U.S. Rep. John Lewis and the New Georgia Project continued their call Monday for state and local officials to move quickly to process outstanding voter registration applications.
Monday was the deadline to register to vote in the November elections, and with early voting beginning next week, Lewis and the group’s leaders said the state must act now.
Lewis, a Democrat from Atlanta, said Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican, “has picked sides in this election.”
“It seems he is not on the side of the people of this state,” Lewis said.
The New Georgia Project believes that more than 40,000 Georgians who filed voter registration forms have yet to be added to the voter rolls. Those 40,000 applications cannot be located either in county election offices or the secretary of state’s system.
State House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, D-Atlanta, the founder of the New Georgia Project, said those applicants “are not showing up anywhere,” and her group wants to know why.
The situation has become something of a blame game. Kemp spokesman Jared Thomas said the Secretary of State’s Office has asked the New Georgia Project repeatedly to provide a database of names of those missing applications.
“Until names are provided to us there is no way to investigate that,” Thomas said, adding that any applications “that have come into our office have been sent immediately to the counties.”
New Georgia Project spokeswoman Kristal Swim, however, said the group has never been asked to provide those names.
“The secretary of state has not asked for a list of the individuals that we cannot find on the voter rolls, but as the chief election official, he has access to those forms,” Swim said. “This has not been his concern to this point.”
The dust-up comes as Kemp’s office and the New Georgia Project spar over some three dozen voter registration forms the group turned in — among more than 80,000 — that appear to be fraudulent. Kemp is investigating and has subpoenaed records from Abrams’ group, although Kemp has said investigators do not believe any of the organization’s leaders are involved.
Meanwhile, counties continue to deal with a backlog of voter registration applications, including thousands in Fulton County alone.
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