Georgia Secretary of State #KarenHandel Purges Minority Voters, Then Runs for Congress

By Greg Palast, Greg Palast's Facebook Page

17 June 17

n my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Movie, we did an interview with the director of a group called the Asian-American Legal Advocacy Center, Helen Ho. They aimed to register 10,000 Korean-Americans in Georgia, mostly in the 6th. After the film was shot, I told Helen to check to see if the people they’d registered were actually put on the voter rolls. So they did. Thousands of names were missing. Korean-Americans vote solidly Democratic.

Their lawyer then contacted the Secretary of Sate, Republican congressional candidate Karen Handler’s successor as Secretary of State and co-candidate Brian Kemp, who’s running for Governor of Georgia as a Republican. The lawyers asked, "Where’s our missing Koreans? They’re not on the voter rolls." The answer was to kick in the organization's doors, take their computers and files, and say that they were all going to be charged with criminal mishandling of voter registration forms. The criminals were the ones threatening to arrest them. It so frightened the people in the Asian-American community that the organization shut down. If those votes that the Korean community had registered were put on the voter rolls, Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff would have won the first round.

Another group, New Georgia Project, registering mostly African-American voters, they registered 86,000 people in the 6th Congressional District and statewide. 46,000 were put on the voter rolls, and 40,000 were not. Some of these registrations were as old as 6 months and they still haven’t been put on the rolls. And they won’t be on the registry for the Tuesday vote. That’s 40,000 voters, not all of them in the 6th, but a lot. Ossoff would have won that first round — he was only 2 percentage points short or roughly 3,700 votes in April. He should be a walkaway for this second round, except for these shenanigans!

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