Georgia's top elections official targets group for encouraging African-Americans to register to vote

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/15/1329904/-Georgia-s-top-elections-official-targets-group-for-encouraging-African-Americans-to-register-to-vote?showAll=yes

The New Georgia Project was created earlier this year with one goal: encouraging unregistered Georgians to vote, particularly in the state's African-American communities. Thus far, it has submitted 85,000 voter registration forms, worked with other groups that are trying to enroll new voters, and—you guessed it—become a target of Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who last week accused the project of voter fraud and issued a subpoena ordering them to hand over copies of virtual all of their records to his office.
Kemp set a deadline of tomorrow at 5 PM ET for the documents, but despite the breadth of his demand and severity of his allegations, has offered virtually no evidence to suggest any wrongdoing beyond citing complaints from a few county clerks and asserting that not every application was completed correctly:

In a memo sent to county elections officials, Secretary of State Brian Kemp said in recent weeks his office has “received numerous complaints about voter applications submitted by the New Georgia Project.” Kemp wrote, “Preliminary investigation has revealed significant illegal activities including forged voter registration applications, forged signatures on releases, and applications with false or inaccurate information.”
A spokesman confirmed Kemp's office was contacted by officials in DeKalb, Gwinnett, Henry, Bartow, Butts and Muscogee counties.

Oooh—"significant illegal activities"—sounds serious, right? Well, Bloomberg News caught up with two of those counties and found:

DeKalb County reported “a handful” of possibly fraudulent registrations to Kemp’s office, including some with apparently forged signatures, said registration director Maxine Daniels. [...] Nancy Boren, registration director in Muscogee County, which includes Columbus, said her office received about 11,000 registration cards and sent 10 to Kemp for review.

A "handful"? Ten of 11,000? And this is "significant illegal" activity? Continue below the fold to see why that doesn't seem credible, even if you factor in 7,000 forms sent to Fulton County for voters who don't live in Fulton County and several thousand registrations whose authenticity is still being verified by DeKalb County.

So there's a handful of forms that might be fraudulent and have been set aside from legitimate forms, plus there are a bunch of others where counties need to either forward forms to the correct county or verify the information. Sounds to me like a system that is working the way it's supposed to work. Moreover, as State Rep. Stacey Abrams, the Democratic leader in the state House and the leader of the group points out, her group was required to submit all forms they received, even the ones that were questionable, which they flagged for further review. And you know who requires that? Yep: Georgia's secretary of state.
So you have a group that is doing exactly what Georgia's secretary of state requires of them and yet because they are doing what he required, he accuses them of fraud based on at most a handful of cases—cases that are almost certainly examples of canvassers trying to get paid for work they didn't do, not a conspiracy to commit actual voter fraud.
What in the world could possibly have caused him to chart such an unreasonable path? Let Big Dog explain:

In Georgia, [former President Bill] Clinton pointed to the need to register more black voters. He visited there this weekend to boost Democratic Senate candidate Michelle Nunn. “African-Americans are as under-registered in Georgia, historically, as Hispanics are in Texas,” he said in an interview. “If we can increase the number, increase the vote, then I think you just need to go out and find the rest of the state, the people that are for you.”

In fact, the day before Kemp issued his subpoena, First Lady Michelle Obama appeared in the state and said:

“If just 50 Democratic voters per precinct who didn’t vote in 2010 get out and vote this November—just 50 per precinct—then Michelle Nunn and Jason Carter will win.”

And even Kemp himself understands what's going on, because in July he said:

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.

In retrospect, those comments look like Kemp was planning all along to target New Georgia Project, but when he made them, he was trying to encourage Republicans to do the same thing:

Well, we’ve got to do the exact same thing. I would encourage all of you – if you have an Android or Apple device, download that app, and make it your goal to register one new Republican voter

Can't argue with that—nobody should ever be discouraged from voting or from trying to get more people to vote. But now that Kemp knows how successful Democratic efforts have been been, he's changed his tune, because more than anything else, the Republican victory plan depends on people not voting. And if he thinks that going on fishing expeditions against groups that threaten the GOP's plan will help him politically, that's exactly what he'll do—and it's exactly what he's doing. The best way for people in Georgia to fight back? To do what Kemp and his fellow Republicans don't want: To get registered, and to vote.