Everyone’s vote counts, right? Of course, but not every vote has to be counted. This approach to voting is one the Kemp campaign, and a few other Republican politicians decided to take. As the midterm elections took place, many people, predominantly people of color had issues casting their ballot.
Many who voted Democratic had issues regarding their names and signatures. If their signatures did not identically matchup, they would not be allowed to vote. If their names did not always include a hyphen, they would not be allowed to vote even though they did not always control whether or not the hyphen was included in all government documents. Even if there were no technical issues with someone’s vote, if they turned in an absentee ballot, there might have been a chance it was not counted. (The Democrats are currently filing suit against Kemp over delayed votes.)
Along with these types of issues dealing with the voters themselves, entire polling places have had difficulties as well. Reports have been coming in regarding polling locations being closed off to the public, even having to call the fire department to break into the polling stations to allow voters to cast their ballots.
Certain polling locations were found to be in abandoned buildings. Multiple polling places reported having too few voting machines, broken machines or machines sent to them with no plugs. Machines were also found to be changing people’s votes from Abrams to Kemp.
With such a mess from this past election, one wonders who was in charge of it. The answer is Brian Kemp, the very same man who is running in the election he was in charge of. This is a clear conflict of interest, with many including the former president Jimmy Carter, calling for Kemps resignation as soon as his gubernatorial campaign began.
However, Kemp did not step down until after the election and all its voter suppression ended. Conservatives are doing everything they can to keep a hold on their districts, even if it means they have to fight dirty.
President Trump went to Twitter, to congratulate Kemp’s great race in Georgia and called for the Democrats to move on. However, there was nothing great about this race. The voter suppression directly affected people of color and calls back to the days of disenfranchisement and Jim Crow.
