Voting rights activists aren’t sitting idly by as Georgia Secretary of State and Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp tries to steal next month’s election for governor.
Instead, they are fighting back with plans to sue Kemp just weeks before voters head to the polls to cast their ballot in the historic governor’s race.
According to Politico, “The Georgia NAACP is preparing to sue Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the Republican nominee for governor, in response to a report that Kemp’s office has put on hold tens of thousands of voter registration applications, most of them from African-Americans, ahead of the election.”
If the lawsuit is successful, those applications would be allowed to move forward for the upcoming election, despite the fact that registration closed on Tuesday.
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More from the report:
The injunction would seek to reopen voter registration in Georgia to ensure that 53,000 registrants on hold in Kemp’s office — and possibly others affected by an outage of the Georgia Department of Driver Services and the state’s voter registration website — would be allowed to register for the upcoming election.
The move was confirmed by to two people with knowledge of the NAACP of Georgia’s plans. The last day to register to vote was Tuesday.
The strict policies enforced by Kemp’s office for voter registration and verification have been under scrutiny in his campaign against Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams, who once ran a nonprofit focused on registering new voters.
The Politico report follows calls from Abrams on Thursday for Kemp to resign for “maliciously wielding the power of his office to suppress the vote for political gain and silence the voices of thousands of eligible voters.”
Republicans can’t win, so they have to change the rules
Brian Kemp, who has been using Trump’s sleazy, racist playbook to appeal to voters in Georgia, is running against Stacey Abrams, who would be the first African-American women to be elected as a state’s governor.
Georgia Republicans know that in order to win in an increasingly diverse electorate, they can’t play by the rules. Instead, they have to cut off African American voter in the state, which is 32 percent black.
Not only should Brian Kemp resign as Georgia’s Secretary of State, but the thousands of predominantly African-American voters currently in limbo should have their voter registration applications processed immediately.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
