House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Chairman Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) on Wednesday sent two separate letters regarding "voter suppression" in Georgia. The duo sent letters to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) requesting documents related to reports of Georgians "unprecedented challenges with registering to vote and significant barriers to casting their votes during the 2018 election."
Specifically, the pair cites the following as reasons for concern:
• Secretary of State cancelled voter registrations for more than 1.4 million Georgians. 670,000 of those cancellations took place in 2017 alone.
• In 2018, 53,000 voters, mostly minorities, attempted to register to vote but the Secretary of State put their application on hold.
• Officials considered closing nearly all polling sites in one majority African American county, although they ultimately relented after public scrutiny.
• More than 200 polling places have closed since 2012.
• Voters in minority-heavy counties waited hours to vote even though there were unused polling machines in government warehouses.
• An unusually high number of "undervotes" for Lt. Gov. among African American voters during the 2018 general election.
It's interesting to note that Georgia passed an "exact match" law in 2017, meaning a voter registration application had to match a government-issued driver's license, state ID card or Social Security records. Sometimes records are placed on hold for small errors, like missing hyphen in a last name, a discrepancy between a maiden name and a married name, or a misspelling in government records, the AJC reported.
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The complaints made in the letters are very similar – if not the same – to Stacey Abrams' claims since her election loss to Kemp in November.
Abrams lost by a little more than 50,000. She claimed that Kemp's leadership as Secretary of State was the reason she lost, citing "voting suppression."
Let's be honest. This is another tactic by the Democrats to blame a loss on someone else other than themselves.
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