Fraud in the Secretary of State's office, while claiming to be investigating voter fraud

Better Georgia, a liberal advocacy group, has an audio recording of Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp addressing a Gwinnett County GOP breakfast meeting last December saying that, if Democrats are successful in their voter registration drive, "they can win these elections in November."

Now we are less than two months before those elections, and Kemp's office has launched an investigation into the voter registration activities of the New Georgia Project, a voter registration group founded by State House Minority Leader Stacey Adams.

Available evidence suggests that these are trumped up exaggerations of the expected minor flaws in registration forms.    The group says it has collected some 85,000 registration forms, although not all of those have yet been processed and turned over to the SofS office.

Abrams said that fewer than 25 forms are being investigated, and that the Project had been working with the SofS office from the beginning, pointing out to them some of the incomplete or flawed forms that they were submitting.

The fact is that state law requires that voter registration projects turn in ALL forms, even if they are incomplete or have mistakes.   Adams says they knew a certain number were incomplete but they were obeying the law by turning them in.  "What we are being accused of is turning in the information we are required by law to turn in," she said.

That hardly consists of voter fraud -- or even voter registration fraud.   But of course that didn't stop the campaigns of Nathan Deal for governor and David Perdue for senator from slamming Democrats with these bogus charges and trying to turn it into a campaign issue.

It seems to me that Republican SofS Brian Kemp has some explaining to do.   Like so many other Republicans in state governments, he is misusing the power of his office to commit a fraudulent investigation intended to intimidate and suppress further voter registration efforts.

Combined with his comments to the Gwinnett group, how is this not abuse of the power?

And when are the voters going to wake up and think about what it means that, by all these actions, Republicans are essentially acknowledging that they can only win elections by suppressing voter turnout?

Ralph