Friday, October 12, 2018

On a Blatant Conflict of Interest in Georgia


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?


[2] Ibid.