Georgia sued over voting law civil rights groups say is discriminatory

On Thursday, several civil rights and voting advocacy groups sued Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp to halt enforcement of the state's "exact match" voting law.

Kemp is also Georgia's Republican nominee for governor, and the suit claims that he has put on hold 50,000 registration applications in order to depress minority turnout and boost his gubernatorial campaign. Under state law, information on voter applications, including names and driver's license numbers, must match exactly what is in state databases. If anything is missing, like a middle name or hyphen, that voter could wind up on the "pending" list. Reuters analyzed the list of people on the pending list between August 2013 and February 2018, and found more than two-thirds were black.

On Election Day, voters can go to the polls and cast ballots as long as they provide a state-issued ID, but critics of the exact match law say it is confusing and many people don't realize that they can vote with their ID.

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Kemp is running against Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is hoping to become the state's first black governor. Her campaign has called on Kemp to step down from his role overseeing the election, with spokeswoman Abigail Collazo saying he is "maliciously wielding the power of his office to suppress the vote for political gain and silence the voices of thousands of eligible voters." The Kemp campaign in turn accused Abrams of "using fear to fundraise" and "faking outrage" over the situation.