APM Reports has posted an in-depth analysis of the purging of voter rolls in Georgia under Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is running for governor. The scope of the purge strengthens the claims of Kemp’s Democratic rival Stacey Abrams that the GOP is using voter suppression to win a tight race. In an appearance on The Daily Show in August, Stacey said, “I have an opponent who is a remarkable architect of voter suppression.”
According to APM Reports, in July 2017 more than half a million names, making up roughly 8 percent of registered voters, were taken off the rolls. “For an estimated 107,000 of those people, their removal from the voter rolls was triggered not because they moved or died or went to prison, but rather because they had decided not to vote in prior elections, according to an APM Reports analysis,” the outlet notes. “Many of those previously registered voters may not even realize they’ve been dropped from the rolls. If they show up at the polls on Nov. 6 to vote in the heated Georgia governor’s race, they won’t be allowed to cast a ballot.”
The new reporting complements other accounts of Kemp’s voter suppression efforts. As Mother Jones reports, one tactic is a law requiring an exact match between registration and other information in government databases. “Kemp has implemented a stringent voter verification process that flags and suspends registration applications if the information on them does not exactly match information in existing databases, down to each letter and hyphen,” Pema Levy notes. “Last week, the Associated Press reported that 53,000 people who attempted to register to vote have not been added to the rolls due to this process. Though Georgia is 32 percent African American, 70 percent of those flagged by Kemp’s protocols are black.”