House Democrats open investigation into alleged Georgia voter suppression

House Democrats announced they are beginning investigations into reports of voter suppression during Georgia’s 2018 election.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, who chairs the House Oversight and Reform Committee, raised his concerns in a letter to Gov. Brian Kemp released Wednesday.

“The Committee is particularly concerned by reports Georgians faced unprecedented challenges with registering to vote and significant barriers to casting their votes during your tenure as Secretary of State and during the 2018 election,” the Maryland Democrat wrote.

The committee has requested documents related to a program Mr. Kemp, a Republican, headed that would prevent voter registration if an individual’s application form didn’t exactly match federal or state documents. Reported problems with voting machines, voter-roll removals and poll closures were also of concern to the committee, according to the letter.

Mr. Cummings listed what he considers voting problems that occurred while Mr. Kemp was secretary of state, such as the removal of 1.4 million people from the voting rolls between 2012 and 2016; the placing of 53,000 registrations on hold before the election, 80 percent of which were persons of color; and the closing of 214 polling places that operated in the previous election, leading to lines of four hours as heavily black voting locations.

The representative also questioned why Mr. Kemp did not remove himself from his duties as secretary of state to prevent a conflict of interest and falsely accusing state Democrats right before the election of “cyber crimes.”

In a news conference Wednesday, Mr. Kemp said that the House needs “to quit playing politics up there” and “do the real work for this country.”

Stacey Abrams, Mr. Kemp’s Democratic opponent, has yet to fully concede the election, instead filing a federal lawsuit against the state’s voting laws, saying that her opponent’s voter suppression was “deliberate and intentional.”