Stacy Abrams, a hero for our times, as reported by Marin Cogan in NYMag:
Last month, the woman behind a massive effort to transform Georgia from a GOP stronghold to a potential swing state this year got news she wasn’t expecting — her wildly successful voter-registration effort was being investigated for fraud. Now, two weeks before the election, she’s locked in a fight with the state’s election officials to make sure the people she registered are able to turn out on Election Day. Whether they’re able to cast ballots could have major implications for the election. Both Michelle Nunn, the Democratic Senate candidate, and Jason Carter, the candidate for governor, are in extremely close races. The voter registration effort sought out mostly minority voters, and those voters tend to pick Democrats. In a close contest, their participation could determine whether the Democrats win.
Stacey Abrams, the engineer of the effort, is a star in Georgia politics: In 2006, at the age of 32, she ran for Georgia’s House of Representatives; four years later, she became the chamber’s Minority Leader, making her the first African-American to lead the House and the first woman to lead a party in either chamber…
Georgia’s legislature is part-time; one of Abrams’s many other hats is running a nonprofit that acts as a consulting firm for small, charitable organizations. That work positioned her to see the massive change in demographics taking place in Georgia — the population of the state has increased by 18 percent over the last decade, and many of those new residents are young people and minorities. At the same time, Georgia had a huge number of people — 700,000 to 800,000 African American, Hispanic, and Asian residents — who weren’t even registered to vote. Abrams decided to start the New Georgia Project, an offshoot of her nonprofit, which aimed to work with other voter-registration groups and sign up 100,000 new voters before the October 6 registration deadline…
Abrams knew before she began that the stakes would be high, and that if they were successful, opponents of the effort would likely try to complain about the registration forms, so she says she called the Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp in June to tell him about their effort, and Kemp assigned them an investigator. Abrams said they worked with the secretary of state’s office to make sure their processes were compliant. “I had a very good working relationship with the secretary of state. As the minority leader, I’ve worked very close with him at the capital and always had [a] very cordial relationship with him.” In September, a few weeks before the registration deadline, Kemp’s office announced it was subpoenaing the New Georgia Project for an investigation into suspected voter-registration fraud. The investigation was based on 25 voter-registration forms that were suspected to be fraudulent…
But that isn’t New Georgia Project’s only concern: They’re also raising flags about 50,000 voter-registration forms they say haven’t been processed. On Friday, the national legal group Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights announced it would sue the secretary of state and five counties because the voters they registered had not turned up on the voter rolls or the list of pending voters who needed to verify their information with the state…
Kemp’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the missing forms, but in a fact sheet released about both the investigation and the missing forms, said, “At no time in history has it been easier to register to vote in Georgia than it is right now,” and claimed that both complaints about fraudulent forms and responsibility for processing registration applications fell to the county level. “Any backlog would need to be addressed by county election officials,” the fact sheet says.
But Kemp was also recorded earlier this year saying, “Democrats are working hard, and all these stories about them, you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines, if they can do that, they can win these elections in November.” …