Tuesday, on the deadline for registering for the upcoming election, the Associated Press reported that over 53,000 voter applications are currently on hold in Kemp’s office. The source of those holds is a policy instituted by the Georgia state legislature called “exact match,” a verification process that requires voter information to be identical to information kept on file either at state drivers’-license offices or the Social Security Administration. Typos, clerical errors, or missing accents or punctuation in names all became grounds for elections officials to challenge voter-registration applications. Challenged applicants have 26 months to remedy their situation by showing a government-issued photo identification to elections officials, but many of those whose applications have been placed on hold say they were never informed about the holdup, and many could see—or could have seen—deadlines come and go, and could be deleted from the voter system altogether without knowing.

According to Danielle Lang, a legal counsel for the nonprofit voting-rights organization Campaign Legal Center, the thousands of people whose registrations are languishing can still vote in person in November, since producing the state-issued government identification that qualifies for Georgia’s strict voter-ID law also counts for clarifying the discrepancy. But other voters might not be so lucky. “Where it causes serious problems in the 2018 election are twofold,” Lang told me. It’s unclear if everyone planning to vote by mail will be able to do so and have their vote counted, since mail-in voters can produce household bills, copies of birth certificates, and other forms of non-photo identification that won’t get them around the “exact match” firewall. The other problems are for recently naturalized citizens who are erroneously flagged as noncitizens in the drivers’-license database. For all these voters, they very well could cast ballots in November that don’t even count—and they might never know.

On Thursday, the Campaign Legal Center, along with a coalition of civil-rights and voting-rights groups in Georgia, filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction against Kemp and his office that would make all people on the pending list or who have been purged under the rule since November 2016 eligible to vote in the upcoming election. The lawsuit also documented racial disparities in the application of the exact-match protocol. “Approximately 80.15% of those pending applications were submitted by African-American, Latino and Asian-American applicants,” the plaintiffs wrote.

Kemp, whose office hasn’t yet responded to calls for comment, blames this preponderance of black purged names on sloppy paperwork submitted by the New Georgia Project, a group founded by Abrams in 2013 to increase the number of black registered voters in the state. Kemp has long criticized the group and its methods, and his own office and the nonprofit have been locked in a feud—complete with multiple lawsuits—for a half decade now. Kemp sued the organization in 2014, alleging that it had committed voter fraud and wasted taxpayer funds in a high-wire quest to register 800,000 new black voters. The lawsuit found no wrongdoing, but it has shaped the contours of a years-long battle over the electorate between Kemp’s and Abrams’s camps—and between a vision seeking to maximize black registrations and turnout and one that has proven deeply resistant to those efforts in the name of fighting and preventing fraud.