How to steal an election

This problem is going to get worse before it gets better:

In July of 2017, according to a study by American Public Media, the secretary of state’s office, under a “use it or lose it” policy, and allegedly as part of an effort to prevent voter fraud, cancelled the registrations of a hundred thousand voters who hadn’t voted in seven years. Kemp also enacted an “exact match” policy, which required information on voter-registration applications to precisely match information on other official records. Something as minor as a missing hyphen could put a registration on hold. The registrations of fifty-three thousand voters, seventy per cent of whom were African-American, were set aside for review. The race drew national attention as more complaints were lodged, including reports that residents who had become citizens were wrongly informed that they could not vote. Voters who requested absentee ballots said that they never received them. The state Democratic Party reported that forty-seven hundred absentee-ballot requests from DeKalb County, which is more than fifty per cent black, had gone missing.

Four days before the election, U.S. District Court Judge Eleanor Ross ruled that the exact-match policy presented a “severe burden” for voters, and allowed three thousand new citizens whose registrations had been held up to vote. The day before the election, the Brennan Center brought a lawsuit on behalf of Common Cause Georgia, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that focusses on election integrity, alleging that a vulnerability in the registration database left it open to hacking, and requested that Kemp’s office insure that provisional ballots be properly counted. On Election Day, November 6th, there were numerous reports that polling places ran out of provisional ballots; residents of Gwinnett County, a heavily minority district outside Atlanta, had to wait in lines for hours to vote.

Lawyers for the Abrams campaign sought more time for ballots to be examined; a margin of less than one per cent would have triggered a recount. The next Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg ordered Kemp to open a hotline so that voters could determine if their provisional ballots had been counted. The state had planned to certify the results the next day, but Totenberg ordered that no certification occur before 5 p.m. that Friday. By the end of the week, though, it became clear that there would not be a recount, and, on the night of November 16th, Abrams gave a speech in which she said, “I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor of the 2018 gubernatorial election. But to watch an elected official—who claims to represent the people of this state—baldly pin his hopes for election on the suppression of the people’s democratic right to vote has been truly appalling. So, to be clear, this is not a speech of concession.”

Many people in and outside Georgia believe that, without the irregularities, Abrams would have won. In early June, in Atlanta, Joe Biden, the front-runner for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination, told the African American Leadership Summit that “voter suppression is the reason Stacey Abrams isn’t governor.” Addressing the same event, Pete Buttigieg said, “Stacey Abrams ought to be governor right now.”