Georgia Loses 40,000+ Voter Applications From Black & Latino People

Democrats may not have as much support at the polls as they anticipated in this midterm election because the state of Georgia has misplaced thousands of voter registration applications.

Somehow, Al-Jazeera reports, that Georgia officials have seemingly misplaced an astounding number of registration forms that just happen to have been filled out by a majority of Black and Latino people.

The New Georgia Project estimates that there are about 800,000 Black, Latino and Asian people who are eligible to vote but have not registered. An organization named Third Sector Development worked very hard to rectify that situation and managed to get 80,000 of those people to sign up to vote. Rachel Maddow reports that the New Georgia Project got 120,000 to apply, so that’s a total of 200,000 potential voters of color.

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After all of that hard work from community activists, Third Sector Development’s applications were taken right to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office in bundles as they came in. Getting that many people into the system can take a while, and officials hadn’t quite reached the half-way point in that stack of registrations when more than 40,000 of the forms went missing last week. What’s more is that there is no paper trail to suggest that those missing applications even existed.

Some people are now pointing the finger at Conservatives in last week’s mysterious disappearance. Georgia Secretary of State Brain Kemp, a Republican himself, insists that his office hasn’t pulled any tricks with the applications. Brian’s supposedly just as baffled as everyone else in this situation, but he’s still getting some major side-eye from the community he represents. Black and Latino voters tend to support Democrats in the voting booth, so an influx of them could snatch victory from the GOP’s clutches during the upcoming elections.

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Third Sector Development isn’t letting this go, and they’re taking the matter to court so that they can keep track of what’s going on with missing voter registration applications.

The situation reeks of voter suppression that was born out of fear that people of color might unseat any Republicans campaigning for an office in the midterm election. And make no mistake, it is not an accident that a majority of the missing forms belong to Black and Latino Georgia residents. Neither is it an accident that this happened right around the voter registration deadline so that those same people would not have a chance to re-apply.

It was no small undertaking to get some 200,000 previously unregistered people to sign up to vote. One would think that in a country where liberty and freedom of speech are some of our most sacred ideals, politicians would want everyone’s voice to be heard. It’s troubling that no one seems to know what happened to the missing forms. How do more than 40,000 forms just go missing? Someone has to know something because that is simply too much information to lose off-hand.

That so many applications could mysteriously go missing without a trace, is insulting the intelligence of not just the people who have now been disenfranchised, but also those who worked so tirelessly to make sure that more Americans could exercise their right to vote.

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