Today, We Should Be Celebrating Stacy Abrams Becoming the 1st Black Female Governor of Any U.S. State, However…
Intense voter suppression and corruption by the Republican in this race, who just so happens to be the AG of the State of GA (and thus in charge of some aspects of the election), has muddled and possibly stolen the election. Here’s more about this Republican bullshittery…
Georgia’s Kemp Purged 340,134 Voters, Falsely Asserting They Had Moved
Last year, Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state canceled the registrations of over half a million Georgians because they left the state or moved to another county. Except they didn’t. The nation’s top experts in address location reviewed Kemp’s list of purged voters — and returned the names and addresses of 340,134 who never moved at all.
John Lenser, CEO of CohereOne of San Rafael, California, led the team analyzing the purge list. He concluded, “340,000 of those voters remained at their original address. They should have never been removed from the voter registration rolls…”
Read more: https://truthout.org/articles/georgias-kemp-purged-340134-voters-falsely-asserting-they-had-moved/
Despite Brian Kemp’s Promises, Some of the Voters He Suspended Say They’re Being Turned Away at the Polls
Kemp promised these voters could cast a regular ballot, but hundreds of them have reported being denied a ballot.
Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state and Republican candidate for governor, has implemented voter registration policies that caused the state to suspend 53,000 registration applications since last summer. Kemp’s office has insisted that people who submitted those applications will still be able to vote as normal, but on Tuesday, a group monitoring election irregularities has received hundreds of reports from voters in Georgia who say their registrations were suspended and they are being turned away from the polls.
When news of the suspended registrations broke last month, Kemp’s office tried to tamp down the outrage by pointing out that these voters could still cast regular ballots under Georgia law. His spokeswoman expressed indignation that the rejected applications—70 percent of which belonged to African Americans, even though Georgia is just 32 percent black—were being cited as evidence of voter suppression. But Kemp’s office may have failed to adequately educate county election officials about the issue, resulting in some voters being disenfranchised on Election Day. This kind of confusion is exactly what voting rights advocates warned about…
Read more: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/11/brian-kemp-blocked-53000-voter-registrations-some-of-those-people-say-theyre-being-turned-away-at-the-polls/
The GOP’s Sneakiest Voter Suppression Tactic
Polling places have been quietly shuttered across the country, in a transparent bid to make it tougher for minorities and the poor to vote.
How about Georgia, where Democrat Stacey Abrams is trying to ride an emerging Democratic majority to victory against Kemp and hasten the end of two decades of white Republican dominance? Surprise, surprise: More than 200 polls have closed since the Roberts Court gave the state a green light to discriminate. And as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed this summer (Kemp’s secretary of state office conveniently keeps no track of the closures), they correlate in near-perfect synchronicity with concentrations of high poverty rates across the state—the places where fewer people have cars to drive to the polls, where public transportation is often non-existent, and where African Americans vote Democratic.
The closures in Georgia could, just as surely as Kemp’s aggressive purges of registered black voters from the rolls, determine the outcome in his dead-heat race with Abrams. This is just pure coincidence, both the secretary of state and local elections officials insist—simply a matter of local Republicans making elections more “cost-efficient” by “consolidating” polling places in more “convenient” white neighborhoods…
Read more: https://newrepublic.com/article/151966/gops-sneakiest-voter-suppression-tactic
Long lines, voting issues reported at several polling places in metro Atlanta
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/long-lines-voting-issues-reported-at-polling-places-across-metro-atlanta/867629575
Georgia Voting Machine Issues Heighten Scrutiny on Brian Kemp
https://www.wired.com/story/georgia-voting-machine-issues-heighten-scrutiny-brian-kemp/
When the electronic voting machines in our Atlanta suburb didn’t work, we weren’t exactly surprised.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/11/07/we-waited-almost-hours-vote-my-georgia-precinct-how-convenient-kemp/