Last week, Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp claimed (video) there is no problem with unprocessed voter registrations, after he was taken to court by the NAACP and the New Georgia Project over outstanding voter registration applications. The NGP had been unable to locate 56,001 voters as of of October 6, on any of the SoS lists for active voters or pending voter registrations.
Remember, Kemp previously lied to the public regarding this case (originally claiming he received complaints of irregularities from 6 counties, when only one of those complaints was actually regarding the New Georgia Project). This was revealed by Open Records requests originally submitted by RiotLibrarian of DailyKos and subsequently duplicated yesterday by an Atlanta TV network affiliate, 11Alive.
Records obtained by 11Alive News tell a different story. An October 9 Open Records Act request shows a total of seven voter registration complaints made in 2014 to the Secretary of State's office. Only one of them, from Butts County, complains about "individuals canvassing voters."
"There was only one complaint related to the New Georgia Project," said Rep. Stacey Abrams, who leads the New Georgia Project. "The rest were related to people who had tried to vote."
"I call into question why (Kemp) took such an aggressive action based on a single complaint that he was notified about in June," Abrams said.
A spokesman for the Secretary of State says there are more records of complaints, but they are exempt from the Open Records Act because they are part of an ongoing investigation. He claims the investigation spans 14 counties -- but can't document them now
When RiotLibrarian submitted the request, the SoS first denied it claiming the complaints "are exempt from disclosure...as they are records of pending investigations". But our local librarian "appealed, pointing out that incident reports are NOT exempt from disclosure as public records under Georgia law" forcing the SoS to release said complaints. So the burden was on Kemp's office to release the incident reports to back up their claims.
Let's see what happens before believing Kemp.
They'll be in court this Friday.
And:
The 11Alive News report came hours after Abrams and supporters held a press conference [yesterday] as part of continued efforts to highlight what they’ve said are over 40,000 newly registered voters who still have not been added to the rolls.
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In a statement released Tuesday [yesterday], Julie Houk of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, which worked with NGP on the lawsuit, said the group is still upset about “systemic problems” with the state’s voter registration system.
“We remain concerned that there are Georgians not accounted for on any list and that even those who are properly registered are not receiving voter registration cards and notification of polling places in a timely manner,” Houk said.
In the lawsuit (PDF), the Lawyers' Committee annexed several communications between them and the SoS office. The last letter dated October 10, the date of the lawsuit, was from the Lawyers' Committee:
We were very disappointed to learn from your letter that our request for a meeting with Secretary Kemp, Ms. Ford or one of their designees has been rejected. We
sincerely hoped that a meeting could have resulted in an informal resolution to
ensure that all eligible persons who submitted valid and timely voter registration
applications were entered onto the rolls and able to vote a regular ballot during
early voting and on November 4
[snip]
In order to enhance the awareness of Secretary Kemp with respect to the scope and gravity of the problem at hand, I am forwarding you a spreadsheet via email which will enable your office to confirm that over 40,000 voter registration
applicants are still not on the rolls or accounted for on the Secretary's "pending
list." We made the offer to provide your office with this data in our October 6,
2014, letter, but your office made no effort to obtain the data from us and your
October 9, 2014, letter contained no reference to our offer in this regard.
During the October 16th press conference, Kemp's office claimed to have looked up the names on the spreadsheet. He specifically says (my transcript from the video):
...40,000 applications. When we ran the, uh, matches through our database in the Secretary of States office over the weekend after we got the lawsuit and got the list from this group. We found that 39,276 records matched active voters. We also found that there are 9,990 voters that matched and that they are in the pending status...meaning there's information missing that's required by law...we also found that over 6,500 names matched records of canceled voters
Anybody else catch that? Matching on names across large databases only works if you're also matching on other more specific criteria, or if you don't care about making mistakes. Also, Kemp is counting past 55,000, which is weird since the letter said "over 40,000". How many names were on that spreadsheet?
Was it the 81,606 registrations that NGP had submitted as of filling the lawsuit?
These are questions that nobody has answered in public.
Case open.