While serving as secretary of state, Kemp oversaw his own election for governor in 2018. Just days before the election, he leveled an incendiary charge that Democrats had improperly accessed the state's election infrastructure and placed his accusations prominently on the secretary of state's official website—where thousands of voters would see it when looking for voting information.

Of course, it was Kemp himself whose office had a history of election security failures, which included allegedly destroying evidence amid litigation regarding the exposure of six million sensitive voter records. Kemp appears to have made his hacking claim to misdirect blame for his incompetence, since he issued it just a day before ProPublica reported he had been warned about security vulnerabilities. Kemp's office subsequently worked to clandestinely fix some of the very security flaws that Kemp himself had refused to acknowledge even existed in the first place.

Kemp, who undertook many efforts to suppress black and Democratic voters through registration purges and other methods, had a clear-cut conflict of interest in overseeing his own election. There's no way, of course, to know whether his actions affected the outcome of the race. But by using his power and state resources to try to suppress voters in his own election, including his complete fabrication of serious charges of election interference against Democrats, Kemp's narrow victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams should be viewed as tainted and lacking the legitimacy of a free and fair election.