THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 33
selling out the students because they got
ten to twenty per cent less. To me, eighty
per cent is a lot more than zero.”
Then came the 2013 Supreme Court
decision in Shelby County v. Holder,
which struck down as unconstitutional
a provision of the Voting Rights Act
that had required Georgia and other
states with a history of discriminatory
voter suppression to get “preclearance”
from the Justice Department or from a
federal court before changing their vot-
ing regulations. Legislatures and elected
officials in the South and elsewhere im-
mediately embarked on efforts to dis-
enfranchise voters. (Earlier this month,
the Brennan Center for Justice reported
that seventeen million Americans had
been purged from the voter roles be-
tween 2016 and 2018, and that the larg-
est increases in purges were in states that
had previously been under preclearance.)
Abrams launched, and became a part-
time C.E.O. of, the New Georgia Proj-
ect, a nonprofit organization devoted to
registering overlooked constituencies:
young people, women, people of color.
There were conflicts early on—crit-
ics noted Abrams’s $177,000 salary, and,
in 2014, Kemp’s office, acting on reports
that the group was submitting fraudu-
lent registration forms, began an inves-
tigation of more than eighty thousand
forms. The Lawyers’ Committee for
Civil Rights Under Law filed a suit on
behalf of the New Georgia Project and
the state N.A.A.C.P., alleging that the
state had wrongfully held up thousands
of forms submitted by the group; a judge
found that the suit lacked sufficient ev-
idence. Ultimately, Kemp’s office iden-
tified fifty-three registrations as poten-
tially fraudulent; all of them had been
submitted by canvassers who were hired
and paid by outside companies that the
New Georgia Project had contracted.
Kemp’s investigators found no evidence
of wrongdoing by the group, and the
matter was referred to the state attor-
ney general’s office, where it still awaits
possible civil action. The battle proved
to be a prelude to 2018.
B
y 2018, Republicans had won the
previous four gubernatorial races in
the state, but political strategists were
beginning to think that a black candi-
date who could perform respectably in
rural areas and over-perform in the
Democratic strongholds around the cit-
ies could win. Abrams decided to run,
on a platform of Medicaid expansion,
affordable housing, criminal-justice re-
form, and gun control. She defeated the
former state representative Stacey Evans
in the primary, in a contest cast as the
Battle of the Staceys.
Kemp had also decided to run, and
he campaigned on an anti-immigra-
tion, pro-gun platform,
supporting tax cuts and
opposing Medicaid ex-
pansion. Trump endorsed
him, and after a primary
runoff he became the Re-
publican nominee. But
he didn’t resign his office,
which meant that he over-
saw an election in which
he himself was a candi-
date—a conflict of interest
that Abrams likened to a boxing match
in which one fighter is also the referee
and one of the judges.
Kemp, who described himself as a “po-
litically incorrect conservative,” did not
endear himself to the emerging elector-
ate. He appeared in campaign ads with
a truck that he said he drove in case he
needed to round up “criminal illegals.”
Another ad accused Abrams of “dancing
around the truth” of her financial history,
while showing a clip of tap-dancing feet.
Some viewers saw this as a racist refer-
ence to minstrelsy. (Abrams had disclosed
that she was two hundred thousand dol-
lars in debt, citing student loans and the
costs of helping support family members.
She also owed the I.R.S. more than fifty
thousand dollars in deferred tax payments,
which she said she was repaying. She
noted that three-quarters of Americans
are in debt, and that it shouldn’t prevent
them from running for office.)
Kemp’s office declined to comment
on the election for this piece, though
he has called reports of voter suppres-
sion “a farce.” A spokesperson pointed
to a new report from the U.S. Election
Assistance Commission that lists Geor-
gia as the leading state for voter registra-
tion through its motor-vehicle depart-
ment. But there was a broad range of
complaints during the campaign. In July
of 2017, according to a study by Ameri-
can Public Media, the secretary of state’s
office, under a “use it or lose it” policy, and
allegedly as part of an effort to prevent
voter fraud, cancelled the registrations of
a hundred thousand voters who hadn’t
voted in seven years. Kemp also enacted
an “exact match” policy, which required
information on voter-registration appli-
cations to precisely match information
on other official records. Something as
minor as a missing hyphen could put a
registration on hold. The registrations
of fifty-three thousand voters, seventy
per cent of whom were
African-American, were
set aside for review. The
race drew national atten-
tion as more complaints
were lodged, including re-
ports that residents who
had become citizens were
wrongly informed that
they could not vote. Vot-
ers who requested absen-
tee ballots said that they
never received them. The state Demo-
cratic Party reported that forty-seven
hundred absentee-ballot requests from
DeKalb County, which is more than fifty
per cent black, had gone missing.
Four days before the election, U.S.
District Court Judge Eleanor Ross ruled
that the exact-match policy presented
a “severe burden” for voters, and allowed
three thousand new citizens whose reg-
istrations had been held up to vote. The
day before the election, the Brennan
Center brought a lawsuit on behalf of
Common Cause Georgia, a nonprofit,
nonpartisan organization that focusses
on election integrity, alleging that a vul-
nerability in the registration database
left it open to hacking, and requested
that Kemp’s office insure that provi-
sional ballots be properly counted. On
Election Day, November 6th, there were
numerous reports that polling places
ran out of provisional ballots; residents
of Gwinnett County, a heavily minority
district outside Atlanta, had to wait in
lines for hours to vote.
Lawyers for the Abrams campaign
sought more time for ballots to be ex-
amined; a margin of less than one per
cent would have triggered a recount.
The next Monday, U.S. District Court
Judge Amy Totenberg ordered Kemp
to open a hotline so that voters could
determine if their provisional ballots
had been counted. The state had planned
to certify the results the next day, but
Totenberg ordered that no certification
