If you’re a voter in Georgia, you may want to double check that you are still registered to vote. According to a recent report, there is a 1 in 10 chance that a voter in the state was purged from the voting rolls at some point in 2017, thanks to Georgia’s former Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, who is now running for governor. Journalist Greg Palast has been investigating The Purge since 2014, but was stonewalled by the politicians until he threatened them with a federal lawsuit. Mere hours before the deadline for the lawsuit, his team got a list of the purged names, and it included many, many Georgia voters. As Salon reports, Palast discovered that, under Kemp, the Georgia State Department “identified people as having moved out of state” or “moved out of congressional district,” and “should either be removed or forced to reregister.” However, according to Palast, Kemp’s team was overzealous and purged voters who were still in state, in the same district, and in one case, had simply moved from one side of a building to the other. Luckily, Georgia voters still have time to find out if they are registered to vote, but they have to act very quickly. Palast has set up a website where voters can find out if they were part of The Purge. If so, they can re-register here. However, this must be done by Tuesday or would-be voters will miss their chance to vote in the mid-terms.<doc-sep>EMERGENCY!! ! IF YOU VOTE IN GEORGIA, OR KNOW ANYONE WHO DOES, BE SURE TO CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING WEBSITE TO SEE IF YOU OR THEY HAVE BEEN PURGED FROM THE VOTER ROLLS AND TO GET HELP IN RE-REGISTERING BY TUESDAY. CLICK HERE. Georgia has purged nearly 10% of its registered voters –nearly 750,000 people from the voting rolls without their even knowing. The problem is that even if they find out they’ve been purged, unless they reregister by Tuesday, October 9th, they won’t be allowed to vote. According to Rolling Stone investigative reporter Greg Palast, approximately 750,000 Georgia voters have been purged. Palast reports that one of the purge's prime tools was Operation Crosscheck, the brainchild of Trump Voter-Suppresser-In-Chief Kris Kobach (Kansas’s Secretary of State who is in a dead head with Democrat Laura Kelly for Governor of Kansas.) It's designed to suppress the vote particularly of minority voters. The Georgia purge is led by Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp who is now running for Governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams, who could become the first African American governor in American history. Many of the people purged have Hispanic, Asian or African American names. So if your name is Hernandez, Kim, Jackson, or any common minority name, be particularly vigilant. SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Never Miss a Beat. Get our best delivered to your inbox. “Purge by junkmail” was Georgia’s method for eliminating 10% of the state’s voters. If you didn’t vote in 2014/2016, an innocuous postcard was sent to your mailbox. If you didn’t return this seeming piece of junk mail, you were tossed from the voter rolls. It’s true that some of the purges were legitimate, because voters had moved out of the state or district or passed away. But tens or hundreds of thousands more were purged for ignoring junk mail. According to Palast, “We found one woman who moved from one side of the building to the other” and was purged. Many of the people purged have Hispanic, Asian or African American names. So if your name is Hernandez, Kim, Jackson, or any common minority name, be particularly vigilant. By setting the Tuesday, October 9th deadline to re-register or lose the vote in November, Georgia has made it extremely difficult to fix this problem of its own making. But remember that Democrat Jon Osoff lost Georgia’s special House election in Georgia’s 6th district by only about 9,000 votes. So with the Georgia Gubernatorial race and many House and statehouse races expected to be close, re-registering even a relative handful of wrongfully purged voters could determine the outcome. PLEASE DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO HAVE EVERY GEORGIA VOTER YOU KNOW CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING WEBSITE IMMEDIATELY TO SEE IF THEY’VE BEEN PURGED AND TO GET HELP RE-REGISTERING BY THE TUESDAY DEADLINE. CLICK HERE. And please IMMEDIATELY forward this website, and/or this article, by email, Facebook, tweet, phone or any other rapid communication method to everyone you know to contact everyone they know who might be effected in time to act by the Tuesday deadline.<doc-sep>In a recent television appearance on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Trevor Noah" Abrams called Kemp "a remarkable architect of voter suppression." That's become a rallying cry for Democrats in the governor's race, which recent public polling shows in a statistical dead heat. Kemp, meanwhile, says Abrams and allied liberal activists are twisting his record of guarding Georgia elections against voter fraud. His campaign spokesman Ryan Mahoney said in a statement that because of Kemp, "it has never been easier to vote in our state" and pointed to a new online voter registration system and a student engagement program implemented under his tenure. "Kemp is fighting to protect the integrity of our elections and ensure that only legal citizens cast a ballot," Mahoney said. Two main policies overseen by Kemp have drawn criticism and legal challenges: Georgia's "exact match" registration verification process and the mass cancellation of inactive voter registrations. According to records obtained from Kemp's office through a public records request, Appling-Nunez's application —like many of the 53,000 registrations on hold with Kemp's office — was flagged because it ran afoul of the state's "exact match" verification process. Under the policy, information on voter applications must precisely match information on file with the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. Election officials can place non-matching applications on hold. An application could be held because of an entry error or a dropped hyphen in a last name, for example. Appling-Nunez says she never saw any notice from Kemp's office indicating a problem with her application. An analysis of the records obtained by The Associated Press reveals racial disparity in the process. Georgia's population is approximately 32 percent black, according to the U.S. Census, but the list of voter registrations on hold with Kemp's office is nearly 70 percent black. Kemp's office blamed that disparity on the New Georgia Project, a voter registration group founded by Abrams in 2013. Kemp accuses the organization of being sloppy in registering voters, and says they submitted inadequate forms for a batch of applicants that was predominantly black. His office has said the New Georgia Project used primarily paper forms and "did not adequately train canvassers to ensure legible, complete forms ...." His office says "the law applies equally across all demographics," but these numbers became skewed by "the higher usage of one method of registration among one particular demographic group." Voters whose applications are frozen in "pending" status have 26 months to fix any issues before their application is canceled, and can still cast a provisional ballot. But critics say the system has a high error rate and decry the racial disparity that it produces. "We've shown that this process disproportionately prevents minority applicants from getting on the voter registration rolls," Julie Houk, special counsel for the Washington based Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in an interview. With that in mind, she called it "kind of astounding" that Georgia legislators wrote it into state law in 2017. Houk's group wrote to Kemp in July threatening legal action if "exact match" wasn't ended. Kemp's aggressive maintenance of the voter list has also garnered the threat of legal action. His office says that they simply "conduct regular list maintenance of the voter rolls to ensure election integrity" as required by federal and state law. "All of the affected records were inactive as a result of returned mail, National Change of Address, and 'no contact' list maintenance procedures," it said. Kemp dismissed and derided the legal threat targeting the "exact match" policy, issuing a statement saying that with Election Day coming up, "it's high time for another frivolous lawsuit from liberal activist groups." His office said that since January 2014, elections officials have processed over 6.4 million voter registrations and less than 1 percent remain in pending status. State Rep. Barry Fleming, who authored the state law enabling "exact match," said in a statement that it's authorized under federal law, and courts have upheld a similar law in Florida. But Appling-Nunez said it's important for every Georgian's vote, including hers, to be counted in November. "If you don't like what's happening you either have to vote to change it or get out there and change it yourself," she said. "A life of politics is not for me so I have to support those who are fighting the good fight."<doc-sep>
In a response, Kemp says Georgia has never used data from the Crosscheck Program to conduct list maintenance in this state. ATLANTA -- According to a release, members of the SCLC, Rainbow-PUSH Coalition, the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda, and the New Georgia Project are planning to join with others to file a federal lawsuit against Georgia's Secretary of State Brian Kemp. Kemp's office is accused of using a racially-biased methodology for removing as many as 700,000 legitimate voters from the state's voter rolls over the past two years. Georgia Election Cycle 2018 | Key dates to know The suit claims that the secretary of state's office has not sent notice of the removal to voters. The group says that at a Tuesday news conference they will publish a database containing each of the names of the voters removed since 2017, so that those voters may re-register prior to the state's October 9 deadline. The group says the lawsuit was initiated by journalist Greg Palast as part of his research for Rolling Stone magazine. Other similar federal suits will be filed against other state officials around the nation in conjunction with the Georgia suit. They claim that during his research, Palast uncovered a so-called 'purge list' from what is called the 'Crosscheck Program' allegedly supplied to the secretary of state's office by Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State. Some critics have said Kobach has worked to implement some of the most stringent voter ID laws in the United States, and has worked to make voting much more difficult for minorities. Tuesday afternoon, Kemp released a statement refuting the research behind the lawsuit. He insisted that no voters had been removed from the state's rolls as a result of any sort of 'purge list,' as claimed by Palast. "This threatened lawsuit has no merit. To be crystal clear, Georgia has never used data from the Crosscheck Program to conduct list maintenance in any capacity," Kemp said in his statement. "Zero voters have been removed from the rolls based on Crosscheck data in this state. Greg Palast is completely blind to this indisputable fact in his pursuit of a sensationalist headline. Real journalists have already reported that Georgia does not use this data for list maintenance. Frankly, Mr. Palast should be embarrassed, and any credibility that he had left is now completely destroyed." In addition to his position as Georgia's Secretary of State, Kemp is the Republican nominee for governor and is running against Democrat Stacey Abrams in the November 6 general election. How can you find out if you are registered to vote? You can determine if you are registered to vote in Georgia by checking the Secretary of State's My Voter Page. By entering your first initial, last name, county of residence and date of birth on that page, you can determine if you are registered to vote in Georgia. If so, you will find your registration information, the name and address of your precinct and a link to the early voting location for your county. The page will also list your US Congressional District, your Georgia Senate District and Georgia House District, with links to each of those persons' official web pages. Links to a full list of qualified candidates in the upcoming election (along with the past several elections) are also provided.