Staggering Voter Suppression In Georgia Could Keep Democrats Out of Power

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Shaun King October 27 2018, 7:00 a.m

In case you missed it, in a state that has been solidly Republican for a generation, Democrat Stacey Abrams is in a dead heat with Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp in the race for governor. It’s a big deal: Abrams could become the first black governor of Georgia.

That’s why it’s so disturbing that every few days, a new story of voter suppression comes out.

It is, of course, an outrageous conflict of interest for the man who oversees Georgia’s elections to be simultaneously running for the highest office in the state. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single reasonable person who says otherwise. Kemp should have stepped down from his role as secretary of state, or at least recused himself from all election oversight, the moment he decided to run for governor.

The stories of voter suppression detail how thousands and thousands of voters, almost always African-American, have somehow been disenfranchised. A staggering 53,000 voter registration applications — most of them from black residents — were denied by Kemp’s office just a month before the election. And his office held up the re-application to register for those folks, too. The applications weren’t fraudulent, but were struck down by Kemp if the information on them — including someone’s signature or even a dash in their name — did not perfectly match information on file with the Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s preposterous and has nothing at all to do with voter security.

Those 53,000 votes could determine this election.

An analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found that Georgia has been accelerating the rate of its voter purging in recent years. Between 2008 and 2012, the study found, the state purged some 750,000 voters. In the following four years, between 2012 and 2016, 1.5 million voters were purged from the rolls — in a state with a total population of just over 10 million people!

https://theintercept.com/2018/10/27/voter-suppression-georgia-election/