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ATLANTA – Following the announcement of the suspension of 53,000 voter registration requests in Georgia, Reverend Ezekiel Holley went directly to his local polling station, in Terrell County, search for the names of the voters concerned.
He has since gone through the list, helping them to qualify to vote. "If Stacey Abrams loses this election, it's because she will steal it," said Holley, president of the NAACP in his riding – and suspicious of registration problems because of the long tradition of electoral repression by the state.
In the last few weeks of the campaign, the controversial dispute between Democrats Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp over the Georgian governor has been mired in a stirring battle over the right to vote. Thousands of Georgians have asked for help to prepare their ballots polling places as concern rises as to whether each vote counts
The struggle does not only affect the secular tensions of the South on race and ballot boxes, it is also personal for both candidates. A former legislator and long-time voting rights activist, she is seeking to become the first black governor in the country. He is a white secretary of state for elections in Georgia and a conservative advocate of strict voting laws.
In a state that has not elected a Democratic governor for 20 years and who elected Donald Trump by five points in 2016, this contest, referred to as "toss-up" by the aggregator of RealClearPolitics polls, was about to test how much the anti – treadwave could achieve. Today, the campaign's attention to the right to vote has turned it into a test of a different kind – centered on race, identity politics, and the deep division between these topics in the American electorate. .
Two controversies have inflamed an already acrimonious election: the suspension of thousands of applications for registration, most of them for people of color or immigrants, under a new state law requiring an exact match between the application and the records of the driver or social security; and the rejection of hundreds of postal ballots in a heavily minority county in the suburbs of Georgia.
One of the county counters of envelopes gives Georgian voters to post their ballots by mail. (Amy Gardner / The Washington Post)
"We have an opponent in this race who tried to steal the vote from 53,000 Georgians," exclaimed this week in front of an enthusiastic crowd of about 200 people in a gymnasium at the Grovetown Community Center. , a small town west of Augusta.
"Abrams wants illegal immigrants to choose our next governor," Kemp said. in a tweet. "She voted against the citizenship verification laws, filed a lawsuit to allow" non-citizens "to vote, and even admitted to supporters that her" blue wave "includes" undocumented " our state. "
There are nearly 7 million registered voters in Georgia – a record for the state.
The tragedy caught the attention of those voters, who send ballots by mail and line up at the earliest to vote – and who are also divided on what to do about controversy over the vote as on the subject to support. On Thursday, in – person advance voting as well as the mail ballot were on track to overtake that of the 2016 presidential election in at least two large counties close to Atlanta – Cobb and Gwinnett.
Some voters said they did not accept Abrams' accusations of electoral repression and welcomed laws that prevent electoral fraud.
People queued Thursday for two hours to vote early at the Cobb County Government Center in Marietta, Georgia. (Jessica Mcgowan / Getty Images)
"Look at this line," said Chet Austin, a retired white poultry processor, standing on the parking lot of Cobb County's advance polling site and pointing to a crowd of voters waiting, many of whom were African-American. US. "I do not see how she could say that. They have the same right to vote as me.
On the other side of the dividing line: "He should resign," said Kelly Napper, 34, a black shop manager in Cobb County, echoing other Kemp critics who have asserted that it was impossible to trust him to hold an honest election. "The fact that Kemp has access to the ballots – that does not seem right."
A lot of misinformation flies. Kemp has championed the new stringent "exact match" policy that has led to many pending registration requests. But it is the local election officials, not the secretary of state, who accept or refuse the ballots and the registration applications – and their interpretations of the law have varied from state to state. l & # 39; other.
While Abrams accused Kemp of preventing 53,000 Georgians from voting, Kemp said anyone whose registration had been suspended could vote at the polls on November 6, provided they presented the documents. appropriate identity. However, there is some concern that the "exact match" law will be interpreted to mean that only a poll clerk with the rank of deputy clerk or the highest rank will have the power to give power to a suspended elector to vote. It remains to be seen how this will take place on election day.
Kemp, for his part, seizes controversy to accuse Abrams of encouraging non-citizens to vote. He drew attention to remarks made by Abrams on Oct. 9 during an appearance in Atlanta with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Abrams had stated that this year's "blue wave" would include a diverse group, including women, gays and men. "Documented and undocumented". Abrams later clarified that she had never encouraged anyone to vote illegally.
"I do not know what's worse: working actively to undermine the rule of law by allowing illegal immigrants to vote or lie to hard-working Georgians," Kemp tweeted. "Anyway, Stacey Abrams is too extreme for Georgia."
Kemp also accused the New Georgia Project, a group founded by Abrams of registering more African-Americans to vote, for most of the suspended applications. He stated that many of the requests made by the group were "sloppy". Kemp launched an investigation into the efforts made in 2014, but no wrongdoing was found.
Kemp's claim that Abrams filed a lawsuit to allow non-citizens to vote was not fair,. New Georgia Project was on trial for election issues last week – but Abrams is no longer affiliated with the organization and the trial does not call non-citizens to vote.
There is no evidence of large-scale electoral fraud in Georgia or elsewhere in the country.
Both sides sound the alarm on electoral issues to voters. Republicans hold phone banks and go door-to-door across the state almost daily, and the country's Democratic Party runs a hotline for voters who received more than 2,000 calls last week. . Voting activists are deployed even in smaller rural counties to help voters correct their registrations or manage a rejected postal ballot.
Concerns about voter suppression have been particularly acute in a few places.
In Gwinnett County – a suburb of Atlanta where about half of the population is African American, Hispanic, or African American – hundreds of ballot papers have been rejected because of filling errors envelope.
Rachel Tiven, a New York lawyer who volunteers with the Democratic Party Hotline, compared the legal-covered envelope with the Jim Crow literacy tests, which allowed local election officials to work. to prevent African Americans from voting if they could not pass a written test. .
"If I write the wrong date and throw the ballot, it's a literacy test," she said.
In Jefferson County, county officials have barred a voter advocacy group from taking a group of elderly voters from a county-run seniors' center to the polls on Monday. In a statement, officials said that political activity is not allowed on county property during office hours.
But LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, a non-partisan organization, called the action a "subtle" form of electoral repression. "Every time you prevent someone from voting, it's the crackdown on voters," she said.
At least four lawsuits have been filed by civil rights organizations. The Kemp accused of illegally serving hundreds of thousands of voters from the voters lists. Others dispute the law of "exact match" and the strict interpretation of the language of the voting envelope in Gwinnett County.
Another case concerns the protection of naturalized citizens, some of whom are wrongly identified as ineligible.
Democrats have also criticized Kemp this week for a video of his office in which child actors routinely educate voters about early voting. In this document, a white boy shows his identity and is allowed to vote, while an African-American girl is required to vote provisionally because she does not have her identity.
The video was removed this week. Kemp spokeswoman Candice Broce said the diversity of the players was meant to encourage participation, not the other way around. She stated that the video had been removed not because of criticism but because it was no longer accurate about the availability of Spanish ballots. Since the video was produced for the first time in 2016, the federal government has asked Gwinnett County to offer votes in both Spanish and English.
In the run-up to the elections, the campaigns work furiously, one voter at a time, to bring their supporters to the polls. Cyndy Whitney, a volunteer epidemiologist responding to Thursday's calls, went on the phone with the help of a correspondent who wanted to know how to vote now that her postal ballot had been cast: "We recommend you go to the polls and vote early, said Whitney.
Asking for another ballot and completing another form, she added, would create too much risk of further error, or even rejection, within three weeks of the election.
Ross Blackstone, 39, a white man, said he did not understand what he was getting after voting for a Republican ticket in Cobb County on Thursday.
"It's the easiest thing in the world," Blackstone said. "I moved out last week. I did not know what to do. They are busy in two minutes.
Yet Blackstone also struggled with the vote – despite, he noted, the fact that he holds a degree in literature. "I made a mistake, I had to fix it and redo it."
Gardner and Williams have both been reported in Atanta, Augusta and Grovetown. Williams also reported from Terrell County.
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