Today, the Democratic Party of Georgia will hold a rally calling for Brian Kemp’s resignation as Georgia Secretary of State.
Protesters will gather with State elected officials at 3 p.m. at the Georgia State Capitol in response to the 53,000 voter registrations on hold by the Kemp’s office. The registrations have been held up due to Kemp’s suppressive “exact match” policy, according to an Associated Press report. Nearly 70 percent of affected Georgians are African American. Although officials say those registrants can cast provisional ballots, there is no guarantee that their votes will be counted.
Abrams for Governor Director of Strategic Communication Abigail Collazo released the following statement in response to the report:
“As he has done for years, Brian Kemp is maliciously wielding the power of his office to suppress the vote for political gain and silence the voices of thousands of eligible voters – the majority of them people of color. This isn’t incompetence; it’s malpractice. It is no surprise that Kemp is reprising these tactics now when multiple recent polls show his race against Stacey Abrams to be a dead heat, as her message of jobs, health care, and public education is resonating with voters. The Secretary of State’s office must do away with the discriminatory “exact match” program and process all voter registrations immediately. In addition, Brian Kemp needs to resign his position, so that Georgia voters can have confidence that their Secretary of State competently and impartially oversee this election.”
The Democratic Party of Georgia has also launched a change.org petition calling on Kemp to resign.
The language of the petition is as follows:
We are voters from across Georgia. We are fed up with Brian Kemp’s long effort to disenfranchise voters. He purged 1.4 million people from the rolls. 214 polling locations have closed under his watch. And now, he is holding up the voter registrations of 53,000 Georgians as the election nears. Brian Kemp cannot be trusted to run an election in which he is a candidate at the top of the ticket. We demand that he resign.