Minority voters purged from rolls
ATLANTA — Marsha Appling-Nunez was showing the college students she teaches how to check online if they’re registered to vote when she made a troubling discovery. Despite being an active Georgia voter who had cast ballots in recent elections, she was no longer registered.
“I was kind of shocked,” said ApplingNunez, who moved from one Atlanta suburb to another in May and believed she had successfully changed her address on the voter rolls.
She tried re-registering, but with about one month left before a November election that will decide a governor’s race and some competitive U.S. House races, Appling-Nunez’s application is one of over 53,000 sitting on hold with Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office. And unlike ApplingNunez, 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.
Kemp, who’s also the Republican candidate for governor, is in charge of elections and voter registration in Georgia.
His Democratic opponent, former state Rep. Stacey Abrams, and voting rights advocacy groups charge that Kemp is systematically using his office to suppress votes and tilt the election, and that his policies disproportionately affect black and minority voters.
Kemp denies it vehemently.
But through a process that Kemp calls voter roll maintenance and his opponents call voter roll purges, Kemp’s office has canceled over 1.4 million voter registrations since 2012. Nearly 670,000 registrations were canceled in 2017 alone.
In a recent television appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” Abrams called Kemp “a remarkable architect of voter suppression.” That’s become a rallying cry for Democrats in the governor’s race, which recent public polling shows in a statistical dead heat.
Kemp, meanwhile, says Abrams and allied liberal activists are twisting his record of guarding Georgia elections against voter fraud.
His campaign spokesman Ryan Mahoney said in a statement that because of Kemp, “it has never been easier to vote in our state” and pointed to a new online voter registration system and a student engagement program implemented under his tenure.
An analysis of the records obtained by The Associated Press reveals racial disparity in the process. Georgia’s population is approximately 32 percent black, according to the U.S. Census, but the list of voter registrations on hold with Kemp’s office is nearly 70 percent black.