ATLANTA, Georgia–Democrats in Georgia are crying foul over ruling made by a Fulton County Judge who dismissed a lawsuit filed by the NAACP and the New Georgia Project (NGP), a 501c3 founded by the state House’s Democratic minority leader, Stacey Abrams, against the state’s Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp and six local county election offices accusing the officials of not processing 50,000 pending voter registration applications.
“When they filed the lawsuit, I’m doing interviews with Politico, and L.A. Times and all those people. When they throw out the lawsuit–nothing, nothing. The AJC, the big paper out of Atlanta, had a little blip in the blog section,” said Georgia GOP spokesman Ryan Mahoney to Breitbart News.
“The only recourse the judge has allowed for these voters is provisional ballots and it’s our mission to make sure every provisional ballot cast is counted,” Abrams told The Hill. “My focus as head of the New Georgia Project is making sure that every provisional vote that’s cast that’s valid is counted and if it means going to court to do that we will certainly do that.”
The voter registration applications are a focus for Democrats given how close the Senate and Gubernatorial races are in Georgia between the Republican and Democratic candidates. Current Georgia law (O.C.G.A § 21-2-417) mandates that Georgia residents show photo identification when voting in person, and black Democrats continue to pound the GOP in the Peach state for it.
“So it’s been one of those things that it’s been this battle and I still deal with it on a daily basis where Democrats are still calling Kemp names and then you send them the link and then they’re like, ‘Oh, okay.’ But the original investigation into the voter fraud is still ongoing. So they’re still collecting that information. The New Georgia Project has not been completely forthright with providing the subpoenaed information and then this lawsuit kind of trumped data collection at that point,” he said.
Kemp’s office has also been trying to remind people his office does not process voter registration forms. Mahoney points out that the process is done on a county level. “It’s interesting that the counties that were sued in this lawsuit were all Democrat counties with election courts that were run by Democrats.”
According to Mahoney, the New Georgia Project initially refused to provide information pertaining to applications for voter registrations they collected several months ago, so Kemp launched an investigation into the New Georgia Project after he received several complaints from county election officials that NGP had potentially fraudulent voter registration applications after they were received complaints from voters.
Mahoney explained, “Voters who would say, ‘Yeah, these people approached our door and said we had to register again or said that we weren’t registered. We needed to register even though we were registered or that it was already filled out and they said that we had to sign this or we’d get trouble.’ So Kemp launches an investigation.”
At that point, Kemp’s office sent out subpoenas to the New Georgia Project and, according to Mahoney, around that time is when “the New Georgia Project started to raise Cain and have kind of publicity stunts at the Capitol and call Kemp a racist and somebody who is trying to suppress voters.”
The bipartisan state elections board met to see if there was enough evidence to have a full scale investigation. They agreed to do so and moved forward it.
“In that first round, that kind of general investigation was to kind of see if they needed to launch a full scale investigation, they found upwards of a hundred fraudulent voter registration applications,” said Mahoney.
He added, “So the spin from the New Georgia Project was, ‘Well that’s only a hundred.’ And the New Georgia Project has claimed they submitted 50,000 voter registration applications, although that number has yet to be verified. They said that and Kemp pushed back and said, ‘Every count of voter fraud could essentially carry up to 10 years.’ It’s a felony. So this is a big deal. So they continue to press on.”
New Georgia Project refused to provide the list of 50,000 and eventually provided a list to the media, The WSJ reported, citing privacy. Eventually a list was provided to Kemp’s office
“40,000 of the 50,000 were already registered to vote in the system–all good to go. Five thousand of them were being processed. They were submitted with inadequate information and letters had been sent by county election offices requiring more details,” said Mahoney. “And then the rest of the group were made up names–were felons or were duplicates.”
Kemp said one of the applications listed a “Johnny B. Good” in a city of “Yo Town,” The Atlanta Journal Contitution reported recently.
Mahoney points out that voting in Georgia has also never been easier. “We now have voter registration on your smart phone and on your computer, so you can register to vote anywhere, anytime, anyplace. And so going through the old signing the paper and sending it in, you don’t need to do that anymore. So they’re calling (Kemp) a suppressionist and he’s reminding people yet again that voter registration is easy.”
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