As we barrel towards one of the most momentous elections in Georgia’s history, Democrat Stacey Abrams’ campaign is calling on Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp to resign following a report his office is cheating using a rigorous verification process to suppress the votes of thousands of African Americans.
As reported by The Root, Kemp has had a long history of “making black votes disappear” as Georgia’s secretary of state, which is always unethical, undemocratic, underhanded and unprincipled, but in this case, will directly benefit Kemp, as most polls have him neck and neck with Abrams for governor.
CNN reports:
The demand from the Abrams campaign comes in response to an Associated Press report on records it obtained showing Georgia has put a hold on more than 53,000 voter registration applications — nearly seven-in-ten of them belonging to African Americans — because they failed to clear the state’s “exact match” standard.
Under the policy, even the most minor discrepancy — like a typo or missing letter — between a voter’s registration and their drivers license, social security or state ID cards can be flagged.
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Kemp has also come under fire from voting rights advocates for canceling more than a million “inactive” voters from Georgia’s rolls since becoming the state’s chief elections officer in 2010. The practice was upheld by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling in June. The state purged a total of 1.5 million voters between the 2012 and 2016 elections, according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice.
“As he has done for years, Brian Kemp is maliciously wielding the power of his office to suppress the vote for political gain and silence the voices of thousands of eligible voters—the majority of them people of color,” Abrams spokeswoman Abigail Collazo said in a statement.
Collazo pushed for Kemp to step down “so that Georgia voters can have confidence that their Secretary of State competently and impartially oversee this election.”
Like that will ever happen.