Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp said Thursday that his office could account for 55,000 people who were alleged to have been “missing” from the state’s voting rolls as he blasted accusations that his office failed to keep track of them
“We should not have to waste valuable resources on a frivolous lawsuit,” Kemp said, adding that his accusers, including Democratic U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Atlanta, should apologize and “stop throwing out random numbers and baseless accusations.”
It's the first time Kemp has commented since the national Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights filed suit last week against him and five Georgia counties, asking a state judge to make sure everyone who registered by the state's Oct. 6 deadline will be able to vote in the Nov. 4 election.
Kemp said his office has now confirmed nearly 40,000 of those voters are active and on the rolls. He said almost 10,000 more are on a “pending” voter registration list kept by individual counties, meaning those potential voters have been asked to provide more information to confirm their identities.
In both cases, Kemp urged any voter with questions about his or her registration status to contact a local registrar or check online at www.mvp.sos.ga.gov. He also launched a new email address to accept voter registration queries — Kemp@sos.ga.gov — and said voters could call his office at 404-656-2871.
At least an additional 6,000 registration forms involved so-called “canceled” voters. That could mean they are deceased. Or are barred from voting because of felony convictions. Other could not be traced because the forms were missing key tracking information such as a valid address or ZIP code. As an example, Kemp said one was listed for “Johnny Beecool” in a city of “Yo Town.”
The lawsuit came in direct response to the handling of voter registration applications by the state and Chatham, Clayton, DeKalb, Fulton and Muscogee counties as the forms were submitted by the New Georgia Project, a Democratic-backed group under investigation by Kemp over accusations of voter registration fraud. The suit also covers forms submitted by the state NAACP.
That a number of forms were incomplete or impossible to process came as no surprise. House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, D-Atlanta, who founded the New Georgia Project, said as much last month when Kemp issued a subpoena demanding its records. State law required the group to turn over every form it gathered — no matter its content — as part of a registration drive that resulted in more than 85,000 new applications to the state’s voter system.
Leaders of the New Georgia Project, however, said they needed more detail to understand the count provided by Kemp. Without it, they were unclear whether all their applications had been processed or accounted for.
Abrams and others have for weeks urged Kemp to publicly provide the kind of update he did Thursday, which Abrams hinted could have prevented a broader legal spat.
“Yet despite our own cooperation and transparency, this effort has been met with dangerous delays, misinformation and inaccuracies,” Abrams said. “Secretary Kemp repeatedly refused to meet to discuss these processing issues, and absent transparency from his office, we were forced to pursue legal action to ensure Georgians’ right to vote.”
Last week, Lawyers’ Committee attorney Julie Houk said it appeared more than 50,000 of the paper forms submitted by the group seemed to be lost in the state’s voting system. They neither appeared on voter rolls nor did they show up on lists of “pending” voter registrants who have been asked to provide more information to verify who they are, she said.
An additional 5,000 of the forms appeared on pending lists, but Houk said some of the forms showed the information originally submitted — such as the last four digits of a person’s Social Security number — to be accurate. In other words, the Lawyers’ Committee questioned why these voters must provide additional proof of identification.
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