Incredible disappearing video

A couple of years ago the Georgia secretary of state – he who is now running for governor while remaining secretary of state even though the latter job involves supervision of elections – released a video on how to do early voting, which is still on the secretary of state website. There’s a funny thing about that video…

The video, produced in six different languages and still linked on the secretary of state’s website, shows a white boy arriving at his voting location, presenting his photo ID and successfully voting. The black girl who shows up to vote does not have the proper form of ID and is turned away from the poll.

The video—showing a white man being able to vote while a black woman is turned away—is gaining attention amid accusations of voter suppression in Georgia, as well as an alleged conflict of interest in the gubernatorial race.

The description is not actually accurate: the black girl is not turned away, she’s given a provisional ballot which she fills out and hands in, returning later with The Proper Form of Voter ID, which is apparently accepted, so the upshot seems to be that her vote will be counted.

That said – it’s still grotesque to make it the white boy [symbolizing a man] who does it right and the black girl [symbolizing a woman] who gets it wrong. This is Georgia we’re talking about. The people in Kemp’s office can be so dim that they did that by accident.

Election officials in Georgia have placed on hold the voter registrations of more than 50,000 people, most of whom are black, largely under a policy requiring personal information on registrations to precisely match Social Security or drivers’ license records. The man in charge of that system and the fairness of all Georgia elections is Republican Secretary of State Brain Kemp, who is running for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams, a woman trying to become the country’s first black female governor.

The video has a striking resemblance to Abrams’s claims that Kemp is trying to suppress the vote of minorities and women through his official power. Her campaign has called for his resignation, or at least his recusal, as secretary of state, to end the alleged ongoing conflict of interest of overseeing his own election.

“We have known since 2016 that the exact match system has a disproportionate effect on people of color and on women,” Abrams said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

Which Kemp’s office helpfully illustrates with a video of a black woman [played by a girl] showing up to vote without the right ID. See? Like this.

I wanted to embed the video, but when I went to the YouTube page to get the share link I couldn’t get to it. Between the time I read the article and watched the video and the time I finished the post, the link became useless. It appears that Kemp’s people have now removed the video. So you can’t now watch it to confirm that the girl was not turned away but was “only” made to jump through extra hoops. But at least we know Kemp’s office is embarrassed.

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