It may seem implausible that the person in charge of overseeing Georgia’s gubernatorial race is also one of the candidates, but here we are. Georgia’s secretary of state Brian Kemp, who ran for governor against Stacey Abrams today, has made it notoriously difficult to vote in his home state—especially for people of color.
As the New York Times reported on Oct 31, “since 2012, his office has canceled more than 1.4 million voter registrations. In July 2017, over half a million people—8 percent of the state’s registered voters—were purged in a single day. As of earlier this month, over 50,000 people’s registrations, filed before the deadline to vote in the coming midterm election, were listed as on hold. Seventy percent had been filed by black applicants.”
Some of Kemp’s questionable tactics for managing the Georgia election included freezing the voter registrations of citizens whose forms did not precisely match their IDs, and charging voters who needed assistance or encountered confusion with voter fraud.
Georgia residents attempting to vote today experienced malfunctioning machines and hours-long waits. One voter who was challenged by today’s process was Kemp himself, who reportedly received a voter card that was marked as “invalid.”
Such a snafu might have stopped other Georgia residents from voting, but apparently Kemp persevered. A poll worker told The Hill that Kemp’s voting process was “smooth.”
In other Georgia voting news, the NAACP succeeded in extending voting hours in two precincts near the historic black colleges of Spelman and Morehouse.