProPublica that “the receipt of a provisional ballot in Forsyth County is not dependent on any particular person or circumstance receiving media or political attention.”)

A week after the election, Helm showed up to a board meeting to defend her provisional ballot and beg for her vote to count. “It kind of brought tears to my eyes when they approved my ballot,” she said.

Two other voters challenged by Schneider in March 2022 returned residency affirmations, obtained by ProPublica through records requests, in which they explained that they traveled throughout the year as engineers on projects around the nation and used the P.O. box as their residency address in lieu of a permanent one. The board rejected the challenges, allowing them to maintain their prior registrations.

Of Schneider’s initial thirteen challenges from March 2022, eleven were heard at the hearing that June, with the county election board upholding five and dismissing six.

In the lead-up to the 2022 election, the Forsyth County board ruled on about 31,500 challenges from Schneider and another 1,100 from two other challengers. In total, the board approved over 200 of the most serious type of challenge that immediately removes a voter from the rolls, known as “229s” for their section of Georgia code. The board also approved around 900 “230” challenges, which place voters into “challenged” status.

Of the 30 counties for which ProPublica reviewed voter challenges, Forsyth County was the most aggressive in approving them — in ways that voting rights lawyers warned may violate the National Voter Registration Act, a federal law regulating how voters can be removed from voting rolls.

When Joel Natt, the Republican vice chair of the board, sought to approve Schneider’s challenges against Helm and Riggs at the June 2022 hearing, Democratic board member Anita Tucker asked, “Madam Chair and Legal, does that violate the NVRA?”

Tucker expressed a number of concerns, according to an audio recording of the hearing obtained through open records requests. The concerns centered on whether the removals of Helm and Riggs violated the NVRA’s prohibition against removing voters in a systematic manner in the 90 days before a federal election.

In the hearing, Tucker argued that rather than immediately removing Helm and Riggs, “the best right procedure” was the NVRA’s process for voters whose residency is in doubt, which allows voters to remain on the rolls for around four years and protects them against being unable to re-register in time to vote. Tucker also questioned whether the batches of challenges — which had grown to encompass hundreds or thousands of voters, along with PDFs of alleged evidence of their ineligibility to vote, such as documents matching names to addresses outside the county — qualified as systematic challenges, and therefore shouldn’t have been allowed to proceed.

In response to Tucker’s questions, Pachuta, the board’s lawyer, warned, “There’s not clear case law on that. It could very well end up in litigation.” The lawyer explained that “there’s different opinions” on whether the challenges would fall under state code or the NVRA. She then advised that “because it is so close to the election, you have to review these items on an individualized basis.” (The NVRA allows consideration of individualized challenges during the 90-day protected window.)

Natt had originally motioned to remove Helm, Riggs and another voter as a block, until the lawyer advised that this could be construed as systematically processing a mass challenge. So Natt and the conservative board chair, Barbara Luth, reintroduced them one by one. Then the conservative board members outvoted Tucker to remove them from the rolls. Recordings show that the majority continued outvoting the Democratic minority while approving challenges one by one during many meetings. The board did summarily dismiss around 28,500 challenges, all from Schneider, because they were made using a fallible database-matching technique comparing Georgia voter rolls with the National Change of Address system, which a federal court had disallowed as systematic.

“I want to be clear that breaking down the challenges” to do them one by one “is still systematic and likely violating the NVRA,” said Andrew Garber, a counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, who had concerns with the quality of evidence presented and the depth of evaluation.

“The Forsyth board certainly violated the spirit of the NVRA and likely its letter as well,” said Garabadu, the attorney with the ACLU of Georgia, which sent a letter to the board warning that its decision at a September meeting to remove voters within the 90-day window “was made in violation of state and federal law and we urge you to reverse it.”

Pachuta wrote to ProPublica that “I respectfully disagree with the suggestion that considering challenges ‘one by one’ is a violation of the NVRA. Rather, I believe established authority provides that the NVRA allows removals based on individualized information at any time.” She noted that the board spent “hours during its meetings conducting individualized reviews of various data sets to make the best collective decision(s) it could.”

After a ProPublica reporter described Riggs’ experience, Luth, the board chair, said that in the future the board might refrain from removing voters from the registration rolls within the 90-day window and just put voters under a challenged status, though she emphasized it would remain a case-by-case decision. “That’s better than taking them off the rolls,” she said. “That would be where my vote would go.”

Natt, who had argued forcefully at the hearing to remove Helm and Riggs from the rolls, called the removals “a mistake” and said, “We learned from it.” He expressed remorse to ProPublica over their difficulties voting. “I don’t want voters to feel burdened,” he said. “It pained me personally.” He emphasized that the board had been operating with limited guidance from state election officials and that they had no legal choice but to rule on the challenges. “We have to respect the challenger,” said Natt, and “we have to respect the challengee.”

South of the conservative, wealthy suburbs of Forsyth County, in the county that encompasses the liberal center of Atlanta, challenges were handled differently by the left-leaning elections board — but still caused problems for election officials and voters.

By the time Chris Ramsey received a letter requesting him to appear before the Fulton County board and “defend why the challenge to your right to vote should not be sustained,” he was six months into a cancer treatment that had suppressed his immune system. On his doctor’s advice, he had stopped teaching elementary school and had people bring him groceries rather than risk interacting with crowds. But Ramsey felt he had to defend his right to vote. So on a Thursday morning in March 2023, he braved rush-hour traffic from his home on the outskirts of Atlanta to downtown, drove in circles looking for parking, paid $20, trudged three blocks to the meeting and arrived “extremely exhausted,” he recalled. Still, he was angry enough to wait nearly two hours so that he could get his turn at the microphone.

Chris Ramsey was six months into cancer treatment that had suppressed his immune system when he received a letter requesting that he appear before the Fulton County elections board to defend his voter registration.

“I’m sorry, excuse my voice, I’m battling cancer,” he said hoarsely. He then proceeded to criticize the Fulton board for summoning him over a clerical error in his address that he’d previously tried to fix. But once he more fully understood that the board had just been following the law that the challenger had invoked, he suspected the challenger of having political motives. Ramsey, who identifies as a Democrat, told ProPublica, “I felt that it was a conservative person trying to make it easier for their politician to get where they need to be.”

Ramsey had been challenged by Jason Frazier, a member of the planning commission for the city of Roswell and urban farmer, who has filed almost 10,000 voter challenges in Fulton County. On a conservative podcast, Frazier described introducing other activists outside of Fulton County to the basics of voter roll analysis. He is also a prominent participant in frequent private conference calls about policing voter rolls hosted by the Election Integrity Network, a conservative organization focused on transforming election laws. During several calls, Frazier gave advice to more than 100 activists from at least 15 states, according to minutes provided by the watchdog group Documented.

Jason Frazier, a member of the planning commission for the city of Roswell and urban farmer, challenged Chris Ramsey’s vote and has filed almost 10,000 voter challenges in Fulton County.

The vast majority of the challenges handled in the March hearing that Ramsey attended had been submitted by Frazier, who had challenged about 1,000 people registered at nonresidential addresses, such as P.O. boxes or businesses, and another 4,000 people who he claimed lived at invalid addresses (including one member of the county elections board), most because they had the wrong directional component at the end of their street name — e.g., “SE” instead of “NE.” About a dozen people at the three-hour hearing spoke out against the challengers and Fulton officials’ handling of the challenge process. A woman who introduced herself as a survivor of domestic violence explained her use of a P.O. box as part of her “extraordinary lengths to try to protect myself and not keep my address public.” A mother complained about how addressing the challenge was taking her away from caring for her children.

“I don’t appreciate being collateral damage in this mission to clean up the voter rolls,” Sara Ketchum said to the board. Ketchum, who is Black and identifies as liberal, had temporarily moved for work from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., where she registered for a mailing address, but then returned to Georgia in time to vote. That D.C. mailing address became the basis for the challenge against her, submitted not by Frazier but by another prolific challenger. According to Georgia law, many people, such as university students, military personnel and traveling workers, may be legally registered to vote in one place but have a temporary mailing address while living in another.

Sara Ketchum, who lives in Atlanta, says a temporary move to Washington, D.C., became the basis for the challenge against her.

Ketchum told ProPublica that she felt the challenge was a type of intimidation, given Georgia’s history of white citizens using voter challenges to suppress the Black vote. “It put in perspective that voter suppression is real and it’s actually happening,” she said.

At the meeting, Frazier defended his challenges. “I’m free labor trying to help the system to make sure everyone can vote,” he said. “I’m not trying to suppress anyone. I just want clean voter rolls for a multitude of reasons,” including to make sure absentee ballots go to the right address. He insisted that challenges needed to be processed in a way that “doesn’t hassle anyone” and blamed election officials for not making it clear that people could have responded to the challenges in ways that did not include coming to the hearing in person.

Frazier did not respond to requests for comment or to a list of detailed questions.

When Frazier himself was challenged in 2022 for being registered to vote at a business address — he sells vegetables from his farm at his house — he decried it as a “frivolous retaliatory challenge” from someone he himself had challenged. The Fulton board did not approve the challenge against Frazier.

Recently, Fulton’s Republican Party has twice nominated Frazier to become a member of the county board of elections, which would give him oversight of its employees and data. But each time the county commission voted to reject him, with one commissioner criticizing him for undermining confidence in the election’s office’s work and calling him “not a serious nomination.” At the end of June, the county GOP sued the board of commissioners, seeking to have a judge force the commissioners to appoint Frazier to the elections board.

A person speaks in support of Republican elections board nominee Jason Frazier during the public comment portion of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners meeting in June. The board rejected the nomination of Frazier, who has challenged the registrations of nearly 10,000 voters in Fulton County, the largest base of Democratic voters in Georgia.

A ProPublica analysis suggests that Frazier disproportionately challenged Democrats. Georgia election data does not track party affiliation, so officials use primary voting histories as a proxy. Of the roughly 8,000 challenges by Frazier that ProPublica obtained, about 800 voters had most recently voted in a Fulton County primary. Of those, 78% voted in the Democratic race, compared to 67% of voters across the county. Several other challengers in Fulton County, including the person who filed the challenge against Ketchum, challenged more than 90% Democratic primary voters. (In Forsyth County, the challenges submitted by Schneider show a smaller disparity: 28% Democratic primary voters, relative to 22% for the county as a whole.)

Five of the six most prolific challengers identified by ProPublica, including Frazier, have assisted or been assisted by right-wing organizations, some leaders of which were involved in efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Frazier has been a prominent participant in frequent private conference calls hosted by the Election Integrity Network, dispensing advice about how to police voter rolls to more than a hundred activists from Georgia and other states. In Gwinnett County, a trio of challengers associated with VoterGA, an organization with a stated mission of “working to restore election integrity,” needed dollies to wheel eight cardboard boxes loaded with tens of thousands of affidavits into the election office. Another Gwinnett County challenger targeted about 10,500 registrations using data provided by Look Ahead America, a conservative organization that offered data and guides for a “Ballot Challenge Program” in battleground states.

In response to questions, Look Ahead America released a statement describing how it “provided thousands of volunteers across ten states” with guidance on how to properly submit voter challenges. It also described itself as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit foundation.” Garland Favorito, the co-founder of VoterGA, did not answer ProPublica’s questions about Georgians working with the organization on their challenges and its leadership’s involvement in disputing the 2020 presidential election results. When pressed for comment, he only responded, “Yes it is a provably false blatant lie.” He declined to elaborate. The Election Integrity Network did not respond to detailed questions.

Fulton County removed the most voters from its rolls of any county that ProPublica examined — roughly 1,700 — but did so mostly during the first half of 2022 when the challenges began, before switching course. Cathy Woolard, the board chair at the time, explained to ProPublica that it had made the removals while taking advice from a county lawyer and that removals were “compliant with the law.” After hiring a special counsel with more experience, however, the board switched to placing voters in “challenged” status rather than removing them, in order to “minimally impact the voter” during the 90-day protected window. (The challenges were then resolved after the election.) If Forsyth County’s board had handled challenges in this way, Helm and Riggs would not have had their difficulties voting. “Fulton County’s objective is to make certain that anyone who is able to vote gets an opportunity to vote,” said Patrise Perkins-Hooker, the special counsel who became board chair on July 1. “We prioritized the right to vote for each of our citizens and protected that through the challenge process.”

Nadine Williams, the elections director for Fulton County, said in an email to ProPublica that the challenges had “significantly” impacted her workers “due to the short turnaround time to complete the challenge process.” (SB 202 requires that challenges that place voters in “challenged status” be considered “immediately” by the board and that hearings for challenges that remove people from the rolls be held within roughly a month of being filed.) Officials from multiple counties described processing the challenges as not just time consuming but also expensive, due to the extra demands on staff and the need to hold additional public hearings and send thousands of mailers, plus hire lawyers and technology consultants.

“If this was actually fixing something or finding criminal activity, it might be worth it. But it’s harassing other citizens, distracting us from important work and not achieving the desired result,” Woolard said. Challenges, she said, have “supplanted our priorities with the priorities of a very small group of people who did these challenges.”

Despite requests from some counties for clearer direction, state officials have issued limited guidance for how counties should handle challenges, mostly advising them to rely on their attorneys.

Zach Manifold, the head of elections for Gwinnett County, said that “counties are out there on their own trying to figure out” the potential discrepancies between state and federal law regarding voter challenges. Gwinnett is Georgia’s second most populous county and had the most challenges of any of the 30 counties ProPublica examined. Almost all of them were dismissed for inadequate evidence.

The lack of direction, the overwhelming volume of challenges and the complicated intersection between SB 202 and the National Voter Registration Act have resulted in boards handling challenges in divergent ways and with different impacts on voters — as evidenced by Forsyth and Fulton counties.

Among Georgia election officials, a sense has been growing that something needs to be done about the challenges. About a week before the 2022 election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that “we need some reform” on the challenge provision to “tighten that up” due to impacts on election officials, and he suggested that the legislature could change the law in 2023. (In the subsequent session, the Georgia legislature enacted no such measure, though it did pass another election-related bill.) In the February meeting of the State Elections Board, which can issue rules for interpreting election law, its chair, William Duffey, briefly noted that “we have already identified” challenges “as an issue that we need to address,” after a voting rights advocate raised concerns about how they were being handled disparately.

“If you have two different counties handling” analogous “challenges differently, we have an issue,” Edward Lindsey, a Republican member of Georgia’s State Election Board, told ProPublica, emphasizing that county and state election boards need to work together to solve the problem. “It’s incumbent on us to have a consistent system in determining who is and isn’t eligible to vote. That needs to be consistent across 159 counties.”

When ProPublica asked the secretary of state’s office about the inconsistent ways in which counties were handling the challenges, Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson, said: “We’re going to try to get the State Elections Board to issue guidance of some kind to answer all these questions that you have.” He said that county elections board members, who receive a small stipend for their part-time work, “are having to make these decisions affecting people’s franchise” and that the secretary of state’s office was going to encourage the state board to “give them some rules to go by.”

Asked if the inconsistencies ProPublica identified had led to internal discussions about how to update guidance around challenges, Hassinger answered, “Oh, hell yeah. Absolutely.” The secretary of state’s office subsequently issued a statement to ProPublica saying that the office had already been working on creating “uniform standards for voter challenges,” adding, “It is not ProPublica’s findings that prompted us to do so.” In another statement, the office said that it is “thankful” for “ProPublica’s additional information, and have asked the state election board to provide rules.”

Duffey, the chair of the State Election Board, said that he had not received recommendations regarding new rules from the secretary of state’s office and that he had been independently drafting a memorandum that would provide “an analytical process” to allow counties to discern if a challenge should be considered under state or federal law. He explained that past news coverage of voter challenges and complaints from election officials prompted him to ask himself during the 2022 election: “How can a county deal with that? And the fact is, they can’t. There was nobody out there that was trying to help them make the determination of how they ought to process these.”

He went on to say: “As a practical matter, they probably didn't have enough time to do it differently. But we do now. And now that the election is over, we intend to do that.”

Irena Hwang and Joel Jacobs contributed data reporting.

Correction

July 13, 2023: A caption with this story originally misspelled the first name of a voter. She is Sara Ketchum, not Sarah.

Correction

July 14, 2023: This story originally misstated the rank of Gwinnett County in terms of population. It is the second most populous county in Georgia, not the most populous.

Companies can now legally apply for deep-sea mining permits, despite a lack of environmental protections.

by Duaa Eldeib

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Federal lawmakers this week introduced a bill aimed at reducing the more than 20,000 pregnancies that end in stillbirth every year in the U.S.

The Maternal and Child Health Stillbirth Prevention Act would explicitly allow federal funding earmarked for mothers and children to also be used for stillbirth prevention, including initiatives that encourage expectant parents to be aware of and track their babies’ movements in the womb.

ProPublica has spent the past 18 months reporting on stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more of pregnancy. The investigation found that a lack of comprehensive action, research and awareness, as well as stark racial disparities, have all contributed to a stillbirth crisis that exceeds infant mortality and far eclipses the number of babies who die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS, each year. Research shows as many as 1 in 4 stillbirths may be preventable. But while other wealthy countries have been able to reduce their stillbirth rates, the U.S. has fallen behind.

“Stillbirth upends the lives of individuals and families from all demographics across the United States — devastating parents and families and increasing the risk of maternal mortality and morbidity,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Investigative reporting has helped call public attention to this major public health concern,” he added, “and I will do all I can to address this crisis, including introducing the bipartisan Maternal and Child Health Stillbirth Prevention Act.”

Merkley and other lawmakers introduced a similar bill last year, but it never came up for a vote. On Tuesday, Merkley and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., reintroduced the legislation, with more than a dozen lawmakers from both sides of the aisle joining as cosponsors. U.S. Reps. Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa, and Alma Adams, D-N.C., a co-chair of the Black Maternal Health Caucus, introduced the measure in the House on Wednesday.

Rep. Alma Adams, D-N.C., joined other lawmakers in support of the measure. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

“Increasing access to stillbirth prevention saves the lives of babies and mothers,” said Cassidy, who is also a doctor.

The Iowa-based nonprofit Healthy Birth Day, which created the Count the Kicks app that helps pregnant people track their baby’s movements, championed the legislation.

“We’re absolutely thrilled because this legislation means lives saved,” said Emily Price, the group’s CEO.

Emily Price, CEO of the Iowa-based nonprofit Healthy Birth Day, said the legislation “means lives saved.” (Jenn Ackerman, special to ProPublica)

Despite working for years to try to raise awareness around stillbirth prevention and the Count the Kicks program, Price said she has heard from several state health departments that did not know that they could use money allocated under Title V Maternal and Child Health block grants for stillbirth reduction. This bill amends the Social Security Act to make it clear to public health officials that they can.

The measure would not provide additional funding, but in clarifying that public health agencies can use existing funds in these ways, lawmakers and advocates believe they can make progress in reducing the number of stillbirths.

Price said she is optimistic about the bill’s passage, in part because she said she has witnessed a recent shift around stillbirth awareness. Advocates and parents, she said, have “had enough.”

In March, the National Institutes of Health released a report that mirrored many of ProPublica’s findings. It called the U.S. stillbirth rate “unacceptably high” and laid out several recommendations to address it.

Price said her group circulated ProPublica’s stories in Washington to help lawmakers better understand the stillbirth crisis and its effects on families. Some of them had already read the stories, she said, and told her, “I understand what you’re fighting for.”

Emily Eekhoff, an Iowa mother, credits the Count the Kicks app with saving her daughter’s life. One morning in May of 2017, she said she noticed her baby’s movements had slowed from their usual pace. She tried pressing down on her stomach and drinking juice, but nothing helped. Her doctor told her to head to the hospital, and after monitoring and an ultrasound, she had an emergency cesarean section.

She didn’t realize how close she had come to delivering a stillborn baby, she said, until a nurse asked her how she knew to come in. When she told her about the app, she said the nurse could hardly believe it. Her daughter’s umbilical cord was wrapped tightly around her neck three times, and a doctor later said that if she had waited much longer to be seen, it might have been too late.

“One day could have made the difference between having her here or burying her,” Eekhoff said.

In addition to raising awareness about the importance of fetal movement, the legislation calls on health departments to fund other stillbirth prevention initiatives. Some of those include improving discussions on whether an expectant parent with certain risk factors should be delivered early, encouraging safe sleeping positions while pregnant and better screening for babies that are not growing as expected.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and March of Dimes are among several organizations that endorsed the legislation. Dr. Verda J. Hicks, ACOG president, said in a statement that supporting the bill is part of the group’s “longstanding efforts to achieve the goal of preventing stillbirth” and will help doctors develop appropriate tests and interventions.

The legislation, she said, will also pave the way for more research and better data, especially when it comes to understanding the causes of a stillbirth and the racial and ethnic inequities. ProPublica found that Black women are more than twice as likely — and in some states about three times as likely — as white women to have a stillbirth. They also face nearly three times the risk of dying during or soon after childbirth.

“There’s no reason why the United States should have worse rates of stillbirth and maternal mortality than most wealthy nations,” Adams said. “The solutions exist, we just need the political will.”

Howard Jones is hitting the road with Boy George & Culture Club on the Letting It Go Show, which also features Berlin. The package has a little bit of everything for the '80s music…

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While Bryan Adams is best known for his music, he’s also a skilled photographer — and now fans are getting a chance to see his latest work. The rocker will be the subject…

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An assist from Biden administration electric bus subsidies helped pave the way to victory at a plant in right-to-work Georgia. But workers say tensions with management have grown.

The end of COVID emergency funding forces public-transit systems, states, and cities to get creative about new funding.

by Margaret Coker, The Current, and Joel Jacobs and Mollie Simon, ProPublica, illustrations by Laila Milevski, special to ProPublica

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Current. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Christina Cooper remembers it was a muggy summer night when she came to terms with a painful reality.

Bill collectors were after her for medical bills, and she owed several thousand dollars on her furniture. Weighing most heavily, though, was the $2,700 debt to Savannah, Georgia-based TitleMax, the nation’s largest title lender, which lends money at triple-digit annual interest rates in exchange for a customer’s car title. In Georgia, these “title pawns,” as they are known, are allowed to carry much higher interest rates than traditional loans, and defaulting on them means the company can repossess the car, a vital lifeline for rural families like Cooper’s.

The working mother of three didn’t know how to make the math work to pay what she owed. She couldn’t earn any more each month, and she was already relying on food stamps. Last July, she swallowed her pride and filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, a legal process that enables debtors to keep their assets while they work on regaining their financial footing. Normally, Chapter 13 bankruptcy clears some debts and reduces payments on others through a court-approved repayment plan that the debtor can afford.

But Cooper’s lawyer advised her to not include TitleMax, one of her largest creditors, as part of that repayment plan, which has her paying other creditors at an annual interest rate of about 5%. Instead, she would keep paying TitleMax directly at the original terms of the pawn — around 119% per year.

That’s because, in 2017, TitleMax won a key legal battle: A federal appeals court ruled that because the title lending industry in Georgia operates under state pawn shop statutes, companies could sidestep the protections available to debtors in a Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

Before filing for bankruptcy, “it was really hard to get by and feed my kids,” said Cooper, who earns about $2,000 a month working in sales for a regional furniture company based in Blackshear, Georgia. “Now, it’s still really hard.”

Every year, hundreds of Georgians file bankruptcy while owing money to title lenders. An investigation by The Current and ProPublica found that even though the pawn shop loophole applies to all title lenders in Georgia, TitleMax’s customers feel its impact the most.

To get a window into this issue, The Current and ProPublica obtained data on cases involving title lenders that were filed in 14 southern Georgia counties. We identified 142 title pawn cases filed from 2020 to 2022 that had court-approved repayment plans.

Bankruptcy Filers Rarely Get Relief From TitleMax

Title lenders in Georgia can sidestep Chapter 13 repayment plans and instead demand repayment at the high interest rate of the original title pawn contract. Here’s how often people who filed for bankruptcy were able to get relief from their title pawn debt.

Note: Percentages based on 142 cases filed from 2020 to 2022 across 14 counties in southern Georgia. Of those, 81 cases involved debts to TitleMax, and 63 involved debts to other title lenders. (Two cases involved debts to both TitleMax and another lender, and those two are counted in both groups.) Numbers for TitleMax don’t add up to 100% due to rounding.

An analysis of these cases shows that in more than 70% of bankruptcies filed by its customers, TitleMax had its debt excluded from their repayment plans, allowing the company to seize the car that served as collateral or recoup the full amount owed.

By contrast, debts owed to TitleMax’s competitors in Georgia were excluded from about 30% of their customers’ repayment plans, the analysis shows. (The news organizations sought bankruptcy case data from all eight of Georgia’s Chapter 13 bankruptcy trustees, but only one of them provided the data. For more, see our methodology.)

This difference reflects how proactive TitleMax is in going to court or invoking the legal loophole when the company is included in repayment plans, according to the analysis, as well as interviews with bankruptcy filers, attorneys and trustees.

The company’s aggressive legal stance has also led some Georgia bankruptcy attorneys, like Cooper’s, to preemptively exclude the company’s debt from their clients’ repayment plans to avoid fighting what they see as a losing battle.

“You hate to see it happen. If you have a TitleMax title loan, you are screwed,” said Elaina Massey, who oversaw the cases analyzed by The Current and ProPublica. As a bankruptcy trustee, she works with bankruptcy filers, verifies financial information and oversees repayments to creditors.

TMX Finance, the parent company of TitleMax, did not respond to requests for comment.

Bankruptcy experts say the legal loophole wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for a Georgia law that regulates title lenders as pawn shops — particularly a clause stipulating that the pawned property is “automatically” forfeited once the customer defaults.

Elaina Massey, one of Georgia’s eight Chapter 13 bankruptcy trustees. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica)

Georgia and Alabama are the only states that regulate title lenders this way, making them the only places where the appeals court’s ruling is applicable.

Liz Coyle, the executive director of Georgia Watch, the state’s leading consumer advocacy group, said she hadn’t known about the legal loophole and its impact on debtors until The Current and ProPublica contacted her about it.

“You’re joking. TitleMax can do that?” said Coyle, referring to the company’s ability to sidestep Chapter 13 protections. “We already knew how abusive these title lenders are, but this takes it to a whole new level.”

Coyle said the legal loophole is yet another reason to pass regulatory reforms for title lenders. Some Georgia lawmakers have been trying and failing for more than two decades to put title lenders under state banking regulation and usury laws.

In their push for reform, lawmakers’ primary goal has been to reduce sky-high interest rates that no other financial institution is allowed to charge. But the fact that reform could also have a positive effect for Georgians filing for bankruptcy could help rally more legislators to this cause, said state Rep. Josh Bonner, a Republican from Fayetteville who sponsored the most recent reform bill in March.

“Many of us want to help hardworking Georgians, and this law, as it stands, does not do that,” Bonner said of the state’s current title lending regulation.

Chapter 13 is particularly prevalent in Georgia, according to federal court data. For the past decade, Georgia has had the most Chapter 13 cases — an average of 23,000 per year — in the nation, despite having a fraction of the population of states like California or Texas. Per capita, Georgia’s rate of Chapter 13 filings is nearly triple that of the country as a whole.

Part of Chapter 13’s appeal to consumers is that some attorneys will file a Chapter 13 case for little or no money up front, a practice that is particularly common in Southern states like Georgia. Instead, attorneys, like creditors, get paid over the course of a court-approved repayment plan. By contrast, in Chapter 7 bankruptcy — the more common form of bankruptcy in most other states — the attorney fees are typically due before filing.

People who file Chapter 13 cases in Georgia are generally in the same demographic groups that title lenders target for their high-cost, short-term financial product, according to Coyle of Georgia Watch.

As The Current and ProPublica have reported, the nearly 500 title pawn storefronts in Georgia are disproportionately located in low-income areas and communities of color. Those same areas are home to a disproportionate share of Chapter 13 filers, ProPublica has reported.

Bankruptcy attorneys say that while title pawns may not be the only cause of their clients’ bankruptcy, that debt is often a precipitating factor. Clients “are struggling — and they are often struggling due to title loans,” said Lorena Saedi, a bankruptcy attorney who runs her own firm in Atlanta. The industry, she said, preys on them, and “by the time I meet them, they have little to no protection.”

Title lenders advertise their products as a quick way for people with bad credit to get desperately needed cash. But confusing sales practices and the high interest rates allowed by Georgia law can trap customers in a cycle of debt. Title pawns have a 30-day term, but they can be renewed indefinitely as long as borrowers make the monthly interest payment.

Most title pawns in Georgia take far longer than a month to pay off, including those issued by TitleMax and TMX Finance’s other brand, TitleBucks. Our analysis of vehicle liens placed by the two brands from July 2019 through the end of 2021 shows that at least 60% of their title pawns lasted six months or more.

If these recurring payments lead debtors to default, their vehicles could be repossessed, a particularly damaging outcome for the many Georgians who need their car to get to work.

To try to avoid repossession, some debtors turn to Chapter 13 bankruptcy. But that avenue of relief has been severely constrained since TitleMax won its 2017 appeals court case.

Think You Can Get Title Pawn Relief With Chapter 13 Bankruptcy in Georgia? Think Again. Every year, tens of thousands of Georgia residents who find themselves in financial need turn to title lenders for quick cash. Title lenders use the title to the borrower’s vehicle as collateral. In Georgia, unlike most states, these transactions are regulated under pawn shop statutes. These title pawns can carry much higher interest rates than traditional loans — up to 187% annually. Those high payments, coupled with other debts, have forced many Georgians to file for Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Chapter 13 keeps a filer’s assets from being repossessed and offers a repayment plan, usually with an interest rate of around 5%. But those protections weakened in 2017 when TitleMax won a legal battle to change how title pawns are treated in standard Chapter 13 proceedings in Georgia. Now even when a borrower has filed for bankruptcy, title lenders can repossess the car or insist on full repayment of the debt, unlike many other creditors.

The company launched its legal case in response to the financial difficulties of a customer in Columbus, Georgia, who had fallen behind on his title pawn and filed for bankruptcy. As was typical in Chapter 13, while the case proceeded, an automatic stay went into effect that prevented creditors like TitleMax from repossessing the debtor’s property. The proposed repayment plan had TitleMax being paid back at a 5% annual interest rate.

TitleMax went to court, arguing that when the debtor defaulted, state pawn shop statutes automatically transferred ownership of the car to the company. The bankruptcy judge initially denied TitleMax’s motion, ruling that a title pawn was like any other debt that was secured by property, and a federal district court judge affirmed that ruling.

TitleMax appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in the company’s favor in December 2017. Two of the three judges on the panel agreed with TitleMax’s rationale that Georgia law exempted the car from bankruptcy proceedings and made it TitleMax property: “The pawnbroker didn’t have a mere ‘claim’ on the debtor’s car — it had the car itself,” they wrote.

The third judge dissented, writing that the ruling enabled “Georgia title pawn lenders to invent loopholes in order to evade the jurisdiction of the bankruptcy courts.”

Bankruptcy attorneys in the state were taken aback by the ruling, which gave title pawns a unique status. “You know that saying? ‘If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s a duck.’ The 11th Circuit says, ‘It looks like a loan, it acts like a loan, but it’s not a loan,’” said R. Flay Cabiness, a bankruptcy attorney based in Brunswick, in southern Georgia.

The decision may have ramifications for hundreds of debtors in Georgia each year. By analyzing a random sample of Chapter 13 cases across the state, The Current and ProPublica estimated that about 2,500 people with title pawn debt filed for bankruptcy between 2020 and 2022. (This covers data for the state, not just Massey’s jurisdiction.)

Bankruptcy attorneys across Georgia have various strategies to help their clients discharge title pawn debt.

Smaller title lenders, which make up more than a half of the nearly 500 title pawn stores in the state, generally agree to be included in the court-approved repayment plan, as they don’t have the resources to wage protracted legal battles with their customers, said Marc Metts, a Douglas-based attorney who represents debtors in southern Georgia. “Those lenders are local, and these customers are local,” he said. “Generally, we can find a way to work together.”

TitleMax, however, has a more maximalist standard of operation, bankruptcy attorneys around the state said.

Brandon Honsalek, who practices in the greater Atlanta area, said he puts title pawn debt into repayment plans and then holds his breath waiting to see if TitleMax objects. Recouping every dollar is “a key part of their business strategy” even if it costs them billable hours to do it, he said. “They are the 800-pound gorilla.”

TMX Finance is by far the largest title lender in the state, with more than 200 store locations between TitleMax and TitleBucks. Its brands issue new title pawns for about 47,000 vehicles per year, more than half of all such new pawns issued in the state.

Cabiness, the lawyer in Brunswick, said that in his experience, TitleMax will intervene proactively to protect its rights. He counsels his clients with TitleMax debts to keep paying the company directly throughout their bankruptcy case.

That’s the same advice that Jamal McRae got from his attorney when he filed for bankruptcy last year.

Jamal McRae and his wife, Shaketha, describe themselves as hardworking Georgians, proud landowners in Coffee County, in an area about 130 miles southwest of Savannah near the state’s vibrant Black Belt.

Jamal McRae works for a transportation company that chauffeurs Medicaid patients for doctors’ appointments in larger Valdosta or Savannah. Shaketha McRae works as a tax preparation specialist. But the COVID-19 pandemic was tough on them, as it was on many rural Georgians. They worked fewer hours than they used to, as they had to help care for extended family members in two counties. “We couldn’t keep our heads above water, no matter how hard we worked,” Shaketha McRae said.

In the fall of 2021, expenses started to overwhelm them. Jamal McRae, because of his checkered financial past — he had filed for bankruptcy before — had few options for getting a loan. In November, he went to the TitleMax store in Douglas without telling his wife, whose strong views against the company were well known to him, thanks to her own past experience with it.

A TitleMax store in Douglas, Georgia. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica)

McRae took out two title pawn contracts, one for a GMC Yukon, which he used for work, and the other for a motorcycle, which their teenagers rode. The total amount of the title pawns — $8,100 — was more than twice his monthly income. The monthly interest payments alone totaled about $1,100, or nearly a third of his income.

In January 2022, McRae said, the bills — living expenses plus payments for a third family vehicle, on top of the TitleMax debt — became too much. He filed for bankruptcy, hoping to keep his vehicles from being repossessed, a strategy that had worked in his previous bankruptcy.

But McRae’s bankruptcy attorney told him that might not be possible. A court-approved repayment plan was created for McRae, but the TitleMax debt wasn’t part of it. McRae’s attorney told him to keep up with the payments under the original terms — or he would lose the two vehicles to TitleMax, despite the bankruptcy proceedings.

By contrast, McRae got relief on payments for the family’s third vehicle, a Toyota sedan, which was financed through a local car dealer. Under the bankruptcy plan, he is now making payments to the dealer at a 5% annual interest rate.

Jamal McRae didn’t pay TitleMax for four months while the bankruptcy case was being processed. That prompted the company to file for a motion in May to repossess the two pawned vehicles.

The following month, tragedy rocked the McRae family. Their 19-year-old son, Savion, was shot and killed. Their grief blurred out everything else — including their money problems. In close-knit Douglas, most people knew of their son’s death. TitleMax’s local store manager offered condolences but not any debt relief, Shaketha McRae said.

The parties struck a deal in August that compelled Jamal McRae to discharge his debt to TitleMax via six monthly payments of $1,677 — far larger payments than creditors in the repayment plan were receiving. But roiling with grief and barely able to get through daily routines, McRae did not make the payments. Later that fall, he told TitleMax’s store manager to go ahead and repossess the two vehicles because he didn’t have the cash to pay the company.

“It’s a horrible feeling. Here we are, still grieving our loss, and all this company cares for is its money,” Shaketha McRae said. “I don’t know how anyone is supposed to deal with all these pressures.”

TitleMax did not respond to requests for comment.

Down the road in Alma, Cooper was facing her own struggles.

Cooper had been taught, both by her parents and at church, that God helps those who help themselves. So she felt ashamed that she had fallen so far into debt, despite living frugally. “I was never someone who prayed for wealth,” Cooper said. Last summer, as bill collectors kept calling, “I was just praying for strength, so I wouldn’t get sick and miss a paycheck,” she said.

Cooper’s family helped her find a bankruptcy attorney. He didn’t try to put her title pawn debt into her repayment plan. He advised her that if she wanted to keep the family’s only car, she should pay off TitleMax at the terms the company demanded. “He said it takes a real wheeler-dealer to win against TitleMax,” she recalled.

Cooper’s court-approved repayment plan will last for three to five years. During that time, she will pay off her other creditors at either a 5% or 4% annual interest rate. Her bankruptcy plan set out $150 monthly payments for those debts and her attorney fees, compared to $337 per month to TitleMax, even though the title pawn debt was less than what she initially owed to the other creditors.

Cooper’s current employer is one of her creditors. She picks up as many shifts as she can to pay for gas and her children’s clothes and school supplies, after deductions made to satisfy her Chapter 13 obligations. Food stamps help offset rising costs and give her hope that she can get rid of the title pawn debt by the end of the year. Her biggest worry is that her aging Ford Escape will break down, leaving her without a way to drive to work.

“We live out in the country. It’s quiet and peaceful. But if my car stops working, then I stop working. I don’t know what would happen to us next if that happened,” Cooper said.

Cooper wants to stay in Alma, a town of about 3,000 that is known as the blueberry capital of Georgia. The quiet, the safety and the sense of community she has in her hometown makes her want to raise her kids there.

Staying in the country, though, comes with limitations, Cooper says. There are few high-paying jobs for people with young families like hers, and few opportunities for economic mobility. For now, her planning remains focused on the short term: working through her debt and managing the uncertainties of raising her rambunctious kids.

“I was scared when I filed for bankruptcy. But I knew that if I was going to make it in this world, it was my only option,” Cooper said. “One thing is for sure, for people like us, we have a lot of chips stacked against us.”

Many low-income students will lose access to academic opportunities and recreational activities.

by Joel Jacobs, ProPublica, and Margaret Coker, The Current

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Current. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

When The Current and ProPublica began investigating the title lending industry in Georgia, we faced a daunting question: How do we measure an industry that nobody is tracking?

Title lenders provide quick cash in exchange for a car title as collateral. Many consumer advocates see the practice as predatory — title pawns, as they are known in Georgia, typically carry high interest rates, and borrowers can lose their car if they default. More than 30 states ban high-interest title lending entirely, but the industry is widespread in Georgia.

Title lenders in Georgia are considered pawn shops, a classification that exempts them from most state oversight and allows them to circumvent the state’s usury laws and charge up to 187.5% annual interest. While most financial institutions are regulated by the state’s Department of Banking and Finance, pawn shops are licensed by local governments, which have limited resources to monitor them.

State lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have tried for years to rein in title lending. But they have been stymied by the industry’s powerful lobbying efforts and by a lack of information.

Measuring the Scope of the Industry

To fill in the gaps, The Current and ProPublica started with a simple, but essential, task: counting the number of title lenders in the state.

Because there is no official statewide list of stores that offer “title pawns,” we turned to Google Maps and corporate websites. Ultimately, we found nearly 500 title pawn store locations, which span the majority of Georgia’s 159 counties.

We also found that these stores are disproportionately located in lower-income ZIP codes and those with higher proportions of people of color. These groups — who are more likely to lack access to other forms of credit — are the target customers for the title lending industry. Title lenders argue that they provide an essential service for communities that are underserved by other lenders, while critics say they ensnare these vulnerable borrowers in high-interest debt traps.

Title Lenders Cluster in Disadvantaged Communities

Title lenders are less common in ZIP codes with more white residents or more high-income residents.

Source: Georgia Department of Revenue; Google Maps; company websites; 2020 5-year American Community Survey

The Current and ProPublica also set out to measure the volume of title pawns in the state. While some states require title lenders to report how many loans they make, Georgia’s pawn shop statutes include no such mandate for statewide reporting.

But we identified an indirect way of tracking title pawns issued in the state: When customers take out title pawns, a lien is placed on their vehicle title, which gives the title lender an ownership interest that they can use to repossess the vehicle if customers default. This lien is registered with the Georgia Department of Revenue’s motor vehicle division.

After a series of discussions with the agency’s staff and filing multiple public records requests, we acquired a list of all electronic liens issued in the state from July 2019 through June 2022. Electronic liens accounted for around 95% of all liens issued in Georgia during this period. (The remaining 5% were handled with physical paperwork and tracked differently than the electronic liens.)

We cross-referenced the lienholders’ names and addresses in the data with our list of title lending store locations. During the three-year period, we found that Georgia title lenders placed liens on an average of more than 75,000 vehicles annually, and more than 60% of that volume came from TitleMax and TitleBucks, both operated by the Savannah-based TMX Finance, the largest title lender in the nation. These tallies likely underestimate how many title pawns are made, since the data we received only indicates the first electronic lien on a car from a specific lender and excludes cases where return customers received subsequent title pawns on the same vehicle from the same store.

The longer title pawns last, the higher the cost of borrowing: Even though title pawns have a 30-day term under state law, they can be renewed indefinitely as long as borrowers make the monthly interest payment. Unlike some other states that allow title lending, Georgia has no requirement that contracts can only be extended after portions of the principal balance are paid down.

After borrowers pay off title pawn debt or title lenders repossess the vehicle, the lien is removed from the title. By measuring the time from when the lien was issued to when it was removed, we could see about how long the borrowers were in debt. (It may take several days for the lien to be put in place after title pawn is issued and may similarly take some time for the lien to be removed after it is paid off.)

We found that at least 60% of the liens issued by TitleMax and TitleBucks from July 2019 through the end of 2021 were in place for six months or longer.

Our analysis may underestimate how long some customers were in debt because in certain circumstances electronic liens may be converted into paper liens, and the data we received only included the dates the liens were removed from the electronic system. It’s possible that in some cases a paper lien remained on the title after it was removed from the electronic system.

TMX Finance, the parent company of TitleMax, did not respond to requests for comment.

The Impact of a Legal Loophole

Faced with title pawn payments and other debts, some customers turn to bankruptcy as a last resort. Yet even in bankruptcy court, title lenders in Georgia have the upper hand.

In 2017, a federal appeals court ruling gave title lenders in the state a powerful legal loophole that allows them to demand that title pawns be repaid at their original high interest rates, instead of being subject to the lower-interest-rate repayment plans created in Chapter 13 bankruptcy proceedings. The ruling was based on the same state pawn shop laws that have enabled the industry to operate with little oversight.

Even though the loophole applies to all title lenders in the state, bankruptcy lawyers across Georgia told us that TitleMax customers feel its impact the most.

We wanted to get a broader picture of how this issue was affecting Georgians, but little information was publicly available about bankruptcies involving title lenders, so our first step was to identify which bankruptcy cases they’re involved in.

The federal electronic court record system, known as PACER, has information on which creditors are involved in a given bankruptcy case. But PACER charges a fee for every document viewed and cannot be comprehensively searched by creditor list, making it impractical for identifying every bankruptcy case with a title lender.

So The Current and ProPublica reached out to Georgia’s eight Chapter 13 bankruptcy trustees, who help facilitate bankruptcy cases and maintain data on cases within their jurisdiction. We received data from one bankruptcy trustee, Elaina Massey, whose jurisdiction covers 14 counties in southern Georgia: Appling, Atkinson, Bacon, Brantley, Camden, Charlton, Coffee, Glynn, Jeff Davis, Long, McIntosh, Pierce, Ware and Wayne. The data she sent us included Chapter 13 cases — a type of bankruptcy that puts the debtor on a repayment plan — where a title lender appeared as a creditor. These cases were identified by using searches for keywords including “title pawn” and the names of title lending companies.

We manually reviewed each case filed from 2020 to 2022 to determine whether title pawn debt was assigned to be paid through the repayment plan.

When title pawn debt is included in a bankruptcy plan, it can reduce the debtor’s burden significantly — debt paid through the plan during this period often had an annual interest rate of around 5%, while a title pawn paid outside the plan is likely subject to the initial contract terms, which can have an interest rate as high as 187.5% annually.

It can take several months for a repayment plan to be confirmed by a judge after the case is initially filed, and some cases are dismissed before the repayment plan is confirmed. Cases where the repayment plan was not confirmed by a judge as of April 2023 were excluded from the analysis.

Occasionally, a bankruptcy case listed a title lender as a creditor even though there wasn’t an active title pawn at the time of filing. These cases were excluded as well.

We grouped each case into one of three categories: ones where title pawn debts were included in the repayment plan, where title pawn debts were excluded from the repayment plan, or where the debtor gave up the vehicle. For the third category, it is generally unclear whether the debtor would have paid the title pawn through or outside the repayment plan.

The analysis included 142 cases total, two of which involved debt from TitleMax or TitleBucks along with debt from another title lender. In 58 of the 81 cases with debts from TitleMax, the debt was excluded from the repayment plan, meaning that the debtor was subject to the terms of the original title pawn contract. By contrast, title pawn debt was excluded from the plan in only 19 of the 63 cases involving other lenders.

Bankruptcy Filers Rarely Get Relief From TitleMax

Title lenders in Georgia can sidestep Chapter 13 repayment plans and instead demand repayment at the high interest rate of the original title pawn contract. Here’s how often people who filed for bankruptcy were able to get relief from their title pawn debt.

Note: Percentages based on 142 cases filed from 2020 to 2022 across 14 counties in southern Georgia. Of those, 81 cases involved debts to TitleMax, and 63 involved debts to other title lenders. (Two cases involved debts to both TitleMax and another lender, and those two are counted in both groups.) Numbers for TitleMax don’t add up to 100% due to rounding.

In cases where the debt was excluded from the bankruptcy plan, court documents do not show whether the title lender negotiated a lower interest rate or other changes to the repayment terms outside of court. It also may not be clear from the court documents whether the debtor ultimately paid off the title pawn through direct payments or had their car repossessed.

We were also curious how many Georgians filing for bankruptcy were burdened by title pawn debt, and therefore how many people might be impacted by this loophole statewide.

To estimate this, we conducted a random sample of 1,000 Chapter 13 cases filed in Georgia from 2020 to 2022. Case numbers were sampled from the Federal Judicial Center’s bankruptcy database, which lists every bankruptcy case filed nationwide (but does not include creditor information). Then, we programmatically compiled creditor lists from the corresponding cases in PACER.

Of the 1,000 cases sampled, The Current and ProPublica found 64 cases where title lenders were listed as creditors, or 6.4%. We counted all cases that included title lenders as creditors, regardless of how the debt was treated in the plan.

Extrapolating across the roughly 39,000 cases filed during this period in Georgia, we estimated that roughly 2,500 bankruptcy cases involved title lenders from 2020 to 2022, with a margin of error of 600 cases, based on a 95% confidence interval. This time period coincided with a significant nationwide decline in bankruptcy filings during the pandemic, and therefore this estimate may be an undercount if the volume of bankruptcies return to their pre-pandemic levels in the future.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

In items dating to the early 1950s, the AP found nonchalance and indifference to the risks of materials used in the development of nuclear weapons.