Unbelievable: On Tuesday, Rolling Stone obtained leaked audio from a private campaign event in which Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who oversees Georgia's elections, outright said he was worried that too many Georgians would vote in his own race for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams. Kemp fretted about the resources Abrams is "putting behind the get-out-the-vote effort," saying that her campaign's unprecedented number of absentee ballot requests "is something that concerns us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote."
Kemp's fretting is more than mere talk, because he's one of America's most infamous voter suppression zealots. Under Kemp’s leadership, Georgia has been one of the leaders in purging voter registrations, even if those may still be eligible to vote. And just last week, we learned that his draconian "exact-match" system has suspended the voter registrations of 53,000 citizens, roughly 90 percent of whom are people of color, over trivialities like a misplaced hyphen in their names. Kemp has also failed to protect Georgia’s election equipment from the threat of hackers, and he’s refused to even acknowledge the obvious conflict of interest in overseeing his own race for higher office.
Kemp's naked desire to suppress the vote is reminiscent of the tactics of the Jim Crow era, especially since polls show he’s locked in a very tight race with Abrams. If elected, Abrams would make history as the first black governor of Georgia or any Deep South state, and she would also become the first black woman to become governor of any state in history.
Republicans like Kemp, on the other hand, are emblematic of the GOP’s racist response to a rapidly-diversifying electorate. Rather than seek to broaden its appeal, today’s Republican Party would rather make sure that as few people vote as possible. Kemp’s latest comments illustrate once again that he is quite simply an enemy of democracy.
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