October 11, 2018

Outrage is increasing about Georgia's Republican gubernatorial candidate, Brian Kemp, and his blatant efforts to suppress the votes of the state's Black citizens. This has been his modus operandi for years as Secretary of State, as overseeing elections is in his job description. Given his latest scheme to keep 53,000 voter registrations on hold because of an obscenely unfair "exact match" requirement, though, calls for his resignation as Secretary of State are becoming louder. Would you allow a boxer to referee his own fight? Of course not.

Stacey Abrams' campaign is now calling for Kemp to resign his position as Secretary of State of Georgia for that reason.

"As he has done for years, Brian Kemp is maliciously wielding the power of his office to suppress the vote for political gain and silence the voices of thousands of eligible voters -- the majority of them people of color," Abrams spokeswoman Abigail Collazo said in a statement.

Collazo pushed for Kemp to step down "so that Georgia voters can have confidence that their Secretary of State competently and impartially oversee this election." Georgia Democrats were rebuffed when they made a similar request earlier in the year.

70% of the 53,000 registrations on hold belong to African-Americans. As a result, the Abrams campaign is not the only one making noise about Kemp's position as Secretary of State, his policies, and the conflicts of interest. According to Rachel Maddow,

[T]he Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights has announced they'd filed a lawsuit against Brian Kemp over those registrations that he and his office are blocking ahead of his own gubernatorial election. Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights seems fairly confident in their prospects of beating Brian Kemp in this lawsuit. They say they have beaten him in the past on this same issue, and they expect to do so again. That confidence is interesting and it may be true that they're going to beat him here, but, you know, tick-tock. The election at this point is 26 days away.

Tic Tock indeed. Let's unlock those voter registrations so the citizens of Georgia can participate in the election of their leaders. Immediately. Kemp is fooling exactly no one about his motives and targets, and he does not belong in the position of Secretary of State giving him control over his own fate.

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