In less than one month, Georgia voters will head to the polls and cast their ballot in what will be one of the country’s most consequential race for governor. Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former state representative, could become the first black woman governor in American history, bringing with her a progressive agenda that pushes back against the Trump administration’s draconian policies. Or, the race could go to Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Trump-endorsed Republican. Abrams and Kemp are neck-and-neck in the polls.
But Kemp has an advantage: As Georgia’s former Chief Election Officer, he designed prohibitive voting rights policies that have since been codified into law. Voting rights groups allege that his office purged 700,000 legitimate voters, disproportionately people of color, in the past two years, and on Tuesday, the AP reported that more than 53,000 voter registration applications are on hold in Kemp’s office and that “many people on that list—which is predominantly black, according to an analysis by The Associated Press—may not even know their voter registration has been held up.”
To learn more about what’s going on and what voters can do before the general election, Jezebel spoke to Allison Riggs, senior voting rights attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, about Kemp’s troubling voter rights policies that created Georgia’s registration backlog.
JEZEBEL: Why does this voting backlog exist, and what does it mean for voters?
ALLISON RIGGS: Because Kemp worked as the state’s chief election officer and is now running for governor, some of the decisions he made in that role are becoming the subject of the gubernatorial debate. Two things that he’s done that are problematic are: First, it wasn’t law, but it was a protocol or policy that he required an “exact match” between voter registrants’ applications—like the name, the spelling of the name, the address, and the last four of the social and the date of birth and the driver’s license number—there was no room for a mistake or a misreading. This was something that legal groups challenged in 2016 and they settled the case in 2017. After they settled the case, the Georgia legislature codified in law the practice that Kemp had been using just as an administrative protocol, which is mind-boggling. That issue is back up for debate. The question is: Is this good policy?
There’s no reason a voter should only have a certain number of days to correct an issue that they may not even know about.
The protocol, which is now essentially the same thing as the law, was shown to disproportionately impact voters of color. It leaves no room for human error and it leaves insufficient room for correcting mistakes at a later date. It’s unnecessarily suppressive. I mean, there’s no reason that a voter should only have a certain number of days to correct an issue that they may not even know about.
I think the reason this is up for debate is, the other candidate, [Stacey] Abrams, would have a more forgiving approach to processing voter registrations and I think that it’s a real important policy question and distinction between the two, and I think Georgia’s exact match requirement is problematic under the National Voter Registration Act.
The other thing that’s always concerning is how a state conducts what it calls its voter list maintenance, and Ms. Abrams has suggested that Mr. Kemp has overseen an overly aggressive list maintenance process and overly purged inactive voters. There’s a real difference under federal law between what federal law allows and what federal law requires. There’s a Supreme Court case this term, the Husted case, that suggested that federal law may allow states to purge inactive voters after a certain period of time. But just because it allows it, doesn’t mean states should do it, or it’s a good idea.
There’s no data to suggest that there’s any sort of significant voter fraud problem. The reason these voters are getting purged is because they’re inactive, so no one’s voting in their name. They’re inactive. That’s why they’re getting purged. So it’s sort of circular logic to say that we need to purge voters because they are inactive because of the threat of voter fraud—that someone would go and pretend to be that person and vote in their name—because that’s just not happening. It’s another example of where, in making policy decisions, Mr. Kemp could have erred on the side of voters and could have erred on the side of ensuring eligible voters didn’t get their registrations rejected or their registrations purged, and he chose a different route. And I don’t know that there will necessarily be any legal consequences at this point on the purging piece, but I think there probably will be legal consequences on the “exact match” piece, and both are bad policy and bad for democracy.