in Georgia, a new investigation has found that the Georgia secretary of state and Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp has overseen the removal of more than 340,000 current Georgia residents from voting rolls.
Greg Palast talking:
Republican candidate for governor Brian Kemp, wouldn’t answer my questions, so he’s going to have to answer them in a federal court. This is a follow-up to my Rolling Stone 2016 investigation. We are suing him—and I say “we,” including civil rights organizations—to find out why he’s removed 340,134 Georgians on supposed evidence that they’ve left the state or left their county. And they are in—they are still in their home registration addresses. They haven’t left. So, you’re talking a third of a million people. If these people show up to vote on November 6th, they’re going to find that they can’t vote. They’ll be handed a provisional ballot, but it won’t be counted. This is huge. And these lists are violently racially prejudiced. So, we are going into court to get all the answers why he did this. We know it’s wrong.
And for my other investigation, I was able to get inside his operation and get some of the purge lists before. It’s quite an ugly operation. I’ve never seen a purge operation this wide, this big. And this one thing that Stacey Abrams was mentioning during the debate, it’s not just the 53,000 names pending, it’s the 340,000 people purged. That is, their registrations have been canceled. That’s why we’re in court with the voting rights groups to get the information on exactly why these people were wrongly removed.
It’s very, very dangerous for Brian Kemp to be in charge of the vote while he’s running for governor. As you see, for example, Kris Kobach, also secretary of state—and you’ve got another story coming up—is closing and moving polling stations where voters of color can’t get to those stations, Kemp is doing the same thing, by the way. He has closed stations in neighborhoods of voters of color, in Atlanta, for example, in the 6th Georgia Congressional District. He will be the one—when people go to the polling stations and find they’ve been purged, and they fill out those provisional ballots, it will be Brian Kemp who decides whether they get counted. Absentee ballots—you just heard how panicked he was about the massive number of absentee ballots coming in from voters of color, from Democrats. And he’s going to be able to decide which of those ballots get counted.
People don’t realize, you mail in your ballot, you’re kind of taking a chance. They have to decide that your signature is correct. In Georgia, Kemp has imposed a rule called exact match. You add your middle initial and you didn’t register that way, or you leave it out and you did register that way, your ballot is toast. It’s gone. This is very serious, to let a secretary of state, the ballot counter, the guy who determines who gets to vote, which ballots get counted, where the vote takes place, how it takes place—Secretary of State Kemp is not following the normal procedure, that a secretary of state should resign while they’re running for governor.
Leah Wright Rigueur talking:
I think Stacey Abrams is laying out her pathway to the governor’s office and to victory. But she’s doing it in such a way as to remind everyone that she is interested in a legal pathway, but that also she is interested in expanding the rights and the constitutionality and the right to vote for all Georgians and ensuring that they have that right to vote. So, for a long time, you know, in our democracy—and it’s not just Georgia—there’s been this idea that everyone should have the right to vote. But there’s also—it’s coexisted with this idea that not everyone should have the right to vote. And, in fact, this is what we’ve seen, a restriction of rights, of the right to vote, for certain groups of people.
Abrams was directly responding to that, by saying, you know, “This has been my ground game, this has been my life’s work, to ensure that everyone who is a legal citizen has the right to vote and has the right to exercise that vote, as opposed to constraining it,” so clearly pointing out that, you know, and rebutting this idea that she’s on tape encouraging undocumented peoples to vote, but instead saying this is about ensuring that citizens have their right to vote and are able to exercise that right, as opposed to being suppressed or losing those rights.
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Greg Palast
journalist who has been investigating Brian Kemp and voter suppression in Georgia. He’s the director of the 2016 documentary titled The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Leah Wright Rigueur
professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is the author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power.
— source democracynow.org | Oct 24, 2018