A contentious and extremely close contest for Governor of Georgia is currently underway between former Democratic State Rep. Stacey Abrams and Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp.  Fortunately, some voters are discovering early that Republicans are playing a very old game of “Voter Suppression” just in time for the November election.

Politics
Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams is on the verge of a historic trifecta:  becoming the first female governor of Georgia, becoming the first African-American governor of Georgia, and becoming the first female African-American governor ever in the US.  So, why did anyone expect the GOP to play fair and allow this contest between a black woman and a white man to be conducted honestly?

Thankfully, Marsha Appling-Nunez, an adjunct professor at Gwinnett Technical College near Atlanta was recently able to catch Republicans cheating.

While showing her students how to verify their voter registration status online, Appling-Nunez made a disastrous discovery. Despite being an active Georgia voter who had regularly cast ballots for years, she was no longer registered.  Understandably shocked, Appling-Nunez immediately tried to re-register,  however, with only a month left before the all-important November election that will decide the Georgia governor’s race and several competitive US House seats, she realized that her application is 1 of over 53,000 sitting on hold in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.

Oh, and guess who the Georgia Secretary of State is?  Republican candidate for governor Brian Kemp!

Not surprisingly, most of the people on the suddenly “unregistered” list are predominantly black and Democrat.  Also not surprising is that most of these people don’t even know their voter registration is in limbo — and won’t find out until they try to vote on November 6th but are turned away.

Last Tuesday was the Georgia deadline to register and be eligible to vote in the November General Election.  Now, tens of thousands of voters will be wiped from the election process due to a GOP disenfranchising game.

“I was kind of shocked,” said Appling-Nunez, who moved from one Atlanta suburb to another in May and believed she had successfully changed her address on the voter rolls. “I’ve always voted. I try to not miss any elections, including local ones.”

Republican candidate for governor Brian Kemp is in charge of elections and voter registration in Georgia.  Instead of recusing himself from the process because he is also a candidate, he is blatantly “cooking the books” in his favor so as to tilt the election his way.  In fact, Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams and several voting rights advocacy groups are charging Kemp with systematically using his office to suppress votes and fix the election in order to disproportionately affect black and minority voters.

Politics
Through a process called voter roll maintenance (or voter roll purges), Kemp has canceled over 1.4 million voter registrations since 2012.  Nearly 670,000 registrations were canceled in 2017 alone.

Although the numbers are there, Kemp is (not surprisingly) vehemently denying any wrongdoing and is instead calling himself a victim, by suggesting that Abrams and liberal activists are twisting his record of guarding Georgia elections against voter fraud.

According to a public records request by The Associated Press, Appling-Nunez’s application — and most of the 53,000 other registrations on hold with Kemp’s office — were flagged because they didn’t adhere to the state’s strict “exact match” verification process.

Under the “exact match” policy, information on a voter application must PRECISELY match information on file with the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration.  If for even the most minute reason it does not, election officials can place non-matching applications on hold.

Appling-Nunez says she never received any notice from Kemp’s office indicating a problem with her application and would have never known about it had she not checked her own registration status

“We’ve shown that this process disproportionately prevents minority applicants from getting on the voter registration rolls,” Julie Houk, special counsel for the Washington-based Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said.  She added that it’s “kind of astounding” that Georgia legislators wrote it into state law in 2017.

Houk’s group wrote to Kemp in July threatening legal action if “exact match” wasn’t ended.  He ignored the threat and allowed for the continuation of African-American and other minority voters to be disproportionately disenfranchised without their knowledge.

As promised, the lawsuit to end the practice was filed late last week.

“Under this ‘exact match’ protocol, the transposition of a single letter or number, deletion or addition of a hyphen or apostrophe, the accidental entry of an extra character or space, and the use of a familiar name like ‘Tom’ instead of ‘Thomas’ will cause a no match result,” lawyers for the civil rights groups wrote in the lawsuit.

“It imposes a substantial, unwarranted, and disproportionate burden on Black, Latino, and Asian-American voters and denies them equal opportunity to register and to vote in Georgia elections,” the suit continued.

Will Kemp and the State of Georgia get away with this old and racist practice of voter suppression?  Will justice prevail and allow everyone the right to vote in a fair election regardless of their race or political affiliation?  Or are the old tricks of minority voter disenfranchisement on the rise and the wave of our political future?

TAKE OUR POLL:

OK WASSUP! discusses Politics:
Georgia is disenfranchising black voters.