GA just 'lost' thousands of black absentee ballots. New laws are needed to punish suppressors

The GOP has, in multiple states, enacted severe penalties for the completely non-existent crime of in-person voting fraud. This is mostly to scare people in lower income areas into thinking that voting could be a crime—and make them think that perhaps it’s best not to risk casting a ballot.

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The true crime, however, is voter suppression—which the GOP has given up any pretense of trying to hide.

This is nowhere as blatant as in Georgia, where the candidate for governor, Brian Kemp, is also in charge of overseeing his own effing election. Optics be damned, he has done everything in his power to suppress literally hundreds of thousands of Democratic voters of color.

Civil rights groups have sued Kemp after 53,000 people seeking to register to vote – nearly 70% of them black – had their registrations put on hold because the information they submitted was not an exact match with state records, with discrepancies as small as a misplaced hyphen causing them to be disqualified.

And then:

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Another lawsuit was filed over reports that Gwinnett County, the most diverse county in the state, had rejected nearly 10% of absentee ballots sent in by mail, far more than other parts of the state.

And then:

Georgia purged twice as many voters – 1.5 million – from the rolls between the 2012 and 2016 elections as it did between 2008 and 2012, the Brennan Center for Justice found in a report.

Kemp took office in 2010.

In fact, Kemp purged 300,000 legitimate voters in just the time he’s been a candidate. Kemp was supposed to send notices to purged voters by law, but he didn’t. (If you are a Georgia voter, a journalist created a website that can tell you if you have been purged. )

And now…… this:

Channel 2 Action News has confirmed that Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp's office is investigating claims that a local county elections office lost thousands of absentee ballot applications.

Channel 2 investigative reporter Aaron Diamant has learned that leaders of the Democratic Party of Georgia contacted officials in Kemp's office, claiming the party had evidence that as many as 4,700 DeKalb County voters never received the absentee-by-mail ballots they requested for November's election.

DeKalb County is the second-most-affluent county with an African-American majority in the United States (behind a suburb of Washington D.C.). The GA Secretary of State’s office has not ordered an investigation.

All of these incidents are targeting black voters. It’s sick, repressive, and downright un-American.  Democrats, if they gain control in statehouses and on the national level, need to quit viewing these efforts as “shenanigans” that draw milquetoast condemnations, and start dealing with them as what the hell they are: a direct attack on our democracy. The oath of office includes the phrase “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”  An American citizen’s right to vote is the entire foundation on which our government is based, and people who seek to strip it away for partisan gain are enemies of the Constitution.

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