Frenzied efforts by Georgia Democrats to register new voters in time for early voting and the Nov. 4 general election have hit an embarrassing snag courtesy of Secretary of State Brian Kemp after he received mounting complaints that a group headed by a state House of Representatives minority leader Stacy Abrams is alleged to have committed voter fraud.
In September Kemp launched an investigation into Abrams’ left-wing organization called the New Georgia Project and its parent organization Third Sector Development. “This is not about politics, it is about fraud,” Kemp told Atlanta’s WSB-TV at the time, as his office was subpoenaing materials related to New Georgia Project registration efforts in five heavily Democrat counties. He cited evidence of “significant illegal activities including forged registration applications (and) forged signatures on some applications… .”
When asked last spring by the publication Roll Call why Democrats expect to register black voters who stayed home twice when Obama was on the ballot, Abrams declared that President Barack Obama’s campaign did not expend significant resources in Georgia but that Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Michelle Nunn would have plenty of funding and would be competitive if approximately 200,000 minorities could quickly be added to the voter rolls. “People who didn’t register to vote for President Obama in 2012 or 2008, they did not have someone coming to their door saying we have a chance to win,” Abrams told Roll Call. “With Michelle’s race, there will be a concerted effort to register and mobilize and turn out voters.”
Indeed there has been “a concerted effort”— but it includes obvious fraud.
Last Thursday, in a wide-ranging interview with the Columbus Ledger, Kemp had some questions for the voter-registration groups now suing him and the five counties failing to register new voters for the Nov. 4 General Election.
One question: “Who is ‘R’ in Fulton County?” Kemp asked, referring to a list of registration applicants submitted by lawyers allied with the New Georgia Project, which amassed thousands of voter applications. “Will you help us find this individual?” Kemp continued. “Because that’s all that we had on the list we were given Friday.”
Another applicant was identified only as “Edward,” a third had only the birth year 1958, and a fourth was listed as “Johnny B. Cool” who lives in “YoTown.”
Kemp’s reference to “Friday” was October 10, the day attorneys for the New Georgia Project and the NAACP sued Kemp and the counties of Muscogee, Fulton, Dekalb, Chatham and Clayton on claims voter registrars were not processing registration applications fast enough to add new voters to the rolls before the election.
Although his remarks didn’t receive wide Atlanta media attention, the secretary of state told the Columbus newspaper that the lawsuit is “frivolous and totally without merit” and its claim that more than 40,000 applications are yet to be processed is “absolutely false.”
So in light of the Kemp pushback, as well as pervasive apathy on the part of many eligible but unregistered voters, the New Georgia Project and its allies fell far short of their 200,000 goal of registering minorities.
