Issue has been a flashpoint in the race, which pits Democrat Stacey Abrams against Republican secretary of state, Brian Kemp

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Allegations of voter suppression in the Georgia governor’s election are ramping up – with lawsuits filed after the state’s most diverse county rejected an unusually large share of absentee ballots.

Also this week, dozens of African American senior citizens were ordered off a bus they were planning to ride to the polls from their senior center, a move advocates called an “intimidation tactic”.

Voter suppression has been a flashpoint in the race, which pits Democrat Stacey Abrams, who if elected would become the first African American woman governor of any state, against Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brian Kemp.

Stacey Abrams: GOP opponent creating 'miasma of fear' over voting in Georgia Read more

Abrams accused her opponent on Sunday of creating a “miasma of fear” around voting, after civil rights groups filed a lawsuit charging that Kemp sought to disenfranchise more than 50,000 voters, up to 80% of them minorities, by removing them from registration rolls if there is any discrepancy in the spelling, hyphenation, or spacing of their names.

Two more lawsuits came this week, targeting Gwinnett county for its rejection of absentee ballots, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

The county, which covers suburbs of Atlanta and in which a majority of voters are black, Latino and Asian, rejected 8.5% of the absentee ballots it had received by Sunday, the Journal-Constitution found. That’s far more than any other county in the state, with an average of just 2% of ballots rejected statewide.

The county alone accounts for about 37% of all rejected absentee ballots in Georgia.

Two separate suits were filed in US district court in Atlanta against Kemp and the Gwinnett county elections board.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Georgia’s secretary of state Brian Kemp. Stacey Abrams has accused her Republican opponent of creating a ‘miasma of fear’ around voting. Photograph: John Amis/AP

“The penalty for even the smallest clerical error or a question about the voter’s signature is disenfranchisement, with no meaningful opportunity to cure any perceived discrepancy,” the Coalition for Good Governance said in its suit, asking for the rejected ballots to be counted.

The county has denied any wrongdoing, saying it rejected the ballots according to regulations if they were missing required information such as signatures, birth dates or addresses, and had no explanation for the discrepancy with other counties.

Some observers have pointed to the fact that the county is the only one in the state required to provide election materials in English and in Spanish, leading to a ballot envelope design that may be confusing to voters.

Meanwhile, at a senior center in Jefferson county, 40 seniors had eagerly boarded a bus outside their senior center to go cast their votes after early voting kicked off, only to be told by the center’s director to get off.

The bus was organized by the group Black Voters Matter, but a county clerk called the county-run senior center to object, the Journal-Constitution reported.

The county deemed the event impermissible “political activity” at a government-run center. Black Voters Matter is a non-partisan organization, but the Jefferson county Democratic party chairwoman helped organize the event.

“We knew it was an intimidation tactic,” LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, told the paper.

“The seniors were so resolved. They said: ‘We’re going to vote. Nobody’s going to stop us,’” she said. “It wasn’t the first time someone has denied them or tried to prevent them from voting.”

The county administrator says no one was denied their right to vote and the residents are free to vote at another time.