Voting rights conflicts in Georgia, elsewhere could affect election
One of the most bitterly contested races in the Nov. 6 election is in Georgia, where the gubernatorial campaign pits Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a white Republican, against Stacey Abrams, a Democrat who is vying to become the state’s first black governor.
The race became especially heated this week when voting rights advocates filed a lawsuit accusing Kemp, the state’s top election official, with blocking more than 50,000 voter registrations — mostly of black residents — to hurt turnout and boost his campaign.
Kemp’s campaign has denied the accusation. The state is among several with laws that require exact matches between personal information on voter registrations and state databases.
Abrams’ campaign has called on Kemp to resign, and spokeswoman Abigail Collazo said Thursday he was “maliciously wielding the power of his office to suppress the vote for political gain.”
The Georgia dispute is among several in various states that voting rights advocates have zeroed in on because of what they describe as restrictive voting laws, changes to early voting rules and polling place closures. They point to studies that show voter fraud is rare in the U.S.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to toss out a law that requires North Dakota voters to show identification with a current residential address. Voting rights groups said the law will hurt the state’s Native American voters, as many of them live on reservations and do not have standard addresses.
On Wednesday, a federal judge in Ohio upheld the state’s system for purging those who haven’t voted in six years from its registration rolls.
On Thursday, an Arkansas state court upheld a law that makes voters show photo identification at the polls. The law lets them use provisional ballots if they have no ID.
At issue in several states are changes to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Supreme Court struck down key parts of the act in 2013 that required certain states — largely ones in the South with a history of disenfranchising black voters — to get approval from the federal government before making changes to voting rules.
The debate in Georgia centers on its “exact match” law, passed last year, that requires names and other information on voter registrations to correspond precisely to state databases. A skipped middle name or hyphen or a typo can put voters on a “pending” list.
Civil rights groups, including the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, are suing to overturn the rule, which they consider discriminatory. They say it disproportionately hurts minorities such as the state’s large black population, which tends to vote for Democrats.