Candidate Abrams continues her legal winning streak in the Georgia gubernatorial race:
A federal judge knocked down a motion from Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial nominee Brian Kemp against a previous temporary restraining order that changes the way election officials handle absentee ballots in the state.
US District Court Judge Leigh Martin May rejected Kemp’s arguments point by point and concluded the “injunction ensures that absentee voters who are unable to vote in person and whose applications or ballots are rejected based on a signature mismatch will still have the opportunity to have their votes counted in the upcoming election.”
Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, also filed an emergency motion Tuesday with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. He argued, “the district court issued a preliminary injunction that requires 159 Georgia counties to make immediate, significant changes to those longstanding procedures right in the middle of an ongoing statewide general election,” which he said threatens to “disrupt the orderly administration of elections.”
Last week, May, the judge, ordered that Georgia election officials stop rejecting absentee ballots with voters’ signatures that do not appear to match those on record. [CNN]
I’m wondering about this “long-standing” claim of Kemp’s. PolitiFact seems to indicate the law is only a year old:
Under a 2017 Georgia law, a voter registration application is complete if information on that form exactly matches records kept by Georgia’s Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration.
If there’s no match, it’s placed on a pending status and the applicant is notified in the form of a letter from the county board of registrars about the need to provide additional documentation. It’s then up to the applicant to provide sufficient evidence to verify his or her identify.
But perhaps the reference can be twisted to mean something far more innocent, eh? There are days I get tired of the picky word shit.
