Voting Rights Roundup: Brian Kemp's Georgia governor win tainted by his own GOP voter suppression
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Leading Off ● Georgia: On Friday, Democrat Stacey Abrams ended her campaign for governor against Republican Brian Kemp, yet she refused to concede and argued his voter suppression efforts had created insurmountable obstacles for her campaign. As ThinkProgrVoting Rights Roundup: Brian Kemp's Georgia governor win tainted by his own GOP voter suppression
Leading Off ● Georgia: On Friday, Democrat Stacey Abrams ended her campaign for governor against Republican Brian Kemp, yet she refused to concede and argued his voter suppression efforts had created insurmountable obstacles for her campaign. As ThinkProgress legal expert Ian Millhiser succinctly noted, «There’s no way to know if the result would have been different if [Kemp] didn’t do everything in his power to steal this election, but he did everything in his power to steal this election.» Consequently, his victory should rightly be viewed as lacking the legitimacy of a free and fair election. Campaign Action Kemp ran a reactionary campaign of voter suppression and intimidation that harkened back to the dark days of Jim Crow. As secretary of state, he suspended and purged countless voter registrations, removed hundreds of polling places to make voting less convenient for those with limited transportation options, had his allies on local elections boards fail to provide adequate resources to handle high turnout, exposed Georgia's election systems to massive security vulnerabilities, and baselessly claimed Democrats had committed cyber crimes to cover up his own security failures. Kemp fought Abrams' efforts to have many rejected absentee ballots counted, a disproportionate number of which had arbitrary or trivial discrepancies like missing birth years and were from counties where Abrams is leading Kemp. Abrams won a few voting rights victories after courts forced counties to count some absentee ballots even if the voter's birth date was incorrect or missing, and another court ordered Georgia officials to take additional steps to count up to 27,000 of the unusually high number of provisional ballots, but it simply wasn't enough. Unfortunately for Abrams, the results as of Friday still had Kemp at 50.2 percent of the vote, just about 18,000 votes above the absolute majority needed to avoid a Dec. 4 runoff. This came after many voters faced significant hurdles cast a ballot—indeed, in the Democratic stronghold of metropolitan Atlanta, hundreds of voting machines sat unused in warehouses as voters waited for hours in some precincts to cast their ballots. This was both the result of election administrators' decisions and Kemp's choice to successfully fight an ongoing lawsuit to force Georgia to switch to paper ballots. Consequently, the bar was likely very high for Abrams to succeed if she had attempted a to have the election voided despite its glaring flaws. Abrams' campaign chairwoman acknowledged that the campaign didn't have a list of 18,000 disenfranchised voters and would have had to present the testimony of hundreds or thousands who were unable to vote and use statistical analysis to argue the effect was widespread enough to taint the outcome. Abrams announced she will file a federal lawsuit over Georgia Republicans' «gross mismanagement» of the election, but the damage to American democracy has already been done. Furthermore, the ultra-partisan Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme almost certainly wouldn't do anything to overturn Kemp's tainted election victory. And as governor, Kemp will have the power to sign new suppressive voting measures and ensure Republicans keep gerrymandering after the 2020 census, locking in a vicious cycle that further undermines any semblance of free and fair elections. Read more