Stacey Abrams: Voter ID law meant to ‘scare people out of voting’

Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for Georgia governor, said Sunday that the state’s voter ID law, which has put tens of thousands of voter registration applications on hold, is designed to “scare people out of voting.”

“This is simply a redux of a failed system that is designed to both scare people out of voting and make it harder for those who are willing to push through, make it harder for them to vote,” Abrams said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

{mosads}Abrams was asked about the 53,000 voter registration applications, mostly from black voters, that have been put on hold for failing to meet the state’s “exact match” law.

That law marks an applicant’s registration as “pending” if the personal information on their voter registration form doesn’t match the information on the state’s Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. 

Abrams is among those who have accused her opponent, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who leads the office that oversees Georgia elections, of trying to suppress minority votes.

Kemp has said that those 53,000 voters can still vote if they show identification, but Abrams said on “State of the Union” that those voters “are being forced to go through unnecessary hurdles to prove their bona fides.”

She also said that poll workers “are going to be asked to substantially verify that these IDs are sufficient.” 

“And the challenges there is, this is a subjective standard,” she said. “It would be much easier if he actually did his job and processed people in a proper fashion, and we did not have this flawed exact match system, that he knew was flawed because we sued him in 2016, and a federal judge forced him to restore 33,000 illegally canceled registrations.”

The Abrams campaign has called on Kemp to resign over the issues, with a spokeswoman saying last week that he should step down “so that Georgia voters can have confidence that their Secretary of State competently and impartially oversee this election.”