Voter Suppression In Georgia

As you may have heard, 24 hours after the polls have closed here in Georgia, we still don't know who won the Governor's race.  

The most recent count has the Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp ahead with 1,967,523 votes (50.4%) and Democrat Stacy Abrams trailing with 1,899,564 (48.7%).  In Georgia, a candidate has got to receive over 50% of the vote and lead by more than 1% to avoid a runoff election.

Technically, Kemp has that now and earlier this evening he declared victory, but Abrams has not yet conceded because all votes haven't been counted yet, especially absentee and provisional ballots.  Her campaign believes there's enough votes out there in her favor to force a runoff.

But here's the real rub - Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp's office oversees elections in Georgia, and many have protested that it's unfair that he gets to manage the same election in which he's running.  Secretaries of other states have recused themselves from their SOS duties when running.  But Kemp has not only not done that, he has engaged in some of the most blatant acts of voter suppression imaginable, and even former President Jimmy Carter waded in and asked for his recusal, saying that at the very least, the appearance of impropriety is enough to tarnish the election and question the legitimacy of Kemp's victory, if that's the final outcome.  Kemp has refused to step down.

Kemp massively purged voter rolls, reportedly to remove dead people and people who haven’t voted in recent elections from the records, but in such a sweeping way that Democrats fear it took legitimate voters, particularly minority voters, off the rolls.

In one of his better known acts of suppression, Kemp announced a new zero-tolerance policy on registrations, and demanded that all registration records had to be an "exact match" with all other records the state had on file for an individual, such as driver's licence, tax returns, business records, etc.  If there was any difference in use of hyphens, maiden names, or useage of "Jr.," "II," etc., the registration application was placed on hold to be resolved sometime after the election.

That might not sound too bad at first - how can you justify non-matching records? - but it turns out that some 53,000 registrations were placed on hold and that some 70% of those were for voters of color (and Georgia is only 32% black).  What's more, a majority of those voters just so happened to be from Gwinnett County, which has gone from being 90% white in 1990 to 70% non-white today.  Full disclosure: the company for whom I work and my office are in Gwinnett County (but I live in the City of Atlanta and Fulton County).

A Georgia judge finally intervened and ruled that the 53,000 registrants were to be given provisional ballots, but they still had to "clear" their registrations with the SOS office by the end of the week for their votes to count.  The burden of having to fill out a provisional ballot and then to have to go through some unspecified bureaucratic process to convince a belligerent SOS (who, we'll remind you, is one of the candidates) that you're really who you say you are was likely enough of a hurdle to discourage many first-timers from voting. I know it would probably discourage me.

Then, just a few days before the election, the official Secretary of State’s website declared with no evidence that Democrats had attempted to hack the state’s voter registration system, a bald-faced lie that one election law expert  called “perhaps the most outrageous example of election administration partisanship in the modern era.”

What's more, yesterday there were excessively long lines at a lot of polling places.  In predominantly black South DeKalb County, one precinct wasn't given power cords for the electronic voting machines used in Georgia, effectively shutting it down.  At historically black Morehouse University, some of the precincts didn't open until 4 or more hours after the official start of polling, throwing off people's plans for the day and probably discouraging more voters.  After yet more judicial intervention, the Morehouse precinct was allowed to stay open until 10:15 p.m. (the polls are supposed to close at 7), but who wants to run back out at 9:00 p.m. to try and vote again, especially considering you had already set aside time to attempt to vote in the morning, and some new trick might just shut the precinct back down?

Stacey Abrams has not yet conceded the race, and her campaign issued the following statement today: 

"We remain committed to ensuring that every single vote is counted, particularly given the significant irregularities in various areas of the state. In Fulton County alone, lines stretched for hours despite a warehouse with 700 voting machines that stood ready to be deployed but never were. Given the effort that Georgia voters made to make sure their voices could be heard, we owe it to them to fight on to make sure that every vote is counted. (As a reminder, the election results won't be certified by counties until Monday or Tuesday of next week.)"

For whatever it's worth, I had to wait in line at my precinct for about an hour, where there were only three voting machines.  My neighborhood is mostly college educated and white, and we went for Clinton in 2016.  A coworker from solidly Republican and suffocatingly white East Cobb County told me she waited less than 5 minutes to vote, and that there were "dozens" of voting machines available.  Only three machines in a Clinton District, and "dozens" of machines in a Trump District?  Hmmmmmm.

Brian Kemp is a Trump-style Republican, and the devil himself came down to Georgia several times to campaign for him.  During a press conference today, Pumpernickel even took credit for Kemp's "very big margin" of victory, and then took the opportunity to mock Oprah Winfrey for "working hard" for Abrams.  Kemp's campaign ads claimed he needed such a large pickup truck in case he had to round up some illegals and deport them himself, and in another one he pointed a shotgun at a teenage boy he claimed was interested in dating his daughter.  

Kemp's shenanigans are clear proof of why the Voting Rights Act needs to be fully reinstated.  A few years ago, the Supreme Court struck down provisions of the Act that gave the federal government oversight of Southern states' voting laws, claiming that the years of institutional racism and Jim Crow-era restrictions were long since over, but states like North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas almost immediately resorted to minority vote suppression, usually under the excuse of protecting the electoral process from largely imagined to virtually nonexistent "voter fraud."  

On a brighter note, it appears that former Georgia Secretary of State and long-time WDW nemesis Karen Handel lost her reelection bid to Democrat Lucy McBath.  As you might recall, just last year Handel waged one of the most expensive campaigns in history against Democratic upstart John Ossoff for Newt Gingrich's former congressional seat.  She narrowly won that campaign, but fortunately for Georgia and probably America, it looks like she's now lost it a mere one year later (we really dislike Karen Handel).  The results still aren't final, but McBath has a pretty commanding 3,000 vote lead.  There might be a runoff, especially if Handel has anything to say about it.

Finally, on a still brighter note, let's not let these little anomalies to yesterday's election make us forget that the Democrats regained control of the House yesterday and that Nancy Pelosi will once again be Speaker of the House.  Pumpernickel's legislative agenda is now officially dead in the water, the investigations and inquiries (and arrests and impeachments) can begin in earnest, and redistricting after the next census should be in reliably Blue hands.