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CLAIM
In October 2018, Georgian Secretary of State Brian Kemp had suspended 53,000 applications for voter registration, of which nearly 70% had been submitted by African Americans.
EVALUATION
WHAT IS TRUE
The office of the Georgian State Secretary, Brian Kemp, has put on hold 53,000 applications for registration on electoral lists, of which 70% were submitted by black voters.
Which is wrong
The 53,000 voters whose entries are pending can still vote on polling day. and there is significant disagreement about the causes and motivations of pending registrations.
ORIGIN
As the November 2018 elections drew closer, allegations of voter repression multiplied, including in Indiana, North Dakota, and Georgia – the last of those states in which Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp was accused of using his office to suppress voters. during the race for governorship against the Democratic candidate, the former state representative Stacey Abrams.
On October 9, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the election records showed that Kemp's office had suspended applications for 53,000 potential voters, nearly 70 percent of whom were African-Americans:
Two main policies overseen by Kemp have given rise to criticism and court challenges: the process of verifying the exact adequacy in Georgia and the massive cancellation of inactive registrations.
According to documents obtained from Kemp's office through a request for public registers, [Marsha] Appling-Nunez's application – like many of the 53,000 pending registrations with Kemp's office – was reported because it went against the process of verifying the "exact match" of the state.
Under the policy, voter application information must exactly match the information stored in the Georgia Department of Driver Services or Social Security Administration records. Election officers may suspend unmatched applications. An application may be suspended due to an entry error or a hyphen in a last name, for example …
AP also said that Kemp's office has removed many registered voters from the voters list since taking office as state secretary in 2010:
Through a process that Kemp calls the maintenance of voter lists and his opponents call the purges, the Kemp office has canceled more than 1.4 million registrations since 2012. Nearly 670,000 registrations were canceled in 2017 only.
Given that African-American voters in Georgia historically favor Democratic candidates and that the opponent of Kemp's governor, Stacey Abrams is herself African-American, the existence of these pending inscriptions has given rise allegations that Kemp abused his office's powers to crack down on probable votes. opponent.
In the same October 10 issue, Occupy Democratic Democrats, on the Facebook page, called Kemp a "cowardly cheater" and said his office "deliberately tried to suppress the vote in his favor":
The left-wing Facebook page, The Other, 98% posted a similar message on Oct. 11, claiming that Kemp himself had created the "exact match" rule that had resulted in the suspension of 53,000 requests for copyright clearance. recording:
In response to a series of questions from us, a spokesman for the Kemp Governor's campaign confirmed that the Secretary of State's office had actually placed 53,000 applications for registration pending validation and that about 70 % of them were African American.
However, the Kemp campaign blamed looming registrations, and the disproportionate prevalence of African-American voters, at the New Georgia Project, an organization founded by Abrams itself in 2014, which aims to register voters from ethnic minorities. and race in the state of Georgia. :
Stacey Abrams – through the New Georgia Project – created this "problem" by submitting tens and thousands of problematic registration forms, as she had done in 2014. She now uses the media to generate buzz for his campaign and finally convince voters on polling day.
The Kemp campaign has taught us that the New Georgia Project refuses to use online registration, but insists on paper forms. According to the campaign, the 53,000 pending registrations were all submitted with the help of the New Georgia Project, and they all violated the "exact match" rule. (We asked the New Georgia Project and the Abrams campaign to respond to these and other complaints, but we received no response.)
Kemp spokesman pointed out that the potential 53,000 potential voters whose applications were pending could still show up at a polling station on polling day and vote as usual:
If you are on the waiting list, you are literally voting in the same way as everyone else in Georgia who is not on the waiting list. In Georgia, you present your photo ID at the polling station. It is scanned. If you are on the waiting list, this action allows you to switch from pending to active. If you are already active, it reaffirms that you are active.
The American Civil Liberties Union, a powerful opponent of the "match exact" rule, corroborated this point by writing in a press release that:
Although the ACLU of Georgia strongly opposes the discriminatory law on exact matching adopted by Georgian politicians, we must ensure that all registered voters vote. We reiterate that all electors who have pending applications can still vote regularly by presenting a photo ID.
Kemp's spokesman also told us that the campaign did not contest Associated Press's record cancellation figures, acknowledging that the Kemp office had overseen 1.4 million registration cancellations since 2012, of which nearly 670,000 in 2017.
However, the campaign showed that some of these cancellations were in fact cases in which voters had moved from one county to another in the state of Georgia. As a result, registrations were canceled (and counted as canceled) in one county, but voters registered elsewhere and thus remained registered to vote in Georgia.
Although the campaign did not provide full figures on Kemp's overall mandate as Secretary of State since 2010, she gave the example of 2016, when 276,461 of the 772,050 registrations canceled (36%) involved voters moving into the state of Georgia, permanently stricken from the voters lists.
Kemp's spokesman also argued that the Secretary of State's office is legally required to "maintain" the voters lists:
In accordance with federal and state laws, Georgia regularly manages the voters lists to ensure the integrity of the elections. These laws were enacted by the Democrats many years ago, previously approved by the federal Department of Justice and used by Democratic and Republican state secretaries to maintain accurate roles.
Thus, the "Occupy Democrats" and "Other 98%" members accurately present the basic facts: Kemp's office suspended 53,000 applications for registration, of which approximately 70% were submitted by African-American voters. However, there is significant disagreement about the causes and motivations of the suspension of registrations.
Abrams and others claimed that the "exact match" policy was deliberately aimed at voters of ethnic and black minorities as part of a Republican effort to crack down on the Democratic vote in Georgia, a particularly poignant issue in the 2018 governorship race, as candidates are Kemp – who oversees the implementation of the policy as Secretary of State – and Abrams – who, if elected, would mark the 39 history as the first black woman to become governor of the state in the history of the United States.
The Kemp campaign also claims that the state secretary is simply applying Georgian law by enforcing the policy, and that the racial disparity between the 53,000 pending registration requests is not the result of racial discrimination or a partisan abuse of power, but the product of incomplete registrations carried out by an organization founded by Abrams as part of an "advertising stunt" aimed at arousing Indignation and increase the participation of Democratic voters.
"Exact match"
At the heart of this case lies the "exact match" rule, which has provoked lawsuits and sparked controversy in Georgia over the past eight years.
After taking office in 2010, Kemp promulgated a policy under which the county registrar (responsible for voter registration in their county) must enter the information from the voter registration forms into a database. Online at the statewide and refer to this information with records kept by the state department. drivers and social security.
If no exact match is found in existing databases, the registration is placed in a "pending" status for 26 months, and the voter in question is informed and asked to correct the discrepancies. If the elector takes no action within 26 months, the application is canceled and the declarant must start again. (Prior to 2017, this grace period was significantly reduced, ie 40 days.)
In this system, "exact match" actually means an exact match, and registrations have been suspended due to relatively minor discrepancies between registration applications and state registrations, including differences related to hyphens and apostrophes. In addition, these discrepancies may not be the result of voters' mistakes, but rather of material errors introduced by county office staff when transferring information from paper forms to the electronic database.
In 2017, the exact match policy was (with some minor changes) codified in the law when the General Assembly of Georgia passed HB 268. On October 11, 2018, several civil rights and anti-corruption groups defended the law. Registration of voters, including the New Georgia Project, filed a lawsuit against Kemp, asking the North District Court of Georgia to declare that HB 268 and the exact matching policy violated the Human Rights Act. vote, the National Voters Registration Act and the 1st and 14th Amendments to the US Constitution.
Among the other demands, voter groups argued that the policy imposed an unfair burden on voters and that it had a disproportionately negative effect on black voters and ethnic minority voters. The lawsuit revealed that between 2013 and 2015, the exact match policy resulted in the cancellation of 34,874 claims (which means that potential voters have not taken any action regarding their pending registrations ) and that 76.3% of the plaintiffs in these cases were African American, Latino or American. Asian American.
According to the lawsuit, as of July 4, 2018, approximately 51% of the 51,111 pending registrations belonged to African American, Latino or Asian American voters.
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