If you’re reading this post on a political news website, odds are you’re already registered to vote. Odds are you’ve been registered for a long time, and heck maybe you’ve already voted early ahead of the November 8th General Election. But just in case, today is the last day to register to vote in Georgia, so if you or your unruly college aged nephew aren’t registered yet, it’s as simple as following the instructions in this link.
Indeed Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who has recently found himself taking criticism from multiple sides, has made it simple to register online. Click the link, enter your information, and voila, you’re capable of performing your civic duties. So why is voting so hard?
According to numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 61% of eligible Georgians are registered to vote. Of those only about 44% actually do vote, which puts the total percentage of Georgia voters at a mere 27% of the eligible voting-aged population.
Voter registration drives have always been a fixture of grassroots campaigning, and Georgia is no different. On the Democratic side especially, groups like the New Georgia Project, headed by State Rep. Stacey Abrams, have pushed to register minority voters in an effort to turn Georgia blue, or at least purple.
Those groups have been mired in controversy, however. As the New Voter Project fell far short of its stated goal of registering 120,000 new voters for the 2014 elections, (where high profile Democratic candidates Michelle Nunn and Jason Carter suffered humbling election day defeats) some Democratic leaders questioned if the vast amounts of money the organization was receiving from national organizations was being spent correctly. Said State Senator Vincent Fort to Atlanta Magazine in 2015, “She (Abrams) hasn’t been open and transparent. Her funders don’t know where her money went. More importantly, the public doesn’t know where the money went.”
Kemp performed his own investigation of the organization after claiming it had sent in dozens of false registration forms in 2014. When that probe didn’t turn up anything worthy of pressing charges, Democrats of course struck back at Kemp, saying that the investigation had been purely politically motivated and was evidence of an attempt at minority voter suppression.
The Secretary of State’s office has also received pushback from liberal groups over its continued efforts to keep voter rolls clean and up to date. Three lawsuits from civil-rights groups accuse the state of violating the federal Voting Rights Act, arguing that many active minority voters lost their registration in the ‘purges’. Kemp’s team responded calling the charges frivolous, arguing that keeping updated voter rolls and requiring state identification to vote did nothing but discourage fraudsters.
Expect this battle to continue long after November 8th has come and gone, but in the mean time get out and vote! It’s really just not that hard.
