[KEMP] I got a big truck - just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take them home myself.
[KEMP] Yep, I just said that.
That's Georgia Secretary of State, Brian Kemp.
He’s running for Governor of Georgia and he also controls who gets to vote for Governor of Georgia.
In 2017 alone, his office canceled nearly 670,000 voter registrations.
Now, his office has more than 53,000 voter registrations on hold,
nearly 70% of which belong to African-Americans.
Here’s how he got all that power:
[KEMP] We’re going to get along just fine.
Brian P. Kemp was grew up in Georgia’s northeastern blue city of Athens.
He attended Clarke Central High School where he played on the football and baseball teams before graduating in 1982.
He then went on to the University of Georgia where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in agriculture
and was a member of the Lambda Chi frat, graduating in 1987.
In 2002, Kemp was elected to the Georgia Senate where he served as chair of the Public Safety
and Homeland Security Committee until 2006.
After serving as a state senator, he was appointed secretary of state in 2010
by then Governor and current U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue.
[PERDUE] You like my tie? This is a Porsche tie, actually.
Kemp was reelected in 2014.
One of the main responsibilities the Secretary of State is overseeing the voter registration and election day process.
And ever since he took over the office, he’s been making it difficult for minorities to cast ballots.
Mother Jones notes that in 2012, a small organization registered over 1,400 new Asian American voters in Georgia.
But roughly a month before the election, some of the newly registered voters hadn’t been sent their voter registration cards
and others who tried to vote early were turned away.
The organization contacted Brian Kemp’s office to no avail,
so it went public with the issue and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a story on the voter disenfranchisement
which finally got Kemp’s attention.
And instead of registering these Georgia citizens,
Kemp launched an investigation into the organization and,
of course, found no wrongdoing.
In 2014, Kemp’s office mishandled 40,000 Georgians voting registrations,
a majority of whom were people of color.
The next year, in 2015, two Georgia residents filed a class action lawsuit against Kemp
for sending CDs containing personal data from six million voters to twelve media organizations,
political parties, and other groups.
The CDs are normally sent out to these groups,
but this batch of six million contained birth dates,
social security and driver's license numbers.
Kemp blamed the fiasco on an IT employee, who his office ended up firing.
This fumble forced Georgia to cough up $1.2 million
for a year’s worth of credit monitoring for the millions of Georgians affected.
In 2016, as evidence of Russian hackers attempting to meddle in the election was building,
Obama sent DHS secretary Jeh Johnson to work with states to secure their voting systems.
Every single state besides Brian Kemp’s Georgia worked with Johnson to secure their voting systems.
At the time, Kemp said that Russian hackers couldn’t get into the voting systems.
Kemp must have a lot of faith in Windows 2000 because that’s exactly what Georgia’s voting systems are running on.
The machines have received an F- rating from the Free Congress Foundation.
F- is really bad.
In July 2017, a lawsuit was filed against the state
in an effort to overturn the 6th District Special Election between Democrat Jon Ossoff and the Republican who won,
Karen Handel.
Brian Kemp was named in the lawsuit which was seeking a re-examination
of Georgia’s vulnerable voting system.
Kemp’s office was notified of the lawsuit by the press a day after getting hit with it,
they declined to comment.
Three days after his office was notified, the servers were completely wiped,
destroying any evidence.
Two backup servers were also wiped a month later.
Initially, Kemp blamed it on “undeniable ineptitude” of the technicians who allegedly wiped the servers.
But later, Kemp said the wiping was a standard operating procedure performed any time servers were taken out of service.
As Slate noted, “Two things could have happened here.
Either way, Kemp came out on top of the gubernatorial primary election
after a tape surfaced of his opponent saying he supports “bad public policy”
if it’s to undercut a political opponent.
And then Trump endorsed Kemp and that was that, the underdog won.
[AD] President Trump has made his choice: Brian Kemp for Governor.
Kemp has been stumping across the state and also reportedly on the gay dating app Grindr.
His advertisements for governor are reportedly being floated around the app,
which is ironic considering he said he’d vote for the “religious freedom” bill,
which would legalize discrimination against the LGBTQ community.
According to the Kemp campaign website, among other talking points, he’s “putting Georgians first”.
But he’s not actually putting all Georgians first.
He’s still overseeing the election and voting process in an election in which he is a candidate.
And he’s taking full advantage of his power.
Voter registration applications have been held in Georgia under “exact match”
which means the information listed on the voter application
must match the information on a driver’s license or the federal Social Security database.
Something as small as a missing hyphen or an accidental space can result in a hold.
Georgia had to bring the “exact match” program to the Justice Department,
which first rejected it back in 2009, stating the proposed law would be discriminatory.
But the next year, when Kemp took office,
it cleared the Justice Department after he included a few new safeguards —
safeguards he obviously hasn’t adhered to.
And voting rights groups say that at the time the Justice Department cleared exact match,
the data that would have showed it was discriminatory
didn’t yet exist because the system hadn’t gone into effect.
And as a result, for the next seven years,
thousands and thousands of marginalized voters in Georgia would be disenfranchised.
A clear example of the disenfranchisement that followed
was brought to light when Georgia civil and voting rights groups sued Kemp in 2016.
The lawsuit noted that while 47.2 percent of voter registration applications since 2013
were submitted by white applicants,
only 13.6 percent of applicants rejected due to verification protocol were white.
Conversely, 29.4 percent of all applications belonged to African Americans,
but 63.6 percent of rejected applicants were Black.
Kemp’s office got caught and conceded, signing a settlement that ended exact match.
But just a few short months later, the Georgia legislature,
with help from Kemp’s office, passed a new law which is essentially just exact match 2.0.
The only difference is instead of giving voters 40 days to correct an error, they now get 26 months.
Going into the 2018 midterms, where Kemp - again - is running for Governor.
Kemp - according to the Associated Press - currently has more than 53,000
voter registration applications on hold- nearly 70% of which are from black voters.
Back in 2014, Kemp warned his Republican constituents that Democrats were
“working hard... registering all these minority voters.”
At a campaign event, Kemp said that Stacey Abrams’
voter turnout effort “continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote.”
So Kemp figured out a way to stop them from voting altogether.
In a deleted Youtube video from Kemp’s campaign,
voters got a very transparent look at who gets to vote and who doesn’t.
[AD] The process is exactly the same as voting in person on election day.
You will complete and sign a voter certificate.
Provide an acceptable form of photo identification
and then vote on an electronic voting machine.
If you don’t have an acceptable form of voting identification when you’re at the polling location,
both on election day and during advanced voting,
you can vote a provisional ballot.
If you vote a provisional ballot, you have three days after Election Day to return to your county’s election’s office
to show your photo identification for your ballot to be accepted and counted.
If you don’t return, your ballot will be rejected and it will not count.