Georgia's Voting Problems Are Now Under House Investigation

The letter that the House Committee on Oversight and Reform sent to Georgia’s new governor dated March 6th had a quite a few footnotes. All of them, save one, cited a media report covering various problems with voting in Georgia during this last election season: voter purges and suspensions, malfunctioning and hackable machines, and efforts to close precincts and polling places. Every one of those issues contributed to the climate of voter suppression that overtook Georgia even as its top elections official, the now-former Secretary of State Brian Kemp, ultimately ascended to the governor’s office in November’s election with a close victory over former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams. To recap: Kemp won a contest of which he was in charge, all while refusing federal help as the state’s voting systems appeared to be crumbling around him.

Was that due to Kemp’s incompetence, intentions, or both? We may soon know quite a bit more, now that he is officially under Congressional investigation. Thanks to all that media attention — and, of course, the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives — Kemp received that letter Wednesday from Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the chair of the subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Abrams’ Fair Fight Action had already filed a big lawsuit that threatens to place Georgia elections under federal supervision for up to a decade, and now Kemp is being compelled to turn over documents related to damn near every possible nook and cranny of his Secretary of State operation.

Hours after news of the letter broke, Raskin spoke to Rolling Stone about why voting rights are at the forefront of their oversight agenda, and why Georgia became an immediate priority for their committee.

What, precisely, prompted this letter?

It was a massive assault on voting rights in a bunch of different states. In North Dakota, in Georgia, in Texas. We have a constitutional duty to render oversight about the integrity of our elections. We’re not going to be able to delve into every single state, but we want to take at least a few of them and examine what happened in the 2018 election.

Georgia jumped out for me because potentially hundreds of thousands of people were falsely disenfranchised through these voter purges.


But all we’re going on, of course, is media reports and the statements of Stacey Abrams, which seem credible. But we want to actually get to the facts directly to find out what happened and in order to determine how to make sure there’s no repeat in the next cycle.

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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/raskin-brian-kemp-georgia-voting-problems-investigation-804646/