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ATLANTA (AP) – Marsha Appling-Nunez was showing college students that she was teaching them to check online if they had registered to vote when she made a troubling discovery. Despite her status as an active Georgian voter who voted in the last election, she was no longer registered.
"I was a little shocked," said Appling-Nunez, who moved from one suburb of Atlanta to another in May and thought he had managed to change his address on the voters list.
"I have always voted. I try to miss no election, including local, "said Appling-Nunez.
She tried to re-register, but about a month away from the November election that will decide a governor's race and US House competitions, Appling-Nunez's candidacy is one of 53,000 pending applications from the office. Secretary of State Brian Kemp. And unlike Appling-Nunez, many people on this list – which is mostly black, according to an analysis by the Associated Press – may not even know that their registration has been delayed.
On Tuesday, Georgia has until the deadline to register and be able to vote in November general elections.
Kemp, also a Republican candidate for governorship, is responsible for elections and voter registration in Georgia.
His Democratic opponent, former state representative, Stacey Abrams, and advocacy groups accuse Kemp of systematically using his office to suppress the votes and tilt the elections, and that his policy disproportionately affects black and minority voters.
Kemp denies it vehemently.
But thanks to a process by which Kemp calls for the maintenance of voter lists and opponents purges, the Kemp office has canceled more than 1.4 million registrations since 2012. Nearly 670,000 registrations were canceled in 2017 only.
In a recent television appearance on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah", Abrams called Kemp "a remarkable architect of electoral repression." It's become a rallying cry for Democrats in the governor's race. .
Kemp, meanwhile, says that Abrams and Allied Liberal activists are refuting his past as a defender of elections in Georgia against electoral fraud.
Campaign spokesman Ryan Mahoney said in a statement that, thanks to Kemp, "it has never been easier to vote in our state" and mentioned a new system of registration. online voters and a student engagement program set up under his mandate.
"Kemp is fighting to protect the integrity of our elections and ensure that only legal citizens can vote," Mahoney said.
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 records, the Appling-Nunez application – like many of the 53,000 pending Kemp office records – was reported because it was going to against the process of checking the "exact match".
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.
Appling-Nunez says she has never seen a notice from Kemp's office indicating a problem with her candidacy.
An analysis of the documents obtained by The Associated Press reveals a racial disparity in the process. According to the US census, the population of Georgia is black at about 32%, but the list of voters waiting at the Kemp office is black at nearly 70%.
The Kemp office blamed the disparity on the New Georgia Project, a voter registration group founded by Abrams in 2013.
Kemp accuses the organization of being unscrupulous in registering voters and claims to have submitted inadequate forms for a black majority of candidates. His office stated that the New Georgia project used mainly paper forms and "did not properly train solicitors to ensure the readability of complete forms …".
His office said that "the law applies the same way for all demographics," but these figures were skewed by "the increased use of a method of registration by a particular demographic group ".
Voters whose applications are blocked with "pending" status have 26 months to resolve any issues before their applications are canceled and can still vote on an interim basis.
But critics say the system has a high rate of error and denounce the racial disparity it produces.
"We have shown that this process disproportionately prevents minority candidates from appearing on the electoral lists," said Julie Houk, special advocate of the Washington-based Committee of Lawyers for Civil Rights under the law. An interview. Keeping this in mind, she described as "staggering" the fact that Georgian lawmakers incorporated it into state law in 2017.
Houk's group wrote to Kemp in July to threaten legal action if the "exact match" was not completed.
Kemp's aggressive stance on the voters list also sparked the threat of prosecution.
His office said they were content to "regularly manage the voters lists to ensure electoral integrity," as required by federal laws and state laws. "All the relevant records were inactive because of the returned mail, the change of national address and the maintenance procedures of the contactless list," he said.
Kemp dismissed and ignored the legal threat of the "exact match" policy, saying that as election day approaches, "it is high time for Liberal activist groups to launch another frivolous lawsuit."
His office said that since January 2014, election officials had processed more than 6.4 million registrations and that less than 1% were still waiting.
The state's representative, Barry Fleming, author of the state law allowing "exact correspondence," said in a statement that he was authorized under federal law and that courts had enforced a similar law in Florida.
But Appling-Nunez said it was important to count all Georgian votes, including his own, in November.
"If you do not like what's going on, you have to either vote to change it, or go there and change it yourself," she said. "A political life is not for me, so I have to support those who are fighting well."
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