Lawsuit filed against Secretary of State Brian Kemp over unprocessed voter applications
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights also sues five Georgia counties
- Joeff Davis/CL File
- SHAME, SHAME: Secretary of State Brian Kemp watches over a Sept. 17 hearing of the State Election Board.
What a surprise! Georgia’s secretary of state today was slapped with a lawsuit for his failure to ensure that tens of thousands of voter registration applications were being processed.
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights have sued Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who refused to meet with several groups this week to discuss the status of more than 50,000 voter applications, and five other counties late this afternoon. New Georgia Project, House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams’ nonprofit organization aimed at registering unregistered minority voters, had turned the applications into local county election officials well before the Oct. 6 voter deadline.
Kemp recently opened a voter fraud investigation into several-dozen NGP applications and subpoenaed documents from the group. His actions have sparked outrage from minority leaders throughout the state.
The AJC’s Gold Dome reporter Kristina Torres has more details:
The lawsuit comes in direct response to the handling of voter registration applications by the state and Fulton, DeKalb, Chatham, Muscogee and Clayton as they were submitted by the New Georgia Project, a Democratic-backed group under investigation by Kemp over accusations of voter registration fraud.
More than 50,000 of the paper forms submitted by the group seem to be lost in the state’s voting system, Lawyers’ Committee attorney Julie Houk said. They neither appear on voter rolls nor do they show up on lists of “pending” voters who have been asked to provide more information to verify who they are.
An additional 5,000 of the forms do appear on pending lists, but Houk said the forms show the information originally submitted to be accurate. In other words, the Lawyers’ Committee is questioning why these voters must provide additional proof of identification.
Last Monday, the national organization wrote a letter to the secretary of state’s lawyers that requested a meeting “in a good-faith effort to avoid litigation” within 48 hours. Abrams last night went on the offensive and attacked Kemp’s office during an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
“The fight we’re fighting now is making sure that those we did register are actually put on the voter rolls,” Abrams told Maddow. “The challenge here is not whether or not they’ve registered. These are completed applications that have been duly processed. The problem is they’ve gone into a black hole and we can’t find those voters. And if we don’t find them by election day, they will not be counted. And that’s wrong.”
We’ve reached out to Kemp’s office for comment. If we hear back, we’ll post an update.