As federal judge orders Georgia to count tossed-out ballots
Voter suppression looms large in 2018 US elections
By
Kranti Kumara
27 October 2018
In the upcoming 2018 nationwide federal and state elections, many Republican-controlled state governments have intentionally adopted barefaced tactics to suppress voting rights, especially of minority and poor voters. Deliberate voter suppression has become a highly contentious issue with barely two weeks left before Election Day on November 6, when voters cast ballots for all 435 members of the US House of Representatives, 35 US Senators, 36 state governorships, and thousands of members of state legislatures.
Nowhere is this tactic being practiced more energetically than in the southeastern US state of Georgia, where the Republican Party’s candidate for governor, Brian Kemp, is also overseeing the elections as its current secretary of state. Despite this glaring conflict of interest, Kemp has refused to recuse himself from his current position.
An arch-reactionary who ran as the most pro-Trump of all the Republican candidates, Kemp has spewed venom against undocumented immigrants, going so far as to state that he may “round up criminal illegals” in his own pick-up truck “and take them home.”
Kemp has taken a central role in voter suppression. In July 2017, just after announcing his candidacy, he and his cohorts in the Secretary of State’s office purged over 500,000 voters from the registration rolls. In an audio recording obtained by Rolling Stone magazine, in remarks to a group of campaign donors, Kemp expressed his concern about his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams spending millions of dollars to mobilize voters, especially those casting absentee ballots.
In the audio recording, Kemp openly states: “They…