Two years ago, at the height of the public outcry over the actions of Martin Shkreli, the so-called pharma bro who unapologetically jacked up the price of a drug used to treat a disease that afflicts H.I.V. patients and other people with compromised health, Kelefa Sanneh wrote a piece about the situation, and made a case for Shkreli’s societal usefulness. “A truly greedy executive would keep a much lower profile than Shkreli,” Sanneh wrote. “But Shkreli seems intent on proving a point about money and medicine, and you don’t have to agree with his assessment in order to appreciate the service he has done us all. By showing what is legal, he has helped us to think about what we might want to change, and what we might need to learn to live with.” Shkreli wasn’t the problem, in other words. He was the person making the problem obvious.

I thought of this argument on Sunday, when I read the news that the office of Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, was investigating the state’s Democratic Party for “possible cybercrimes.” Kemp is also Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, so he’s the official overseeing the very election he’s running in. Kemp has declined to acknowledge the conflict of interest inherent in this situation, yet that’s the least of the trouble. His tenure as secretary of state has been marred by a record of voter suppression and intimidation tactics. In general, it’s impossible to talk about these actions without talking about how they hurt minority turnout. But in Georgia’s gubernatorial race it’s even more to the point, as the Democratic candidate, Stacey Abrams, who would be the first African-American woman elected governor anywhere in the country, has staked her campaign on getting black Georgians to the polls.

Voter-I.D. laws, and other measures that put barriers between voters and voting booths, have proliferated in the past few years, partly as a consequence of the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder, which struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These measures are often debated and implemented without much public notice, or in the fog of the controversy that Republicans have stirred up about the vanishingly small problem of voter fraud. In Georgia, though, Kemp’s efforts this year have been as obvious as they have been serious. He’s tried to hold up tens of thousands of voter-registration applications for tiny paperwork issues. His political allies have pulled senior citizens off buses going to the polls, and tried to close polling locations in a rural corner of the state. This latest stunt, however—putting out terse press releases about an “investigation” of the Democrats, showing no evidence, using the secretary of state’s office as an appendage of the campaign—is an obvious absurdity, the political equivalent of buying a two-million-dollar one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album, as Shkreli did at the height of his infamy. Shkreli basked in his notoriety, and at some point it’s worth asking if, for Kemp, too, the bad headlines aren’t a bad thing, but part of the point, an attempt to sow confusion and dismay among his opponent’s supporters, and to show his own that he means business.