TRANSCRIPT: Fair Fight Founder and Chair Stacey Abrams Testimony before Congress on Voting Rights

WASHINGTON – Today, Fair Fight founder and chair Stacey Abrams testified before the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties at a hearing taking place on the 6th anniversary of the Shelby County v. Holder decision. A transcript of her remarks follows:

Chairman Cohen, Ranking Member Johnson, Committee Members, thank you for allowing me to address this important hearing today, regarding the effects of Shelby County v. Holder. The Shelby decision created a new channel for the troubling practice of voter suppression, during a time of dramatic demographic change. However, no assault on democracy will ever be limited to its targets. As the franchise is weakened, all citizens feel the effects, which is why restoration of the full power of the Voting Rights Act must occur.

I come today because I was raised in Mississippi, where my parents joined the civil rights movement as teenagers, and they instilled in their six children a deep respect for the right to vote. I came of age in Georgia, where I registered voters while in college, served as Georgia House Minority Leader, and where I stood for office as the Democratic nominee for Governor in 2018.

Jurisdictions formerly covered under Section 5, joined now by states with changing demographics, have raced to reinstate or create new hurdles to voter registration, ballot access, and ballot counting. Among the states, however, Georgia has been one of the most aggressive in leveraging the lack of federal oversight to use both law and policy to target voters of color.

In 2014, I founded the New Georgia Project, one of the state’s largest voter registration organizations. Minorities are twice as likely to register through third-party registration as are whites.[1] Post-Shelby legislation and practices in states like Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and Florida seek to impede these activities.

Then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who was also responsible for the oversight of local elections officials, refused to take action to process registration forms in a timely manner. Later, we discovered unpublished internal rules such as the 90-day blackout period, during which no voter registration forms were processed, causing delays that denied registrants the right to vote. In 2017, citizens challenged and eliminated this secret policy in the federal courts.

Due to the volume of NGP registrations, which we tracked by paper applications, we also proved the racially discriminatory effect of the “exact match process,” which requires perfect data entry by government employees to secure a proper registration. In 2009, under preclearance requirements, the Justice Department summarily rejected exact match as presenting “real,” “substantial,” and “retrogressive” burdens on voters of color.[2]

Post-Shelby, Mr. Kemp implemented the discredited exact match policy, empowered by a lack of Justice Department preclearance. In 2016, Mr. Kemp agreed to process approximately 34,000 suspended applications. Despite the 2016 federal settlement, Kemp ushered another iteration of exact match through the state legislature in 2017, leading to 53,000 suspended voter registrations in 2018, 70% of whom were black voters, who comprise roughly 30 percent of Georgia’s eligible voters.

Remaining on the voter rolls also poses challenges. Under Kemp’s post-Shelby regime, facially neutral rules for removing voters who have died or left the state became tools for voter purges. In total, he removed over 1.4 million voters from the rolls, including purging half-a-million voters in a single day in 2017, an 8% reduction in Georgia’s voting population.[3] An estimated 107,000 of these voters were removed through an arguably unconstitutional application of the “use-it-or-lose-it” law.[4]

One of the most pernicious effects of Shelby can be found in the very act of casting a vote. Section 5 provided an effective check against hyper-local suppressive tactics, like excessive poll closures or “challenge” proceedings against voters of color, as occurred in 2015.[5] Of 159 counties in Georgia, 156 counties removed a higher rate of voters from the rolls post-Shelby, which resulted in an increase in the number of voters being forced to cast provisional ballots.[6]

Last election cycle, separate federal courts ruled against Georgia policies for rejecting absentee ballots and ballot applications under trivial pretenses, for implementing an inconsistent provisional ballot system, and for improperly disallowing access to translators in the polling booth. While these lawsuits brought remedy to some, thousands more may have faced similar discrimination without the resources or the knowledge to gain relief.

Post-Shelby, voting rights groups must too often rely on resource-intensive litigation and advocacy work to protect a fundamental right of citizenship for voters of color. This anti-voting system has the concomitant effect of harming taxpayers, as states must expend tax dollars to defend voter suppression in court.

At the end of the 2018 contest, I acknowledged the legal result of an election marred by widespread election irregularities. I also redoubled my commitment to voting rights through the creation of Fair Fight Action, which has filed a federal lawsuit against the Georgia electoral system, asking for Georgia’s preclearance requirement to be reinstated under Section 3.

The proposed Voting Rights Advancement Act and Voting Rights Amendment Act represent considerable progress towards restoring the power of the VRA, including modern-day protections that require nationwide preclearance to attack the broad reach of voter suppression.[7] I strongly urge Congress to take action.

Thank you again for this opportunity to appear today.

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[1]http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/publications/State%20Restrictions%20on%20Voter%20Registration%20Drives.pdf
[2] https://www.justice.gov/crt/voting-determination-letter-58
[3] https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/10/19/georgia-voter-purge
[4] Id.
[5] https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/2018/Minority_Voting_Access_2018.pdf at 139.
[6] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Purges_Growing_Threat_2018.pdf
[7] https://sewell.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/sewell-leahy-introduce-voting-rights-advancement-act