Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp heads to court Friday to defend the state’s voting system.
But the lawsuit by what he calls a “liberal group of lawyers from Washington, D.C.,” is just the latest in a string of public controversies that have engulfed the office over the past few years.
Now, less than two weeks before the Nov. 4 vote, the state’s election chief is saying the public should have confidence in his office’s ability, even as he has acknowledged that problems created by budget cuts and unfunded mandates have led to fewer staff and more service glitches. And he is emphasizing successes, including the launch of one of the nation’s first online voter registration systems and mobile apps — which more than 70,000 people have used.
The national Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights says tens of thousands of voters who it believes registered properly have been lost in the system. Kemp, who faces Democratic challenger Doreen Carter in the election, disputes that.
“There are no lost voter registration applications,” Kemp said Sunday evening in a debate organized by the Atlanta Press Club. “Every single one of them that met the deadline of Oct. 6 for the general election has been processed.”
In his campaign, Kemp is touting efforts to modernize the office he first stepped into four years ago. The office has implemented a new statewide voter registration system over the past two years. Kemp, himself, pursued the ability for voters to register or make registration changes online. He has also overseen the automation of many of the office’s other responsibilities, including online renewal of professional licenses.
It has not all gone smoothly.
An oversight by lawmakers in 2011 when they passed a stringent state immigration law led to massive backlogs for professional license renewals. Mounds of paperwork overwhelmed office staff in Macon, as applicants had to prove they had “secure and verifiable” identification every time they renewed their licenses.
Lawmakers passed a fix in 2013 — the same year they transferred control of the Georgia Archives away from the Secretary of State’s Office. The move, worked out by Gov. Nathan Deal, came seven months after Kemp’s office announced layoffs at the Archives and the cancellation of public hours. By then, his office’s overall budget had been reduced by 40 percent and it had lost 30 percent of its people.
“The only other option would have been to take that cut at our licensing division or our corporations division, which would have cost people the ability to get into the workforce,” said Kemp, whose office has also lost oversight of several professional boards that make rules for, among others, pharmacists, nurses and — as of July 1 — accountants.
“I will just tell you it is a matter of resources,” he said. “The licenses pay in $24 million a year in licensing fees. The Secretary of State’s Office licensing division is appropriated about one-third of that.”
Now comes a lawsuit targeting the elections division, filed in Fulton County Superior Court and being heard for the first time at Friday’s 9 a.m. hearing.
The Lawyers’ Committee wants proof how the state and four Georgia counties — Chatham, Clayton, Fulton and Muscogee — handled the applications of what it initially said were more than 55,000 voters submitted by the state’s deadline. That number has likely dropped. The group dismissed DeKalb County from the case earlier this week after reaching an agreement.
The remedy could include mandating that either the state or counties hire more staff to process the applications or investigate where they went. It could also include a court-appointed monitor to issue recommendations.
“Something as small as a hyphenated name can result in an application being flagged and ultimately canceled,” Lawyers’ Committee attorney Julie Houk said earlier this week. The group also believes that errors in the information being supplied to the counties by the state have caused applications from eligible Georgians to be flagged and canceled.
The result, they said, is that Georgia’s new registration system could keep voters from casting ballots — an assertion Kemp disputed.
“We have not had one single person come into our office saying, ‘I registered and I’m not on the rolls,’ ” he said.
About the Author
