Georgia GOP Senator Steals Student’s Phone Over Question About Voter Suppression
Republican Sen. David Perdue of Georgia appears to be tough enough to snatch a cellphone out of a college student’s hands, but not tough enough to answer a simple question about voter suppression in his state.
Perdue was on the campus of Georgia Tech campaigning for Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp on Saturday when he was approached by a student and member of the Young Democratic Socialists of America who wanted to ask a question.
Kemp, who has systematically targeted people of color to purge them from voter rolls for years, is in a tight battle for governor against Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams. On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that 53,000 voters had been placed on hold on the state’s voter registration list ahead of the November elections, most of them African Americans. Tuesday was Georgia’s deadline to register to vote.
The AP noted that Kemp’s office has canceled more than 1.4 million voter registrations through voter roll purges since 2012. That includes 670,000 canceled registrations last year alone.
On Thursday, Kemp was sued by a coalition of civil rights groups over the state’s “exact match” voting law of 2017, the primary tool that Kemp and state lawmakers have used to keep people of color off voter rolls by targeting minor discrepancies of personal information in existing registries. Abrams, who could become the country’s first female black governor, called on Kemp to resign.