. . . .
These individuals called the New Georgia Project, the voter rights group for which I serve as chairman, and we sent in a phalanx of legal experts to defend their rights. But not everyone is so lucky, and these are not rare and random instances of people accidentally falling through the cracks. The system is functioning exactly as it was designed. They’re the consequence of the policies pursued by Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp (who, like a boxer refereeing his own bout, oversees the election in which he’s running).
My beloved state of Georgia has followed seemingly every strategy in the voter-suppression playbook, like partisan gerrymandering and closing polling locations. It even charged a poll worker with a felony for helping someone use a voting machine. Moreover, the state has pursued aggressive voter purges, removing 1.6 million names from the rolls between the 2012 and 2016 elections, and another 670,000 last year. More than 100,000 of these were due to the new “use it or lose it” standard. Anyone sincerely concerned with the health of our democracy, whose voter turnout trails most developed countries, would invite citizens into the process, not punish them for being unable to make it to the polls for two seasons.
