ICYMI: New Report Shows Brian Kemp Wrote the Rules to Get Himself Elected Governor — And Now He’s Trying to Go Even Further 

AJC report concludes that under Kemp’s watch, precinct closures harmed voter turnout in Georgia

Atlanta — As Governor Brian Kemp and his allies plan to purge over 300,000 Georgians from the voter rolls tonight, a bombshell new report last week from the AJC found that Kemp’s voter suppression tactics as Secretary of State likely kept 54,000 to 85,000 Georgians from voting last year — in an election where Democrats were within 17,000 votes of a runoff. 

These latest numbers should come as no surprise given Kemp’s history of fighting against voting rights. Kemp is an expert in voter suppression who spent years implementing policies with one goal in mind: making it harder for Georgians to vote. Under his tenure as Secretary of State, Kemp canceled 1.4 million voter registrations and launched investigations against organizations that registered 200,000 new Asian-American and African American voters.

Kemp admitted in his own words why he was so eager to suppress the vote:

Democrats are working hard registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines. If they can do that, they can win these elections in November.

“Brian Kemp and his allies are still on the same destructive mission to make it harder for Georgians to vote after spending the last election doing everything in their power to rig the outcome,” said Maggie Chambers, spokeswoman for the Democratic Party of Georgia. “Now, we have more proof than ever that Brian Kemp’s only legacy as Secretary of State will be stealing the Governor’s mansion and keeping thousands of Georgians from exercising their most basic democratic right.” 

Other voter suppression tactics from Kemp’s playbook that helped fix the election in his favor  include putting 53,000 voter registrations on hold under the “exact match” law he lobbied for, under which a discrepancy as small as a misplaced hyphen could block a voter’s application to register. And from 2012 to 2018, precinct closures and relocations under Kemp’s watch also doubled the average Georgia voter’s distance to a polling place.

Read more on how devastating Kemp’s voter suppression was for Georgia voters:

AJC: Closures accelerated after Supreme Court invalidated Voting Rights Act provision, putting thousands farther from the polls

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