Tight race in Ga. shines light on vote restrictions
GOP candidate imposed tighter rules as secretary of state
ATLANTA — He aggressively deleted inactive voters from registration rolls, enforced an “exact match” policy that could have prevented thousands of Georgians from registering to vote and launched an investigation that disrupted a voter registration drive.
Now Republican Brian Kemp is declaring himself the victor in Georgia’s race for governor, a race so close that even marginal differences in voting and turnout could make the difference in determining whether the race goes to a runoff.
The Associated Press has not called the race between Kemp, who until this week was Georgia’s secretary of state, and Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former state lawmaker seeking to become the nation’s first black woman to be elected governor.
In a state dominated by Republicans, Abrams staked her campaign largely on getting new and infrequent voters to participate.
Meanwhile, Kemp and the state’s Republican legislature have imposed tighter voting and registration rules that can make it more difficult for just those voters to register and cast ballots. Most of those rules have come since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
“Georgia uses every tool in the voter-suppression tool kit,” said Andrea Young, director of the ACLU of Georgia. “It’s unfriendly the way that voting happens in Georgia. It’s more like cashing a check than casting a ballot.”
Kemp defends his tenure, noting increased voter registration on his watch.
Like other Southern states, Georgia after the Civil War had a history of suppressing black voters by disallowing votes from people who owed taxes, imposing literacy tests and implementing white-only primary elections. Those efforts eventually were stopped by the courts and the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But the Supreme Court ruling five years ago rolled back a provision of that act that had required Georgia and eight other states to get federal approval before changing voting laws. That gave those states the freedom to impose new restrictions.
The ACLU’s Young said Georgia’s recent voting restrictions have been made in the name of preventing fraud. But she believes they’re also born out of a desire to keep minorities from voting.
Some of those restrictions predate Kemp.
In 2005 — five years before he took office — Georgia implemented a law requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls. The Justice Department approved it, but a court struck it down as an unconstitutional poll tax because it required voters to pay for IDs unless they could prove financial hardship. Lawmakers responded in 2006 by revising the law to make it easier to get IDs for free.
In 2014, Kemp launched an investigation of a voting drive run by a group that Abrams had started. The investigation eventually forwarded to law enforcement just 53 allegedly forged registrations out of a total of 87,000, but critics said the probe disrupted the overall registration drive.
Dr. Carlos del Rio, chairman of global health at Emory University, said a poll worker at his precinct initially told him he was not registered. The issue: His voter registration has a space between “del” and “Rio” in his last name, but his driver’s license does not.
He had to explain to the poll worker that the state Department of Driver Services does not allow for spaces in a name, and he was then allowed to vote.
“It did require a little of me knowing how to defend my rights,” del Rio said.