(Newser) – As controversy continues to swirl around the Brian Kemp-Stacey Abrams gubernatorial faceoff in Georgia, a senator campaigning for Kemp created one of his own. Kemp, who's currently Georgia's secretary of state, has been accused of trying to purge voter rolls ahead of the November election, and a Georgia Tech student tried to ask GOP Sen. David Perdue about the issue when Perdue visited the campus on Saturday. The student—a member of the Young Democratic Socialists of America who asked Law&Crime not to ID him for fear of retribution from Perdue supporter—recorded a short video on his cellphone in which he started asking the senator about possible voter suppression, at which point it appears Perdue rips the phone out of the student's hands after saying, "No, I'm not doing that."

"You stole my property," the student can be heard saying. "Give me my phone back, senator." The senator then apparently hands the phone back and walks away, as the student notes, "US Senator David Perdue just snatched my phone because he won't answer a question, one of his constituents." The YDSA called the senator's actions "abhorrent" and "dismissing [of] dissent," while some on the right poked fun of the student's socialist status, with a write-up on Twitchy noting, "So it's only OK if the government takes someone else's property and not your own? WEIRD!" A Perdue rep, meanwhile, says the whole thing was a "misunderstanding" and that the senator thought the student wanted a selfie, so Perdue took the phone to oblige. "When he realized they didn't actually want to take a picture, he gave the phone back," the rep says, per the Washington Post. (Read more David Perdue stories.)

