Brian Kemp (1963- ) is one of the foremost voter suppressors in the US. In the 2018 midterm elections he is running as a Trump Republican for governor of Georgia against Democrat Stacey Abrams. If Abrams wins she will become the first Black woman ever to become a state governor in the US – and of a red state at that.
Too close to call: With the election just two weeks away, the race is too close to call. In 2016 Trump won Georgia by 5 points – low for a red state.
The battle: The race for governor is merely the latest in a long-running battle between Kemp and Abrams to change the face of Georgia politics by changing who shows up to vote.
Abrams, a state senator, is the founder of the New Georgia Project, which has been working to register Georgia’s 700,000 unregistered Black voters.
Kemp is the secretary of state of Georgia, which puts him in charge of elections – even the one he is running in! He has been busily blocking Blacks from voting:
- From 2013 to 2016 he closed 214 polling places in 53 counties, a fourth of all polling places closed nationwide.
- From 2012 to 2016 he purged 1.5 million people from the voter rolls – twice as many as during the same period before 2012. In 2017 he purged 670,000 more.
- In 2018 he is holding up 53,000 registrations because they do not exactly match the voters’ driver licences, often because of a missing hyphen or accent.
All of that sounds race-neutral and it is meant to. But in practice Blacks and other people of colour are affected more than Whites. Those 53,000 registrations, for example, “just happen to be” 70% Black – in a state that is 32% Black. Oops! Those closed polling places? Mostly in Blacker counties. The purged registrations? Many were people who changed address, something poor Blacks (and younger people) do more often than middle-class Whites.
All this from a man who talks of “outside agitators” like it was still Jim Crow times.
In 2014 Kemp said:
“Democrats are working hard, … you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines, if they can do that, they can win these elections in November.”
and then two months later he opened a “criminal investigation” into the New Georgia Project itself, accusing it of voter fraud. He found none, but was able to keep it under a cloud of bad press.
In 2012 he did the same to the Asian American Legal Advocacy Center (AALAC) when they asked Kemp why people they registered to vote were not on the voter rolls.
Kemp says he is merely trying to fight voter fraud, yet strangely:
- There is no paper trail to double-check the computers that run the elections. A disaster waiting to happen.
- When Russians hacked Georgia’s election software, Kemp refused help from Washington.
Stranger still, right before the 2016 election Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, visited Kennesaw State, a small university in Georgia. It “just happens to be” where all the computers that run Georgia’s elections are kept.
– Abagond, 2018.
Update (October 30th): Jimmy Carter, the former US president and governor of Georgia, is asking Kemp to step down as secretary of state, that he should not be overseeing his own election, especially not in a state like Georgia:
“In Georgia’s upcoming gubernatorial election, popular confidence is threatened not only by the undeniable racial discrimination of the past and the serious questions that the federal courts have raised about the security of Georgia’s voting machines, but also because you are now overseeing the election in which you are a candidate.”
More at NPR.
See also:
- Voting Rights Act of 1965 – gutted in 2013.
- voter suppression
- Southern Strategy – why most Whites vote Republican and most Blacks vote Democrat
- The midterms
- Russiagate update
- Russian hackers
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Abagond 