A federal judge ruled against Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp's controversial voting policy on Friday, allowing 3,000 more Georgians to vote in Tuesday's midterm elections, Law & Crime reports.
In October, advocates sued Kemp, who's also the state's Republican candidate for governor, over the state's "exact match" policy that required voter registrations to precisely match official documents on file with the state. An investigation by The Associated Press showed Kemp had "purged" 1.4 million voters' registrations since 2012, and this exact match policy had prevented 53,000 of them from re-registering. Many were not notified they were taken off the voting rolls, or that their re-registration hadn't gone through.
Most of these voters could've still voted Tuesday with an ID, The Hill notes. But about 3,141 were "inaccurately flagged by the state as non-citizens," the judge said in her ruling, and "therefore ineligible to vote." Friday's ruling will let these voters cast their ballots on Tuesday, so long as they provide proof of citizenship at the polls, per NBC News.
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Kemp was accused of discrimination for his exact match policy, seeing as 70 percent of those stalled applications were from black voters, per AP. Democrats particularly worried these racial disparities, as well as the policy's affect on absentee and early voting, would hurt their party's chance of success. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams notably called for Kemp to step down as Georgia secretary of state, seeing as he is the state's top election official while simultaneously running for the state's top office. Kemp has refused, but Democrats still celebrated Friday's ruling as a victory.
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