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Brian Kemp, Republican candidate for the governorship of Georgia, speaks at a rally at the Classic Center in Athens, Georgia on Tuesday. (Joshua L. Jones / AP)
Brian Kemp, Georgian Secretary of State and Republican Governor, has been sued, claiming that his duties undermined the voting rights of tens of thousands of Georgians belonging to a minority. This controversy led the campaign of his Democratic opponent to demand his resignation.
A coalition of civil rights groups sued Kemp on Thursday, because of the 2017 voting law that hampers the registration of more than 50,000 people, of whom about 80 percent are black, Latin American or Asian. in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Atlanta.
The "exact match" law requires election officials to report and suspend any application for voter registration if the identifying information does not exactly match the voters' information in the existing registrations, even because of a trait as small as the missing or transposed hyphen. Although voters are not prevented from voting, they must take additional steps to verify their identity.
Kemp, who is stuck in a close race against Democratic contender Stacey Abrams, is charged with enforcing the election law as a state secretary, which has led Democrats to accuse him of attempts suppressing the minority vote to gain an election advantage.
The Abrams campaign on Thursday called on Kemp to resign as secretary of state "so that Georgian voters can rest assured that their secretary of state is overseeing this election with competence and impartiality," said the spokeswoman. Abigail Collazo in a statement to CNN. Abrams, a former state representative and founder of a voting rights group, would become the first female black governor in the nation's history if she won.
Kemp has denied allegations of irregularities or violation of the right to vote, labeling the accusations of Abrams and Democrats on Twitter as misleading and fabricated. He stressed that Georgia had "breeze"His all-time record this year, with more than 6.8 million voters.
Secretary of State Candice Broce told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the claims made in the lawsuit were "completely false".
"The law of" exact correspondence "was adopted by the legislature and signed by the government. [Nathan] Treat. This reflects a Florida law recently upheld in federal court, "said Broce. "The 53,000 Georgians named in the complaint can vote in the November 6 elections. All statements to the contrary are motivated by political reasons and totally false. "
The lawsuit, filed Thursday by the NAACP's Georgia Conference of States, the New Georgia Project and Americans of Asian Origin – Atlanta et al., Follows an Associated Press article on Tuesday that revealed that 53,000 nominations were pending in Georgia because of the law of "exact match". While only 32% of the Georgian population is black, voters whose inscriptions were pending were 70% black, according to the AP report.
[Republicans may be about to steal an election in Georgia]
Under the law, if voters are flagged by typos or errors in their applications, they have 26 months to correct the information provided by local officials, otherwise their registration request could be canceled. If polling day falls within that 26-month period and their candidacy is still pending, those voters can still go to the polls and vote on an interim basis.
Nonetheless, defenders argue that Georgian law serves no legitimate purpose to the state and is contrary to federal voting laws. The lawyers argue that everything the law does imposes an additional burden on the majority minority voters.
"This is a constraint for our democratic system when less than a month before an election, which could give birth to the first female African-American governor in the history of our country, we see this type of scheme of suppression of voters tempted by a governance official produced an irremediable conflict of interest, "said NAACP President and CEO, Derrick Johnson, in a statement.
The suit makes Georgia the last battleground in terms of voting rights at a time when Republicans support stringent voter identification laws across the country, saying that they are needed to protect the integrity of elections.
Just this week, a North Dakota law requiring residents to provide proof of voting for a residential street address – even though many Native Americans do not have this address – was upheld when the Supreme Court refused to intervene. On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Arkansas upheld a law requiring voters to present an identity photo at the polls or to vote on a provisional basis.
In both cases, the plaintiffs argued that the laws would have a disproportionate impact on minority voters, as the lawyer explained in the lawsuit against Georgia.
On Twitter and in a statement to the Associated Press, Kemp retaliated to such allegations in part by blaming Abrams. he accused New Georgia Project, the advocacy group that she founded, submitted "sloppy" voter registration forms for a predominantly black group, bringing many voters into the polls. Limits of registration under the law on the exact match. (Abrams is no longer involved in the group.) Kemp said that New Georgia Project, which counts among the plaintiffs, "simulates indignation for gaining political gain".
"My opponent has created a" crisis "to rekindle its supporters and raise funds from the leftist radicals of the country," he said. said Thursday on Twitter, a link to a picture of an apparent Abrams campaign message accusing Kemp of suppressing the black vote.
This is not the first time that Kemp is being prosecuted for his "exact match" practices. Prior to the enactment of a law, Kemp's office applied an exact administrative matching rule that canceled voter registration applications if errors or typing errors in their applications were not corrected within 40 days. According to the prosecution, almost 35,000 applications were canceled between 2013 and 2015 alone, and 76% of these people were minorities.
Kemp reached an agreement with civil rights groups in 2016, which dropped the 40-day deadline. The following year, legislators put Kemp's policy in the law by adding the 26-month delay.
The latest Atlanta Journal-Constitution / Channel 2 Action News poll indicates that Kemp is leading Abrams by less than two percentage points.
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