Early voting in Georgia began on Tuesday and just the number of votes cast has set records. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has been covering the contentious gubernatorial election and the shady tactics used by the GOP candidate, Brian Kemp, who also happens to be Georgia secretary of state and overseeing the election process.
He has not recused himself from those duties while running for governor against Georgia’s first black female contender, Stacey Abrams.
Although Kemp has been exposed for keeping 53,000 voter registration applications from being processed, 70 percent of which are voters in communities which are predominantly black, it seems he hasn’t been able to keep voter turnout from soaring. On the first day of early voting in the 2014 midterms, around 21,000 people showed up to cast their vote.
For these 2018 midterms, more than 69,000 Georgia voters came out to vote.
‘That’s more than triple the number of people four years ago. That number is super high, even though some voters experienced the kind of hurdles we have come to expect, particularly this year in Georgia…when you add in the mail-in ballots, more than 129,000 Georgians have voted already in advance of the November 6th election.’
Keeping 53,000 voters unregistered was not the only dubious attempt Kemp has made to suppress black votes. He’s also purged 1.5 million voters from the rolls that he said were “inactive,” although many of those voters say that’s untrue. His efforts go much farther than even that, however.
Other news stories have revealed arrests of Democratic aides and Georgians working to register black voters and college students, and Maddow has uncovered every moment of it. Abrams, for her part, has called on Kemp to resign in the face of such unconstitutional acts.
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