Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate for governor of Georgia and two-term secretary of state, is a husband and father of three, his ads never fail to emphasize. He’s also a “politically incorrect conservative,” according to a TV spot that featured him revving the engine of his pickup truck, which he might use to “round up criminal illegals and take ’em home” himself. “Yup, I just said that,” he smirked into the camera. Kemp, if you haven’t guessed, is a Trump-loving Republican, and the feeling is mutual. “He has my Strong Endorsement,” the president tweeted on October 20.
Kemp also risks being the first Republican candidate for governor to lose in Georgia since 1998. His Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams has kept the race tight, and Kemp is just two percentage points ahead in the Real Clear Politics average of polls. If she wins, Abrams would be the first black female governor in the country and the vanguard in a years-long effort by Democrats to turn Georgia blue. The closeness of the race and the conventions of contemporary politics have revealed Kemp to be a bit of a demagogue. He’s unfairly accused Abrams of voting in the state legislature to protect the ability of sex offenders to live near schools and daycare centers. He’s also uncharitably said Abrams has encouraged illegal immigrants to vote.
The Abrams camp, in return, unfairly accuses Kemp of being a racially motivated vote suppressor. At an October 23 debate, Abrams charged Kemp with creating an “atmosphere of fear” and claimed Georgia voters “have been purged, they have been suppressed, they have been scared.” On October 12, several civil rights groups sued Kemp in his capacity as secretary of state over his enforcement of the state’s voter registration laws. The same day, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, urged Attorney General Jeff Sessions to take oversight action against Kemp, saying the Republican candidate “has targeted black voters with laser precision.”
The charge has been amplified with enthusiasm in the media, but it ultimately doesn’t hold water. Let’s unpack the indictment. Kemp’s position as secretary of state makes him Georgia’s chief elections officer. Around 53,000 voter registrations have been deemed “pending” by the state, the majority of which are for African-American and other minority voters. Meanwhile, there was a purge of a large number of inactive registrations from the voter rolls last year. Both are being cited as proof minority votes are being suppressed by the state official who happens to be running for governor.
In fact, what we see in Georgia is the result of a patchwork of federal, state, and local laws governing voter registration requirements and verification. First, consider the cache of pending voter registrations. A federal law passed by Congress in 2002 requires states to maintain an official voter registration list and to regularly remove duplicate or ineligible voters. In Georgia, individual counties administer elections, including voter registration, but the secretary of state’s office manages the verification process for those registrations.
In 2010, the Department of Justice cleared Georgia’s process, which requires voters to submit either a driver’s license number that can be verified by the state or a Social Security number that can be verified by the feds. Six years later, the NAACP and other civil-rights groups sued the state over this process, arguing it was too restrictive. Kemp’s office settled, and in 2017 the Republican-controlled general assembly modified the verification process in line with the settlement. The principle remains the same: Certain relevant information (like last name, first initial of first name, and date of birth) [see correction] must match exactly with the appropriate database. If there’s a mismatch, voters are informed by their county elections officials and have 26 months to fix the incorrect information. Meanwhile, their registrations are designated “pending.”
An October report by the Associated Press found more than 53,000 voter registrations pending in Georgia, most of which are the result of a mismatch in information. The AP also reported that 70 percent of pending applications belong to African Americans. But Kemp’s campaign and the secretary of state’s office have pushed back on the idea that this means suppressing votes. A department spokeswoman, Candice Broce, notes that every eligible voter with a pending status can still vote, early or on Election Day, simply by showing up to the proper polling place and providing a driver’s license or other identifying card, as required of all voters by state law. This act alone would allow the person to vote on a regular (not provisional) ballot.
How does a “mismatch” happen? Most often, by human error. Perhaps a county elections official made a typo. One Georgia woman who discovered her registration was pending was featured prominently in the AP’s report. According to the secretary of state’s office, the first letter of her last name was missing in her registration form.
There might not be much to a story about sloppy data entry, but the racial disparity is arresting. Black voters make up about 30 percent of Georgia’s electorate—so how do they account for 70 percent of this pending pile? The secretary of state’s office doesn’t have a complete answer, but there is reason to think racial bias isn’t a primary factor. That’s thanks to an investigation into a nonprofit voter registration initiative called the New Georgia Project, which seeks to register minority voters. In 2014, elections officials in more than a dozen counties issued complaints about possible forged applications and other problematic practices by New Georgia Project canvassers, prompting an investigation by the state elections board (a bipartisan commission Kemp chairs). To make things more complicated, the New Georgia Project was founded by Abrams.
As part of the investigation, which ended last year with no charges against the group, the secretary of state’s office subpoenaed the New Georgia Project’s list of registrations for 2014. According to Broce, 14 percent of the state’s pending applications come from this list. One plausible explanation: The New Georgia Project uses paper forms exclusively (as opposed to online registration). That increases the opportunity for error—both on the original forms and when the information is keyed into the database.
Now what about the voter purges? An investigative piece by American Public Media reported that nearly 600,000 Georgia voters were removed from the rolls in 2017. Team Kemp has an explanation for that: A 2016 lawsuit brought by Common Cause and the NAACP over the state’s voter list temporarily halted the biennial purge of inactive voters. After the lawsuit was thrown out, Georgia had two cycles’ worth of inactive voters to remove from its list.
Many of these voters were dead, convicted felons, or had moved out of the state. But others—107,000, APM estimates—were kicked off “because they had not decided to vote in prior elections.” The report admitted that while purging voters for this reason is legal, “voting rights advocates say [it] is a potential tool for voter suppression.”
That tool is the “use it or lose it” law, and Georgia is one of nine states to have adopted such a law since Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act in 1993. Here’s how it works: If a registered voter does not vote in any election in Georgia for three consecutive years, he is considered to be inactive. This is a designation that’s required by the 1993 National Voter Registration Act before a state can revoke a voter’s registration. The voter is notified via a prepaid return postcard that he is inactive and can become active again in three ways: by voting again, by returning the notice, or by otherwise making contact with local elections officials. The inactive voter has an additional four years (or two federal election cycles) to reactivate his registration. The entire process takes seven consecutive years and doesn’t require a registered voter to vote at all—only make some form of contact renewing the registration.
In June of this year, the Supreme Court overruled a lower court opinion on a similar law in Ohio and found such procedures are not unconstitutional. Justice Samuel Alito, writing the majority opinion, argued that federal law prohibits failure to vote as the “sole criterion” for revoking a registration. But Ohio’s “use it or lose it” law, like Georgia’s, includes the return notice process, which the majority concluded was fully in line with federal law. All of which is to say that the “purges” attributed to Kemp are in keeping with state and federal law, passed by duly elected representatives.
Finally, there are the numbers to consider: In Kemp’s eight years as secretary of state, black voter registration in Georgia has gone up every cycle, with an overall increase of 462,000 voters, or more than 31 percent, between 2010 and 2018. That outpaces white voter registration both in real numbers and as a percentage of all voters. Black voter turnout has been consistently around 50 percent for midterm federal elections and 70 percent during presidential years.
Kemp hasn’t helped his own case. He’s referred to critics of the state’s voter registration laws as “outside agitators”—a phrase that recalls the rhetoric of white segregationists. He has also tried to turn the tables on Abrams, arguing that a recent remark she made about the “blue wave” of Georgians, including undocumented immigrants, was a call for illegal aliens to vote in the midterm election.
The merit of Georgia’s voter registration laws is hardly beyond debate. Kemp cites concerns about voter fraud as a reason to implement tough voter maintenance, but according to the APM report, “Georgia officials have pursued 19 election fraud cases in the past two decades” and just 7 of them resulted in convictions. States have broad discretion to implement their own election laws within the federal framework, but perhaps Georgia’s “use it or lose it” and “exact match” laws are more onerous than Georgians prefer. And given that systemic suppression of black voters happened in Georgia in living memory, there’s an argument that more liberal registration laws are a corrective to perceived or real racial bias. Considering Georgia’s volatile racial history, a reasoned debate about the efficacy of the state’s laws may be in order.
But casting Kemp as an agent of blanket disenfranchisement is not only unfair but counterproductive. If Kemp edges out Abrams by just a few thousand votes—a quite plausible outcome, given the polls—the perception that Kemp suppressed more than enough minority votes to put him over the top could threaten the legitimacy of the election in the minds of many Georgia voters. Kemp’s critics argue this is precisely why a spotlight on the registration issue is so important. But without the context and with hyperbolic rhetoric, the claims of voter suppression aren’t much different from the demagoguery Democrats decry from the likes of Kemp and Donald Trump.
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Correction, October 26, 2018, 10:48 a.m.: The piece originally said that “Certain relevant information (like last name, first initial of first name, and address) must match exactly with the appropriate database.” The address is not required, but the date of birth is. The article has been changed accordingly.
