We’ve written before here at DC Tribune about Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp and the likely illegal server purge he ordered after the special election between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel. Kemp himself is a Republican, so it made it all the more suspicious that after the candidate he wanted to win the election actually squeaked through by the skin of her teeth, that immediately following any questions being raised about the election, he ordered the voting machines wiped of all record of the election.
Let me sum that last paragraph up: Brian Kemp stole an election last year on behalf of the GOP, because he didn’t want anyone thinking public opinion was swinging away from Donald Trump.
Now Kemp is running for Governor in Georgia, but guess what? He’s still the Secretary of State. That means he’s still in charge of elections in the state. If that seems like a conflict of interest to you, you’re not alone, especially in light of the fact that he’s specifically preventing more than 53,000 people, most of them black, from registering to vote in Georgia.
Kemp denies he’s doing anything wrong, but then, that’s what you would do if you were doing something shady, isn’t it? And removing more than 1.4 million people from the voter rolls in the last 6 years, nearly half of those in the year before he ran for governor, is pretty darn shady.
Maybe that’s why Kemp, along with a handful of other Republican officials around the country who take actions like this in the name of “voting integrity” — but fully understood and acknowledged to be blatant voter suppression by everyone outside the Republican Party — is being sued over his effort disenfranchise voters.
The entire affair stinks like the 2004 election fraud case in Ohio that handed George W. Bush a second term after the Republican Secretary of State there, Ken Blackwell, publicly promised to “deliver the state of Ohio to President Bush” — and then did so, erasing all evidence of the election shortly after November of that year by purging the electronic voting machines exactly the way Kemp did after the Ossoff-Handel race.
Thankfully, voter registration in Georgia is at record levels this year, and it looks like Democrats might be able to overcome even the dirty tricks of the GOP and take the state.
That sure doesn’t make up for the voters who won’t get a say this time around.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons
