A Win For Voting Rights in Randolph County

Democratic Congressman Conor Lamb (PA-18)
pictured with a child he mentors

Well it's Friday (thank God).

Yesterday a parole board denied John Lennon's murderer Mark David Chapman parole for the 10th time.

And just 74 days remain until November 6th when millions of Americans will head to the polls to cast votes in the widely-anticipated 2018 midterm elections.

For many people, including yours truly, that day can't come fast enough.

Especially for those repulsed by the ongoing abomination that is Donald Trump's chaotic presidency, abetted by an almost silent, do-nothing Republican-majority in Congress.

If Democratic and independent voter turnout in early primaries and some of the various special Congressional elections that have taken place are any indicator, the 2018 midterm could have grave implications for the Republican Party - like Democrat Conor Lamb's upset of Republican Rick Saccone in western Pennsylvania's heavily-Republican 18th Congressional District back in March.

All 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, along with 35 of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate, are up for grabs in November, along with governor's seats in several key states, including Georgia where some early polls show the Democratic candidate Stacy Abrams holding a slight lead over Republican candidate Brian Kemp.

He is Georgia's current secretary of state, and like his notorious vote-suppressing counterpart in Kansas, Kris Kobach, Kemp has spent eight years doing everything possible to remove hundreds of thousands of state citizens (mostly people of color) from the state's voter rolls in a flagrant attempt to suppress non-white voter turnout.

One of those efforts has made national media headlines recently both for it's absurdity and audacity.

Republican voter suppression efforts in majority-
black Randolph County Georgia were rejected 

Randolph County is located in a rural area of southwestern Georgia not far from the eastern border of Alabama.

It covers an area of 431 square miles and is situated in a fertile region known for its high density of plantations during slavery.

The county is about 61% African-American with a population of 7,719 people according to the 2010 U.S. Census, many of whom live in the kinds of impoverished economic conditions common to many rural areas of the Deep South.

While Georgia voted for Trump during the 2016 presidential elections, Randolph County voted for Hillary Clinton with a margin of 55%, which is likely the reason that state Republicans targeted the county with its notorious voter suppression efforts.

As Mark Joseph Stern reported for Slate.com, earlier this year Brian Kemp tapped a man named Mike Malone, a conservative "elections consultant" who contributed money to Kemp's campaign for governor, to basically travel around the state and "recommend polling place closures" in various counties.

Kemp sent Malone out on this sketchy mission ahead of the May primary vote for governor.

Now according to Stern's Slate.com article, ten of the counties identified by Malone complied with his recommendations and closed polling places where mostly rural folks go to cast their votes.

Not surprisingly, all of those counties shared one thing in common - their populations have large percentages of African-American citizens.

Republican candidate Brian Kemp poses with a
shotgun in one of his ads for Governor

Randolph County, the sixth smallest county in the state, has nine voting precincts.

That's nine places for people to vote over a 431 square-mile area.

Malone proposed closing seven of those nine polling locations.

That means he proposed closing a staggering 78% of Randolph County's polling sites, including one precinct that is 97% black.

Word of this blatant and discriminatory effort to disenfranchise black voters began making media headlines.

In response, Kemp tried to backtrack in order to cover his ass by releasing a "recommendation" to Randolph County suggesting that it wasn't actually a good idea to close seven of the nine polling places.

Even though he was the one who originally sent Mike Malone out to urge Georgia counties to do just that (Malone told that to the Randolph County Board of Elections by the way.)

Kemp's public recommendation to scrap the plan to close all those precincts wasn't made out of some kind of noble change of heart or soul-reckoning self reflection - it was purely for self-serving reasons.

He knows he wasn't the overwhelming favorite Republican candidate for governor by any stretch, so as much as he wants to go "full right-wing Republican", he doesn't have the mandate from Republican Georgia voters to do it.

Neither he nor Lt. Governor Casey Cagle were able to win the 50% of the vote in the May primary needed to secure the GOP nomination for governor.

So they were forced into a runoff primary election in July, which Kemp won with some help from predictably right-wingy tweets from Trump, as well as the series of controversial political television ads he'd been running in the spring.

Like the one in which he pointed a shotgun at a teenager (pictured above).

Brian Kemp's anti-immigrant truck TV ad

Or the one where he proudly shows off his guns, revs up his chainsaw and was photographed in his pickup truck boasting:

"I gotta a big truck, just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take 'em home myself. Yup, I just said that."

Yup, he really did say that, watch the ad for yourself - the ad also features an explosion in a field too, which I guess really pumps up conservative voters.

Even though he's running on embracing his hardline conservatism and directly appealing to Trump voters, Kemp is politically savvy enough to recognize that being linked with efforts to suppress African-American voters could torpedo his chances in November against Georgia's Democratic former minority state house leader Stacy Abrams - who is African-American.

Abrams, who's also an attorney and a romance novelist, has developed a national political following as her candidacy is, in many ways, symbolic of the ideological differences that define the broader 2018 midterm elections - which is not just a mandate on Trump's presidency.

The midterms are also a gauge on how Americans feel about national domestic policy, Russian interference in the 2016 elections, the overall direction of the country, and a House of Representatives that's been under Republican control for the past eight years.

And with the 2020 presidential race just months away from kicking off, there's little doubt that the Democratic Party sees the election of a Democratic governor in Georgia as a critical step towards winning Georgia's 16 electoral votes in a southern state that hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton won the state over George H.W. Bush back in 1992.

"Elections consultant" Mike Malone 

So while Randolph County Georgia may be a relatively small rural community, Republican's attempts to try and close 78% of the polling sites to make it more difficult for African-Americans to vote for governor in November are reflective of just how critical this governor's race is.

But fortunately those efforts failed.

During a meeting on Friday morning the Randolph County Board of Elections took less than a minute to shoot down the proposal to close seven of nine polling sites three months before the November elections.

And "elections consultant" Mike Malone?

He was fired by Randolph County elections officials on Wednesday.

As USA Today reported, the failed voter suppression effort in Randolph County actually had the effect of energizing voters, activists, and national organizations dedicated to fighting Republican voter suppression efforts around the country - including the NAACP, the ACLU and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

And with regards to Republican candidate Brian Kemp, the Randolph County debacle is simply a reflection of who he is, both as a person and as a Georgia secretary of state dedicated to suppressing the votes of black voters in a state with a long legacy of institutionalized racism.

As I blogged about back in September 2014, Kemp was the guy caught on tape at a Republican breakfast meeting saying:

"In closing I just wanted to tell you, real quick, after we get through this runoff, you know the Democrats are working hard, and all these stories about them, you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there, and others that are sitting on the sidelines, if they can do that, they can win these elections in November."

They can indeed.

Like I said, if the Democratic turnout in recent primaries and special elections around the country are any indicator, "all these minority voters" Brian Kemp and the Republicans are so busy trying to prevent from casting a ballot, will be showing up en masse on November 6th.

And the results could be very different from the 2014 midterms when a mere 37% of American voters turned out in what was the lowest midterm election turnout in 70 years.

My guess is that if the people of Randolph County have anything to say about it, the results this November will be very different indeed.