Brian Kemp owes his asterisk to his leadership in Georgia

Kemp had no intention of giving up a post that he had held since 2010 and was often used as a weapon to crack down on Georgia's electorate. He understood that he would need all the tricks of the book, because he ran into a woman who, in addition to leading the minority in the House of Representatives of the State from 2011 to 2017, had founded the formidable organization of registration of voters, the New Georgia Project.

Read: The race of the governor of Georgia has highlighted the repression of voters

Several years ago, Abrams noticed that the state's demographics were changing rapidly, with minorities representing a growing share of the eligible electorate. Abrams also noticed that more than half a million black Georgians were not registered to vote. In 2013, as Executive Director of the New Georgia Project, she decided to "register and civically involve the growing electorate in our state".

When tens of thousands of voter cards poured into Kemp's office, he heard warning tones. He told the media that "we are simply not committing fraud" and launched a high-profile investigation into the organization of Abrams. While accusations of crime hung in the air, he told a story very different to that of his Republican compatriots. Kemp told them in 2014 that "the Democrats are working hard and all these stories about them, you know, by registering all those minority voters who are out there and others who stay away," he said. They can do it, they can win these elections in November. "

The complaint for electoral fraud, it seems, was a ruse to try to intimidate the New Georgia Project, Abrams and black voters with criminal prosecution. It did not work. Abrams, a lawyer trained at Yale, knew the law, knew that the New Georgia project had not failed and was holding up. Kemp was forced to go away, unable even to accuse him or the organization of violations. (A counter-suit of the New Georgia Project, alleging voter repression, was thrown out.)

Under the Kemp, Georgia has dropped more than 1.5 million voters, eliminating 10.6 percent of voters from the registered voters between 2016 and 2018 alone. The state closed 214 polling stations, most of them living in minority and poor neighborhoods. Between 2013 and 2016, he blocked the registration of nearly 35,000 Georgians, including newly naturalized citizens. Georgia accomplished this feat of suppressing the right to vote based on a filtering process called "exact match", which means that the state would accept new records only if they corresponded exactly to information contained in databases, including dashes in names, accents and even typos.

Although a judge ruled that the "exact match" was biased and had a disparate impact on minority candidates, the Georgian legislature in 2017 mocked the decision and created a new program of " exact match, "affected by the same bias for Anglicized traditional names. The exact match is supposed to eliminate voter identity theft fraud before it can begin. In reality, it eliminates from the electorate tens of thousands of otherwise eligible voters, mostly minorities.