One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

As Georgia prepared for the midterm elections, then, all was not well. There was a secretary of state running for governor, one who held onto his current job while striving for a higher elected office, creating an ethical conflict of interest that he flat-out refused to resolve. There was a high-profile, statistical dead-heat governor’s race that promised to drive record voter turnout in the midst of widespread efforts at voter suppression. There were voting machines that were easily hackable with no auditable paper trail. Then, there was Kemp’s office, which was tasked with ensuring election integrity but was lax on cybersecurity and so dismissive of expert testimony that U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg admonished Kemp that “the Defendants and State election officials had buried their heads in the sand” and left the state’s election machinery vulnerable.150 There was also a refusal by Kemp’s office to use any of the ten million dollars from the federal government to buy new machines to replace those embargoed.151 And, an unwillingness to contact the court to release into use some of the seven hundred machines sequestered in Fulton County because of lawsuits. Altogether, a perfect electoral storm blew through Georgia. It was as chaotic, mismanaged, and frustrating as expected. Predictably, because of Kemp’s machinations, precincts “with particularly long lines [were] in African American neighborhoods.”