As a citizen of yet another Georgia city ending in -a, I sent the following comment to our SOS Brian Kemp on Tuesday, Oct. 28. after Judge Brasher's (R-Bush) no-decision decision:
Sir,
On election day next week, if the majority of those 40,000 registrants, who currently do not appear on registration rolls, are not able to vote, it will be my pleasure to join with thousands of other Georgians to find out why. I hope the U.S. Department of Justice also joins our effort.
Why, as Secretary of State, are you not working as hard as possible to find out why those 40,000 are not registered? Why are you not clearing up all questions for these fellow Georgians who have placed their trust in you?
Please do the right thing.
Respectfully,
And faster than you can email a voter database, I received the following reply:
Any allegations that the Secretary of State's office or county registrars have refused to process voter registration applications are untrue. All voter registration applications that the Secretary of State's office receives from third party registration drives are mailed to the applicant's county within 24 hours, where the county then processes the application by entering the data into the Georgia Voter Registration System.
If you would like to check your voter registration status, you may do so on the My Voter Page section (http://www.mvp.sos.ga.gov/) of the Secretary of State's website, or by contacting your county registrar, or by contacting our office. You may also view your poll locations, sample ballots, and early voting locations on My Voter Page, as well as register to vote online with a valid Georgia driver's license or state ID.
For sure. In other words, Georgia's SOS office claims that they dutifully sent the 40,000 applications within 24 hours to their respective counties and, if there's a problem, it is at the county level.
Dissemble, much?
Revealed in court (but not in the email to me) is that county election boards are relying on a manual sent to them (along with the voter registrations) by SOS Kemp with instructions that caused (not just the delay) but the possible non-entry of the forms. For full reporting on this, see Atlanta Progressive News on Oct. 29.
Kemp was also quoted in the APN article as saying,
“The claim that there are 40,000 missing or unprocessed voter registration applications is absolutely false,” Kemp said. “The counties have processed all of the voter registration applications that they received for the General Election.”
"Processed" here does not mean they were accepted as valid and added to the voter rolls. It could just as well mean they were looked at and, by applying the criteria sent to them by SOS Kemp, rejected.
SOS Kemp also did not say in his email that his office has opened an investigation of The New Voter Project and Third Sector Development because 11% of the 85,000 registrations submitted were incomplete.
This is the Acorn Strategy. Like Acorn, the New Voter Project flagged the 11% incomplete forms for the SOS before submitting them, as required by law, and had reached out to Kemp in June to ensure they were in lawful compliance. Three months later, Kemp put them under investigation because of "complaints"--without elaboration--from five counties.
I trust a Republican SOS about as far as I can spit a peach pit.