MSNBC's Tur Still Seems Unaware GA 'Voter Suppression' Was Debunked

November 4th, 2018 4:22 PM

During Saturday morning's AM Joy show, as MSNBC's Katy Tur on location at a Brian Kemp campaign event in Georgia spoke with a Republican guest, Tur still seemed unaware that claims of "voter suppression" against state Republicans have been debunked as she asked why so many voters on the pending registration list are minorities.

This is especially ironic since just the day before, on her weekday show, a different Republican guest had explained that many applications for new minority voters had been sloppily handled by a liberal group that was founded several years ago by Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams for the purpose of registering more minorities.

Additionally, more than a week ago, an analysis of the pending registrations found that, in most cases, applications were missing a valid Social Security Number, even though Tur continued to suggest that picky technical issues with mispelled names was the reason that so many failed the "exact match" screening test.

On Friday afternoon's MSNBC Live with Katy Tur, at 2:35 p.m. Eastern, Tur turned to Republican strategist Julianne Thompson and posed: "Why does it disproportionately affect African-American and minority voters? Those who would presumably be voting for Stacey Abrams."

Thompson answered: "I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that an organization that Stacey Abrams was associated with was doing a lot of the voter registration and get out the vote effort among those people to register them to vote, and there were a lot of mistakes on the voter registration forms..."

Even though most of the pending registrations were reportedly about incorrect Social Security Numbers, Tur jumped in to follow up: "Some pretty minor mistakes, though. I mean, stuff like not having a hyphen between a name or a minor misspelling. I mean, those are some of the sort of things that, if I went to a polling place in my state, it wouldn't mean that I wouldn't be able to vote."

Left-leaning guest Tharon Johnson of Paramount Consulting Group soon jumped in to complain that Secretary of State Kemp "has purged 1.4 million voters off the list since 2012" without anyone informing viewers that the Georgia Secretary of State is required by a law passed by a Democratic legislature in the 1990s to cancel voter registrations for those who go seven or eight years without either voting or answering requests to verify their address information.

On Saturday morning's AM Joy, at 11:06 a.m. Eastern, Tur seemed to have forgotten why so many minority voters were put on Georgia's pending list as she asked a similar question about race to an unidentified Republican at a Kemp event. Tur: "Does it concern you that it affects more African-American voters than it affects white voters? ... I think it's 70 percent or so African-American voters are affected disproportionately by exact match."

It is also noteworthy that, a couple of weeks ago, Tur's colleague, Steve Kornacki, mentioned the role that the Abrams-founded group had in mishandling minority voter applications as he substitute hosted for Tur, although she must not have been watching.