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Brian Kemp gives his victory speech after winning the GOP gubernatorial primary runoff for governor on July 24.Curtis Compton / Atlanta Journal-Constitution / TNS via ZUMA
In 2012, Helen Ho Asian Americans to vote in Georgia. Two years prior, she had founded a small nonprofit to increase civic engagement among this growing minority population, and she found that the most fruitful way to register new voters was at naturalization ceremonies. Soon, she and her small staff have been attending to each other and have been in the process of registering. As the presidential election neared, more than 1,400 new voters.
About a month before the election, Ho realized something was amiss. People whom she had registered were contacting her, reporting that they had never received registration cards. Then others who have been tried to vote. The American Legal Advocacy Center, now Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta-had tried to register. He found that 574-about 40 percent-were not on the rolls. "That's when we're doing this is a problem," Ho says. "These are mostly new immigrants, to form refugees, who are becoming citizens, and for some reason the registration process is systematically denying them the right to vote."
Ho's first race of action to the office of the secretary of state, Republican Brian Kemp. When Kemp office failed to respond, she took the issue to the press, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a story about disenfranchised new citizens. A week after the election, Ho from Kemp's office: Kemp was launching an investigation into the Asian American Legal Advocacy Center, alleging that it had violated protocol when it had retained a copy of registrants' applications. Ho believes the investigation has been made by his going public and making his office look bad. "Who would think vote is a dangerous thing for a nonprofit to do?" Ho wonders. "But that's what it felt like. It felt like we were doing something that is in our right, it's a right of every citizen, and it was dangerous doing it. "
In nine years as secretary of state, Kemp has championed and enforced policies that make it harder for minorities to register to vote. Now he's locked in a tight race for governor-a race in which his own work as a member of the United States can not Democrat Stacey Abrams is trying to become the first female governor by boosting turnout among Democratic-leaning minority groups who historically have not voted in large numbers. Kemp's efforts could keep Abrams from reversing that trend.
Kemp has implemented a stringent vote verification process that flags and suspends registration applications if the information on them does not exactly match information in existing databases, down to each letter and hyphen. Last week, the Associated Press reported that 53,000 people in the United States. Georgia is 32 percent African American, 70 percent of those flagged by Kemp's protocols are black. The revelation prompted a lawsuit the next day from a coalition of civil rights groups, who would like to know who they are.
"Says Bryan Sells, an Atlanta-based voting rights attorney who is part of the suing Kemp team. "I think he has been a willing player in a much larger strategy to do just the opposite, to prevent people from voting and discourage people from voting."
Kemp grew up in Athens, one of Georgia's liberal enclaves and home to the University of Georgia. His grandfather and father-in-law had served in the state legislature, as Democrats. In 2002, Kemp decided to get into the business of state, with the Republican Party, which had absorbed most of the state's old conservative Democrats.
Kemp leveraged his family's political stature in his first campaign. "At a time when it took courage to do so, train Sen. Julian Cox, Brian Kemp's grandfather, boldly voted to join the University of Georgia, "one of his radio ads stated, promising that Kemp would carry on the legacy. Goal that was a skewed reading of history. As an Athens paper pointed out in 2002, African Americans are waiting for the University of Georgia; it was integrated by a federal court order. Over several years in office, Cox cast multiple votes to preserve segregation in Georgia schools. (The state's segregationist law would be self defeating the university if black students enrolled, Cox joined an almost unanimous legislature in repealing that law so the university could remain open.)
Kemp won his race in a Republican wave. Four years later, he lost a primary race for agriculture commissioner, but in January 2010, Gov. Sonny Perdue appointed Kemp secretary of state when the incumbent, Republican Karen Handel, stepped down to run for governor. Kemp ran successfully for a full term in November 2010, and again in 2014.
Kemp's tenure as secretary of state has coincided with a nationwide surge in politics that makes it difficult for the minorities and poor people to cast ballots. States under Republican control, particularly since the 2010 election that carried countries to power around the country, Voted ID laws, proof-of-citizenship laws, and reductions in early voting-all policies that Kemp has supported in Georgia. These developments escalated in 2013 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, freeing Georgia and its 159 counties from having to preclear changes to voting procedures with the federal government. Without that decision, Georgia close 214 polling locations53,000 voters in limbo today.
Though he Kemp has done the opposite. Not only has he made it more difficult for some people to vote, but his campaign has been taken by the Republican based on a stridently anti-immigrant tone. In one ad, he's threatened to get to know you and bring them to your truck. His anti-immigrant stance has Endeared him to President Donald Trump, whose endorsement helped him win a close Republican primary runoff in July.
The roots of the current controversy over the suspended registrations back to the 2000 presidential election. In response to the many problems administering that contest, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002. Among other provisions to streamline election administration, it required states to run a new registration in order to help confirm registrants' identities. Some states quickly turned this for a weapon for disenfranchising voters, using it to block registrations.
Georgia was among the states that took this approach, known as "exact match." the Justice Department, which rejected it in 2009 as discriminatory and "seriously flawed." By this time, the policy was falling out of favor by the country, as well as by a number of countries. Wisconsin's election board, for example, failed to meet the challenge of a failed test. Goal after Kemp took office in 2010, he forged ahead. He made small tweaks to his predecessor's proposal in the arena of the Justice Department ruling, and for the next seven years, Georgia had the nation's strictest exact-match program. Tens of thousands of Georgians were disenfranchised as a result.
Under Kemp's exact-match policy, Each new registrant's application has had its proper relationship with the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. A missing hyphen or apostrophe in someone's name could block his or her application. Sometimes, the discrepancies are caused by the election of officials.
Would-be voters with mismatched information were asked for information in the mail. They had 40 days of their time to correct the issue. Doing so often required a lot of guesswork. The Social Security Administration database, which has a 2009 inspector general's report, was a glitch that flags some matches as nonmatches, would not inform officials what part of the information did not match up. This is a mystery for flagged voters. In the case of a vote, who is a member of the public, who has an incorrect address in the matching system, and who has not received the notice. Ho believes the exact-match scheme is caused by the fact that it is not flagged and blocked, because it does not automatically update when an immigrant gains citizenship. Voters of color, who are less likely to have drivers, are more often run through the Social Security Administration database, which is less reliable than the state's.
In September 2016, several disenfranchised voters and Georgia civil rights groups sued Kemp to stop the exact-match process. In their complaintthey disproportionately disenfranchised minority voters. White applicants had submitted 47.6 percent of rejection applications, July 16, 2009, 13.6 percent of applicants had been rejected by exact match, while African Americans had 29.4 percent of applications but 63.6 percent of rejections, according to records from Kemp's office. African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos were all about seven times. Of the 34,874 registrations blocked by exact match, more than 75 percent were nonwhite.
A month after the suit was filed, The following February, his office signed a settlement that effectively ended the exact-match program. But for voting rights groups, it was a short-lived victory.
A few months later, at the urging of Kemp's office, the Republican-controlled Georgia legislature passed a law requiring a matching protocol. Kemp the new law has a green light to bring back a nearly identical exact-match policy. There was one key difference: Voters' 40-day window to correct a mismatch Was extended to 26 months, where they brought proper ID. Kemp's office argues that this new law overrides the settlement.
Predictably, the program once again flagged minority voters at disproportionate rates. By July 2018, after just a year of the new exact-match policy, more than 51,000 voters had been flagged and put on a pending list, with 26 months to provide additional proof of identity. Of those, less than 10 percent had listed their race as white. On October 11, voting rights groups sued again.
Kemp spokeswoman Candice Broce says she is misguided. "This is a publicity stunt that the media falls for year after year," she says in an email. "Their claims are bogus. It is a complete waste of our time and taxpayer dollars. This so-called 'exact match' law passed by the legislature and signed by Governor [Nathan] Deal. "Broce notes that the exact-match policy is similar to that of Florida. It also allows local officials to try to figure out the matching error, then Georgia puts the burden of proof entirely on the vote.
Lawsuits against Kemp's oversight of elections have become routine Kemp spins this Groundhog Day situation as a sign that he is under siege by his enemies. "November 6, 2018 is right around the corner, which means it's high time for another frivolous lawsuit from liberal activist groups," Kemp said in a statement in July, when the Lawyer's Committee on Civil Rights Under Lawful Lives threatens its new exact-match policy. "They pulled the same stunt in 2014 and 2016, and it's no surprise that they're planning the same tactics this year."
The suits are not as frivolous as Kemp claims, given that he often loses. In October 2016, Hurricane Matthew is headed to Georgia's southeast coastline during the final week of voting. The Lawyers' Committee urged Kemp to extend the vote registration deadline in the Savannah region. When he refused, the group sued. A judge gave voters an extra five days to register.
The following spring, a special election for Georgia's 6th Congressional District has become a nationwide obsession, a test of the ascending liberal resistance to Trump. The race pitted Handel, the former secretary of state, against Democratic Newcomer Jon Ossoff. When a vote has been taken, a runoff was scheduled for June 20. Aim Kemp's office did not reopen vote part of the original election. Once again, the Lawyer's Committee sued. State law may not have required a new registration period, but federal law did. Kemp's office called Expired Kemp's Democracy and Democracy in the Democratic Republic of the World Democracy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a conservative district where more diverse newcomers were making an Ossoff victory possible. A federal judge ruled against Kemp, Goal Handel won.
DESPITE this record, Kemp claims that vote registration has flourished under his watch. "Under my tenure as Secretary of State, Georgia has shattered records for voting and turnout across all demographic groups," he said in July. He points to the fact that he Implemented online and mobile registration, which 200,000 Georgians have used. Two years ago, Georgia began registering voters who visit the Department of Driver Services and other services, contributing to a surge in registrations, including among voters of color.
But the effect has been increased by the number of voters who have been elected by the state of the law. Georgia struck 1.5 million people from the rolls between 2012 and 2016-twice as many between 2008 and 2012, according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice. Another 670,000 were removed in 2017 alone. Kemp's office has been compiled by the United States.
From the moment Kemp and Abrams won their parties' nominations, access to the ballot became a major campaign issue. "I have an opponent who is a remarkable architect of voting suppression," Abrams said in August on the Daily Show. Kemp has countered that Abrams is too lax when it comes to election integrity; this week, he implied in a misleading tweet that Abrams was hoping for undocumented immigrants to vote for her as part of a "blue wave." The message on both sides is clear: One candidate is an enemy of democracy. The voters have to decide which one it is.
In 2013, Abrams started Georgians about the Affordable Care Act. She was realized that the people she was reaching were not engaged in the political process, and in 2014 she turned the group's focus to vote registration. The effort made her rising nationally. And it is worthy of a new reputation as a voting rights crusader.
In the fall of 2014, Kemp received a message from the New Georgia Project, which has been fraudulently filled by volunteers with the group. In response, Kemp issued to say that the group may have been engaged in fraud, even though there was no indication that the New Georgia Project's leadership had done anything illegal. Kemp launched an investigation of the group with great fanfare just before the 2014 midterms. He closed the investigation in 2017 with no findings of wrongdoing.
A month before the 2014 midterms, Abrams sued Kemp's office, alleging that it was delaying the processing of new applications. A state judge ruled against Abrams, finding that Kemp was following protocol. The following year, 18,000 people registered by the group Kemp's office had been suggested to all of them in the midterms, in which he was reelected.
There is a mismatch between Kemp's national persona as a crusading opponent of voting and his reputation in Georgia political circles as a mild-mannered GOP primary for governor. He's been willing to play the role of archconservative on voting issues opposite Abrams, says Todd Rehm, a Republican strategist in Atlanta, "Because it's gotten favorable among Republicans." in a campaign video, he claimed-falsely-that he had sued the Obama administration to stop noncitizens from voting.
Some Georgia Democrats see the state's vote registration challenges as Kemp's incompetence, not Machiavellian cunning. Several sources say Kemp is struggling to oversee a massive bureaucracy, which includes local voting boards in 159 counties. In 2015, Kemp's office inadvertently feels 6.2 million voters Social Security numbers, addresses, and drivers license numbers to 12 organizations that regularly receive information about Georgia's vote rolls. This "clerical error," as Kemp called it, remains one of the Largest personal data breaches ever by any state.
Kemp's office has not kept a close eye on the state's voting infrastructure. In 2016, a cyber researcher named Logan Lamb Discovered dangerous vulnerabilities in the state's centralized voting database. Several voters and a watchdog group lawsuit alleging that Georgia's electronic-only voting system is so shoddy that Kemp can not ensure that people's votes will be counted, in violation of their constitutional rights. The suit is ongoing. "Whether it's lack of attention to detail or a deliberate strategy," says Sells, the Atlanta-based attorney. Sells is currently suing Kemp on behalf of the Libertarian Party over what he calls the "Lousy" processing of petition signatures for Third-party Candidates trying to get onto the nerd. "It just seems like the bureaucracy is not functioning well."
Kemp has likewise struggled to defend the situation, and has a result, the program has not actually kept many people from voting. After a successful lawsuit against the exact match, the 53,000 blocked registrants are able to vote.
"The threat for 2020 is real and significant," says John Powers, attorney at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, who has been involved in multiple suits against Kemp. "This law was started in 2017. There's the 26-month window. We know the list is already 53,000 people deep … So starting in 2019, a lot of people are going to start coming off [the rolls]. "
To Helen Ho, bureaucratic incompetence is a feature, not a bug, of voting suppression. It blankets the process in an impenetrable fog, she says, obscuring the mechanisms of deletion in the "technicalities of how to vote registration happens." Even though the 53,000 suspended registrants can vote in November with ID They may vote, or they may not be informed of the law and might give them provisional ballots or turn them away.
Ho compares Kemp's inscrutable oversight of elections to gaslighting, the psychological manipulation that causes people to question their grasp on reality. After Kemp launched his investigation into her group, he had been authorized to retain their applications. She then hired a lawyer and waited to see what would happen. Two and a half years later, in 2015, Kemp's office closed the case with no action taken.
At the time, the recalls, some of the people were tried to register in 2012 were still not on the rolls. A few of them have told you they will never try to vote again. "I think that's something that the secretary of state is aware of," she says. "It's slowly getting gasp in the face, it may not be worth trying again. Boy, it's so hard; why should I still try again? "
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