Just after five o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, five Georgia voters, represented by the D.C.-based, nonprofit, nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, filed an injunction in a U.S. district court in Atlanta, attempting to prevent Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp “from exercising any further powers of the Secretary of State’s Office in presiding over the 2018 general election, in which he himself is a candidate.” So far, Kemp has resisted numerous calls for his resignation as secretary of state, including, predictably, from Stacey Abrams, his Democrat opponent, and also the former President and Georgia resident Jimmy Carter.
Protect Democracy and its five plaintiffs are seeking a temporary restraining order that would prevent Kemp from counting votes, certifying results, or “any runoff or recount procedures that would normally be exercised by the Secretary of State’s Office or the Board of Elections, on which Kemp also sits.” (The Libertarian candidate, Ted Metz, could garner enough votes to force a runoff.) It’s typical for these kinds of temporary restraining orders to be filed on Election Day.
As Georgia’s secretary of state, Kemp has faced numerous allegations of voter suppression during his gubernatorial candidacy, including for his role in an unsuccessful effort to shut down polling locations serving minorities in southern Georgia, and also for putting the voter registrations of fifty-three thousand state residents “on hold.” On Friday, a federal judge struck down a restrictive “exact match” policy that Kemp implemented, which Protect Democracy argued “jeopardized the ability of over three thousand individuals to vote because their voter registrations had minor discrepancies with their official identification documents.”
Full Article: Midterms 2018: Voters Ask a Federal Judge to Bar Brian Kemp from Counting Ballots in Georgia | The New Yorker.