Some Georgia voting machines aren't counting votes for Democrat Stacey Abrams, NAACP says

The NAACP is accusing election officials in Georgia of bungling votes in the gubernatorial race, saying in a complaint Tuesday that voting machines mistakenly showed votes intended for Democrat Stacey Abrams as votes for Republican Brain Kemp. Voters were able to correct their ballots after repeated attempts, according to USA Today. Abrams, who could become the first black, woman governor in the United States, has repeatedly accused Kemp — Georgia's current secretary of state — of voter suppression through purging rolls and holding up registrations. But the new NAACP complaints, first reported by USA Today and filed with the Secretary of State Office on Tuesday, purport to show how even successful, registered voters are facing trouble when they go to the polls for early voting.

Voting advocates have already scrutinized Kemp’s suspension of more than 53,000 voter applications — 70 percent of them filed by black people — as they violated a controversial “exact match” standard,” which can hold voting records over misspelled words, incorrect addresses or misplaced hyphens. The Georgia NAACP did not immediately respond to a VICE News request for comment.

The complaints concern voting machines in Bartow and Dodge counties, on behalf of eight voters. Voters told USA Today that they went to polling sites and tried to select Abrams, but the machines continued to mark their selections for Kemp. They had to try again several times before successfully voting for their intended candidate, according to USA Today.

Read: How the gutting of the Voting Rights Act led to hundreds of poll closures Bartow and Dodge are predominantly white counties. However, past voter suppression claims have largely centered around black voters, some of whom have been purged from the state’s voter rolls, seen their registrations put on hold or have had to fight to keep polling sites open. The race between Kemp and Abrams is neck and neck — RealClearPolitics has Kemp slightly ahead but ranks the race a “toss-up” — and there are only two weeks left until Election Day. A recent VICE News analysis found that since the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 — which once required federal oversight of certain local changes to voting — previously supervised jurisdictions shut down, on average, nearly 20 percent more polling stations per capita than jurisdictions in other parts of the country. Many of the polls closed in neighborhoods with large minority populations.

“This farce about voter suppression and people being held up from being on the rolls … is absolutely not true,” Kemp said in a Tuesday debate with Abrams.

Kemp, a self-described “politically incorrect conservative” endorsed by President Donald Trump, told supporters at a campaign event last week that he was worried about Abrams’ attempts to increase voter turnout, according to leaked audio obtained by Rolling Stone.

“They have just an unprecedented number of that,” Kemp said of Abrams’ turnout efforts, “which is something that continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote — which they absolutely can — and mail those ballots in, we gotta have heavy turnout to offset that.”

Cover: Georgia gubernatorial candidates (L-R) Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp debate in an event that also included Libertarian Ted Metz at Georgia Public Broadcasting in Midtown October 23, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by John Bazemore-Pool/Getty Images)