Republicans are worried, really, really worried that they may lose Georgia’s race for governor. Their candidate, Brian Kemp, also happens to be the Secretary of State and he’s working overtime to throw out as many Democratic voter registrations and actual votes as possible before the final count. As my colleague Kelly Macias noted, 70% of the 53,000 voter registrations on hold in Georgia belong to black applicants.
Now the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports an alarming number of absentee ballots are being thrown out in Gwinnett County, Georgia’s second most populous county with roughly 900,000 residents.
Gwinnett is throwing out far more absentee ballots than any other county in Georgia, according to records from the Secretary of State’s Office. Ballots were discarded because of allegedly mismatched signatures, incomplete forms or missing residential addresses.
The county rejected 390 absentee ballots through Sunday, which represents 8.5 percent of all mailed ballots received in Gwinnett so far, according to state figures. Across Georgia, less than 2 percent of absentee ballots have been rejected. Gwinnett accounts for about 37 percent of all rejected ballots in Georgia.
“They’re putting an extra burden on someone to come back in to get another absentee ballot. That’s unheard of,” said Helen Butler, executive director for the Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda, a civil rights group.
With a dead even race, it seems crystal clear Brian Kemp and Georgia Republicans are pulling out every dirty trick in the book to suppress the vote and deny Georgia residents their Constitutional right to vote. Will it be enough to swing the vote and deny the enormously popular Stacey Abrams from becoming the first black female governor in American history?
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Tuesday, Oct 16, 2018 · 4:07:27 PM +00:00
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Jen Hayden
A lawsuit against Brian Kemp is already in motion related to the vote suppression in Gwinnett County. From the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
Late Monday, a new lawsuit was filed U.S. District Court in Atlanta against Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the state elections board and the Gwinnett County elections board over the issue. The suit, brought on behalf of five plaintiffs and underwritten by the Coalition for Good Governance, asks a judge to order that all rejected absentee ballots and absentee ballot applications be reviewed and be reinstated if at all possible.