Remember that time when Brian Kemp, while serving as Georgia’s secretary of state, oversaw the same 2018 gubernatorial race that he eventual won?
And how he used every voter suppression tactic imaginable—from understaffed polls, to purging hundreds of thousands of voters from state rolls, to tossing out provisional ballots, to ensuring that voting machines were missing power cords—in order to shamelessly secure his own victory?
Well, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the incoming chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, wants answers.
More specifically, he wants Kemp to address allegations that he’s an unscrupulous bastard who willfully abused his power in order to aid his own campaign.
“I want to be able to bring people in, like the new governor-to-be of Georgia, to explain, you know, explain to us why is it fair for wanting to be secretary of state and be running [for governor],” Cummings told the Huffington Post.
As you might recall, Kemp stole won a close victory over the first black woman governor in the history of the United States Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams, in what she would deem a “not free and fair election” after concluding her campaign.
Following Kemp’s immoral shenanigans, Abrams also announced her intention to sue the state for allowing Kemp’s office to orchestrate all this bullshit.
But in the aftermath of the midterms, and in his pursuit of accountability for how elections through the country were undermined, potential hearings on voter suppression won’t be limited to just Georgia. Cummings also has states such as Kansas and North Carolina in his crosshairs.
One of the first people he’ll be calling into the principal’s office is Ford County, Kansas county clerk Debbie Cox, who moved the only polling location in Dodge City—a town of 13,000 residents that just so happens to have a 50% Latino population—to outside of city limits, triggering a lawsuit from the ACLU.
But Cummings also wants to talk to officials in North Carolina about why 20 percent of the state’s early-voting polling sites were closed this year. Which according to Huffington Post, were closed “because of a law passed by the Republican-controlled legislature over the veto of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper in June”.
But while Cummings has a lot of work ahead of him in exposing a bevy of racist ass voter suppression tactics, hopefully these hearings will serve as an impetus for Congress to pass reforms that will prevent abuses of this nature in the future.