'Textbook voter suppression': Georgia's bitter election a battle years in the making

Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp are locked in a dispute amid allegations of voter fraud – something that has plagued Georgia in its history

Georgia’s hard-fought and bitter governor’s race still isn’t over.

Nor was it just a gubernatorial campaign pitting rightwing Trump acolyte Brian Kemp against insurgent Democrat Stacy Abrams and her bid to become the first African American woman governor in US history. Instead it was a battle years in the making, and it was not so much about who to vote for – but who could vote at all.

Kemp has declared victory and handed in his resignation as secretary of state – the very office that oversees this contentious election. The outgoing governor Nathan Deal, has declared him the victor.

There’s just one catch.

Abrams’ campaign team is still counting the votes. Her campaign manager, Lauren Groh-Wargo, said from the campaign headquarters Thursday: “All of the votes in this race have not been counted. All the voters of Georgia deserve to be counted before the now-former secretary of state announces his victory.”

According to a statement posted on the Georgia secretary of state’s website while Kemp was still in that role, counties have until 9 November to verify provisional ballots and until 13 November to certify the results.

As of Friday morning, the unofficial election results show Kemp with a lead of more than 63,000 votes – a gap Abrams has closed from 75,000 since election night – in an election where nearly 4 million ballots were cast. In Georgia, a runoff is triggered when neither candidate secures 50% plus one vote, which Abrams’s team claimed could happen if she gains 25,632 votes.

After Kemp’s resignation, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People president Derrick Johnson released a statement, filled with refrains echoed by other legal experts, civil rights figures and Kemp’s adversaries during and prior to the election.

He said: “Kemp’s actions during the election were textbook voter suppression. His actions were strategic, careless and aimed at silencing the voting power of communities of color in the state.”

Consider these numbers.

• In the three months leading up to election day, more than 85,000 voters were purged from rolls under Kemp. During 2017 a huge 668,000 voters were purged, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

• Of those 2017 numbers, investigative reporter Greg Palast told Salon, 200,000 people left the state, died or moved out their district, making them legitimate cancellations. However, through litigation, he got the entire purge list. “Of the 400,000 who supposedly moved, our experts will tell a court that 340,134 never moved – wrongly purged,” Palast told the Guardian, saying people had been purged for not voting in an election or two.

• Furthermore from 2012 to 2016, 1.5 million voters were purged – more than 10 percent of all voters – from records, according to a 2018 report from the Brennan Center for Justice. In comparison, 750,000 were purged from 2008 to 2012.

Kemp took office in 2010 and he and fellow conservatives argue the law requires ineligible voters who move or die to be cleared from rolls. But voting rights advocates say the removals disproportionately affect groups who tend to vote at lower rates, like minorities and low-income voters – the same groups who generally support Democrats.

It’s a fundamental problem that stretches back into the history of Georgia and the wider south where racial tensions and the fight over who can vote persists from the days of civil rights struggles.

Sophia Lakin, a staff attorney on the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, points to the fact that until 2013 Georgia was covered by a section of the Voting Rights Act that stipulated it submit election changes to get “pre-clearance” from the federal government – a protection meant to protect minority voters.

She said: “It was a hugely important part of maintaining fair voting practices in places in this country that had a long history of discriminating on racial grounds.”

But with those protections now gone for the last five years – that covers Kemp’s period in office – many activists say minority voting rights have been threatened again.

Legally, it has been lawsuit after lawsuit in Georgia.

Before the 2016 general election, Common Cause, a nonpartisan grassroots organization, and the NAACP filed a lawsuit against Kemp, seeking an injunction to block Kemp from more voter purges based on a registered voters’ failure to vote.

Voter purges aren’t the sole concern for critics of the conservative, Trump-endorsed candidate.

Abrams’ team also claims the race is too close to call because of other forms of voter suppression lobbied by her adversaries – all ones that could have cost her the governorship.

Days before early voting began, a civil rights group sued Kemp “over the state of Georgia’s discriminatory and unlawful ‘exact match’ voter suppression scheme”, resulting in 53,000 pending voter registration applications which they claimed affected mostly minority voters.

The “exact match” policy is when a voter’s application has to match – without an errant dash, space, hyphen or period, for example – the information listed in social security or driver’s license databases.

On the first day of early voting, a bus full of African American senior citizens on their way to a voting center were turned back. Organizers called it “live voter suppression”.

A few days before the election a white supremacist group released racist – and fake – robocalls impersonating Oprah Winfrey, just as she arrived in metro Atlanta to stump for Abrams.

Then there was the announcement Kemp was looking into unfounded hacking allegations against Democrats just two days before the election.

On election day, Abrams’ fears seemed to come true.

The Guardian witnessed long lines in various parts of metro Atlanta, where the majority of counties lean Democrat. MIT’s Election Performance Index for 2016 suggested Georgia ranked 49th out of 50 for wait times to vote.

In the state’s second largest, hotly contested – and traditionally Republican but becoming Democratic – Gwinnett County, an entire polling location at Annistown elementary school was offline when the doors opened at 7am. The county cited issues with the express polling machines that make the electronic ballots, said Joe Sorensen, a county official who showed up at noon.

The NAACP sued successfully to keep two polling precincts near the historically black colleges Spelman University and Morehouse College open until 10pm.

“It’s easy to vote and hard to cheat in Georgia,” Kemp said Thursday. But on election day, a local news channel claimed even Kemp had difficulties voting, with his vote card coming up as “invalid”.

The current high stakes impasse between the two front-runners is actually a sequel.

A similar scene played out in the lead up to the 2014 midterms when Abrams was the then-Democratic minority leader in the Georgia house and Kemp the secretary of state. In an effort to increase voter registration among minorities, young adults and unmarried women, Abrams launched the New Georgia Project. According to the non-partisan organization’s website, the aim was to target more than 700,000 unregistered Georgians who happened to be people of color.

Kemp accused the organization of voter fraud. Leaked audio from a Republican breakfast in Gwinnett county, now Georgia’s most diverse, recorded Kemp as saying: “You know the Democrats are working hard, and all these stories about them, 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.”

At the moment, Kemp is holding firm. Since the night of the election, he has said: “The math is on our side.” He implied that the argument over voting in Georgia is over.

Abrams disagrees. The Georgia Democratic party filed a lawsuit Thursday to extend the deadline for absentee ballots in Dougherty county, a southern county affected by Hurricane Michael in October.

Palast, though, agrees, unwillingly, with Kemp. “[Voter purge] resulted in massive number of provisional ballots that Kemp [or his successor] won’t count. Worse, most of the [people purged who] showed [up on election day] were denied the provisional ballots.

“That’s probably the election for Kemp.”