Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp is under fire for infringing on minority communities’ voting rights. Office of U.S. Senator David Perdue. Wikimedia Commons

Georgia’s race for governor has become a dogfight over voting rights.

The deadlocked election pits Democrat Stacey Abrams, Georgia’s House minority leader, against  Georgia’s Secretary of State, Republican Brian Kemp.

As the race drags on, Kemp faces mounting accusations of voter suppression: using his office to game Georgia’s ballot system and limit the state’s historically Democratic minority vote. But Kemp argues that he “is simply implementing Georgia law,” and that these laws aren’t intended to discourage minorities from voting. 

He’s right. Properly vetting voter registration is integral to our entire democratic system. In order to ensure integrity at the polls and popular confidence in our elections, we have to make sure we know exactly who is voting. 

Sure, how to go about getting that identification is a complex issue, but regulation at the polls is necessary. Demanding extensive documentation to vote is certainly questionable, but so is requiring no registration at all. 

Still, Kemp is up to something. 

Under Georgia’s “exact match” law, voters’ identification at the polls must match their exact names — down to the last hyphen — in the state’s registration database. 

Even though it’s flawed, the policy as written isn’t at all discriminatory. Excluding a margin of clerical error, the stipulation — though perhaps overzealous — is fair and should affect every demographic equally.

But that’s the thing: it hasn’t. Nearly 80% of Georgia’s 53,000 ballots flagged due to exact match belong to minority voters. 

In a similar jerryrigging scheme, Kemp’s office purged over half a million people from its voter database via Georgia’s “use it or lose it” statute. The rule — designed to efficiently keep tabs on people moving out of state — requires those who haven’t voted for three years to confirm their home address. Upon certifying that they still live in Georgia, their place in the voter database is (supposedly) kept.

That doesn’t sound like a big deal-until you realize that over 300,000 of the half-million people Kemp removed still live in Georgia. And the majority of these unjustly removed voters were — you guessed it — minorities in blue battleground districts. 

Now, in fairness, Abrams isn’t exactly a paragon of electoral purity either. The “New Georgia Project” she helped found is suspected of making some of the very clerical errors that cause votes to be flagged by “exact match.” The voter-registration agency was also was investigated several years ago over charges of voter fraud. 

Additionally, not all 350,000 some ballots that Kemp tampered with will be stricken from the record. They’ll be delayed for further inspection, but voters affected still have time to clear up errors in their registration and papers. 

Still, delays in ballot processing force many to undergo a time and labor intensive process to get things sorted out. And for the vast majority who can’t afford to do so, their ballot is effectively nullified. 

So while Kemp can’t actually erase any ballots, he can effectively discourage many in poor minority communities from voting altogether.   

But he hasn’t stopped there.

In Randolph County, Georgia, his associates were narrowly defeated in a last-ditch push to close 7 of the district’s 9 polling stations. The proposal would have left thousands in the underserved and predominantly black district with absurdly long treks to the polls. 

How did Kemp’s camp attempt to explain away the blatant suppression tactic ? Lack of required wheelchair ramps in the buildings. 

C’mon, really?

See, the problem in Georgia’s election isn’t its voter laws. It’s that those laws are being unfairly and selectively wielded to hamstring the minority vote. 

Voter fraud and voting rights are always contentious debates: striking a balance between electoral integrity and accessible voting for all is often difficult.

But that isn’t what this Georgia gubernatorial race is about. It isn’t about laws or policy, and it certainly isn’t about electoral fairness.

This is about Georgia’s Secretary of State abusing his power to suppress minority votes and actively prevent people of color from making their voices heard. 

Now Georgia decides if he’ll get away with it.