A coalition of advocacy groups launched a lawsuit on October
11, 2018 to “block Georgia from enforcing a practice critics say endangers the
votes of more than 50,000 people in [the upcoming election] and potentially
larger numbers heading into the 2020 presidential election cycle.”[1]
Kemp was at the time Georgia’s Secretary of State, which means he had
considerable discretion concerning how the election would be run. The conflict
of interest lies in the fact that he was running for governor—interestingly against
Stacey Abrams, a candidate who had been a voter-rights lawyer! I submit that
such a conflict of interest should never have been permitted.
Rather than focus on the controversial “exact match” issue
at the center of the suit, I want to call attention to the fact that “the
Abrams campaign called for Kemp to resign as the state’s top elections official
in order for Georgia voters to ‘have confidence that their Secretary of State
[will] competently and impartially oversee the election.”[2]
For a candidate to also be the top elections official is such a blatant
conflict of interest that we can legitimately ask in retrospect why the
travesty was allowed to exist in the first place. Shouldn’t candidates be
barred from overseeing their own election? Why, moreover, didn’t Georgians
scoff at the conflict of interest and demand that it be deconstructed
immediately after Kemp declared his candidacy for governor?
[1]
Gregory Krieg, “Civil
Rights Groups sue Georgia Republican Brian Kemp over 53,000 ‘Pending’ Voter
Registrations,” CNN.com (accessed October 12, 2018).
[2]
Ibid.
