Greg Palast: Brian Kemp's resignation is too little, too late

https://www.salon.com/2018/11/09/veteran-journalist-greg-palast-brian-kemps-resignation-is-too-little-too-late/

Veteran Journalist Greg Palast: Brian Kemp’s resignation is too little, too late

Brian Kemp resigns as Georgia Secretary of State amid reports that voting machines went unused as voters waited

MATTHEW ROZSA

NOVEMBER 9, 2018 12:00PM (UTC)

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp has announced that he is resigning as the governor's race between himself and his Democratic challenger, former State House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, remains too close to call.

The secretary of state's office announced that the resignation would become official as of 11:59 AM on Thursday, according to CNBC. Although Kemp's resignation means he wouldn't certify the state's votes once an official winner is declared, it does not address the fact that thousands of voter registrations were put on hold, massive voter purges occurred and technical problems required voters to stand on long lines on Election Day — all factors that could have cost Stacey Abrams the election. Her main hope now is that, when the final votes are counted, Kemp's total falls under 50 percent of the popular vote; if that happens, an automatic runoff will take place.

"Number One, Brian Kemp should have resigned as Secretary of State before he purged half a million Georgians, before he told the counties not to even hand out provisional ballots to people he had wrongly purged," Greg Palast, a journalist who created a website to help Georgia voters determine if they had been purged from the rolls, told Salon. "Two, he should have resigned before he started enforcing a system of exact match and other gimmicks that have basically suppressed the votes by literally the hundreds of thousands. To now to just come up with a gimmick like putting one of his flunkies in charge, a political hack in charge to replace him, is hardly blessing the election as fair and democratic."

"When you are removing — and my count from my experts is that we know that 340,134 people were absolutely, positively wrongly removed for moving who never moved at all — that's not the entire sum of people wrongly purged," Palast told Salon. "They don't all vote, okay? They don't all vote. Figure a third. Low-frequency voters. Even if 100,000 voted, we're looking at what, maybe, 50,000 provisional ballots? We don't know. Kemp won't even tell us."