On Monday afternoon, CNN's Wolf Blitzer and MSNBC's Katy Tur continued their networks' recent history of highlighting misleading claims by Democrats that Georgia Republicans are engaging in "voter suppression" against minorities.
At 1:40 p.m. Eastern on his Wolf show, Blitzer proclaimed: "Georgia is fast becoming ground zero for the debate over voter suppression." After noting that GOP Secretary of State Brian Kemp is running for governor against Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams, the CNN host continued:
Kemp's office, which oversees elections in Georgia, is being sued in federal court for purging as many as 700,000 voters from the polls over the past two years. Some have fallen victim to the state laws that remove people who didn't vote for three years or whose name on the voting role doesn't exactly match their name on their driver's license.
In fact, it takes seven years of not voting to be dropped from the voter registration rolls.
Without noting that voters are usually mailed notices warning them about the danger of being purged, Blitzer added: "Many do not even know that they can't vote until they show up on Election Day."
The CNN host was then joined by New York Democratic Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, who likened the situation in Georgia to the Jim Crow era. Blitzer adopted the Democratic terminology of "voter suppression" as he at one point sympathetically followed up: "What, if anything, can you do about these efforts at voter suppression affecting minority voters?"
No Republicans were included to argue in favor of trying to keep the voter rolls up to date and accurate.
About an hour later on MSNBC, Tur introduced a segment on the subject: "Early voting in the midterm elections is now under way across the natoin, but in Georgia, there are grave concerns that thousands of votes will not count."
NBC News correspondent Rehema Ellis began her piece by recalling the case of Georgia resident Marsha Appling-Nunez, who accidentally discovered that her voter registration had been put in "pending" status in spite of a lifetime of voting, because of the new "exact match law" in her state.
Ellis did not clarify that the law apparently only affects those with new voter registration applications, meaning Appling-Nunez was probably targeted in part because she moved and had to submit an application to update her address.
The NBC correspondent soon added: "Even more surprising, the 'exact match law' seems to be discrminating by race." Without giving Secretary of State Kemp's explanation for why a large percentage of pending applications are minorities, Ellis noted that almost 70 percent are African American
By contrast, on Thursday while Tur was away, fill-in host Steve Kornacki at least mentioned that Kemp blamed many of the pending applications on "sloppy" forms being presented by a liberal voter registration group founded by Democratic nominee Abrams which disproportionately concentrated on registering minorities.
