Welcome to ‘Republican Democracy,’ where the right to vote is only awarded to the chosen few and ‘winning’ an election means suppressing the most votes possible.
In Georgia, Republican Democracy is in full view for all to see. Over 40,000 votes have vanished from the voters rolls and surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of these names are people who historically vote for Democrats.
The mastermind behind this mysterious disappearance of 40,000 registered voters’ names is the Secretary of State, Brian Kemp. Kemp is singlehandedly selecting the people he wants to vote and ones from certain democratic areas, those voters disappear.
Trying to bring the spotlight to the issue, demonstrators from the Moral Mondays movement marched and held protests inside Kemp’s office, refusing to leave until Kemp met with them to discuss the missing 40,000. Kemp stayed away from his office and 8 protesters were arrested.
“Nobody here wants to go to jail,” said Tim Franzen, from the American Friends Service Committee. “We’d rather just go home. But we have to do something to answer this egregious act of voter suppression. When 40,000 Georgians show up to vote, they’re going to find their names missing from their polling places. It’s unacceptable.”
“What the Secretary of State is doing is nothing new for Georgia,” said Dr. Francys Johnson, the president of the Georgia NAACP. “It goes back through a long line of efforts to deny some people access to the ballot. Today, the people have had enough. We have caught the Secretary of State with his hands in the cookie jar. Georgia deserves better.”
Meanwhile, with just days to go before the midterm elections, tens of thousands of Americans trying to exercise their constitutional right to vote in Georgia, will not even be allowed to, because Republican Democracy says their votes have no meaning.