{"id":384471,"date":"2018-11-10T04:06:55","date_gmt":"2018-11-10T03:06:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/this-was-a-strategy-from-kemp\/"},"modified":"2018-11-10T04:06:55","modified_gmt":"2018-11-10T03:06:55","slug":"this-was-a-strategy-from-kemp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/this-was-a-strategy-from-kemp\/","title":{"rendered":"“This Was a Strategy From Kemp”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Atlanta \u2014 \u201cI was blocked from voting for Stacey Abrams.\u201d Yasmin Bakhtiari is upset, horrified and determined. Her family had fled Iran for American democracy. But New York-born Yasmin found democracy disappeared now that she\u2019s located down in Brian Kemp\u2019s Dixie.<\/p>\n

Kemp, until Thursday, was Georgia\u2019s secretary of state in charge of voting \u2013 and in charge of \u201cmaintaining\u201d the voter rolls to make them more accurate. But he used that power to cancel more than half a million Georgian voter registrations without notice. <\/em><\/p>\n

Bakhtiari, who planned to vote for Kemp\u2019s Democratic opponent Abrams, said poll workers told her, \u201cYour name has been purged [from voter rolls] because you haven\u2019t voted in two election cycles.\u201d <\/p>\n

Yet, according to rights attorney Jeanne Mirer of Mirer, Mazzocchi and Julien, New York, \u201cThe National Voter Registration Act is crystal clear that you cannot lose your vote for not voting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Federal law doesn\u2019t mean a whole lot to Kemp. The GOP candidate aired commercials in which he boasted, \u201cI\u2019m so conservative I blow up government regulations\u201d \u2014 followed by dynamite exploding in the background.<\/p>\n

Kemp blew up a second federal law, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Bakhtiari said, \u201cNot only could I not vote, but they didn\u2019t even let me do the provisional ballot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Provisional ballots are required by HAVA specifically to allow voters wrongly purged to cast a ballot so the voter or candidates like Abrams can fight to have it counted by county officials or by court order.<\/p>\n

Bakhtiari knew she was entitled to the provisional ballot. She tried to get one in three attempts taking over two hours.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole process was designed to use any excuse to not have you vote,\u201d Bakhtiari said. \u201cThis was a strategy from Kemp to discourage people from voting.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Of course, Kemp had already ruled that counties cannot tally the ballots of…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Atlanta \u2014 \u201cI was blocked from voting for Stacey Abrams.\u201d Yasmin Bakhtiari is upset, horrified and determined. Her family had fled Iran for American democracy. But New York-born Yasmin found democracy disappeared now that she\u2019s located down in Brian Kemp\u2019s Dixie. Kemp, until Thursday, was Georgia\u2019s secretary of state in charge of voting \u2013 and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-384471","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}