https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181104/23204140978/georgias-brian-kemp-no-good-very-bad-claim-that-democrats-were-hacking-voter-registration-system.shtml

Okay, let's start with this. Can we all agree -- no matter what your party, ideological, or candidate preference -- that in any election where you are up for one of the offices, that you shouldn't be the one in charge of safeguarding the integrity of the election? This seems like a fairly basic point concerning democracy, that if you're a candidate for office, you should recuse yourself from anything involving election integrity. However, that's not the way things work around here, apparently. In at least three key elections this year, current secretaries of state, who are in charge of election integrity, are running for higher office while being in charge of counting their own votes. It just so happens that this year all three of those cases involve Republicans (and all three of those Republicans have a long and fairly detailed history of voter suppression tactics), but the issue applies equally to Democrats who might be in the same position. No one who is in charge of election integrity should ever be in the position of running for office at the same time.

But let's focus in on just one of the three individuals in that situation this year: Republican Brian Kemp, Georgia's Secretary of State, who is in a very heated campaign to be Governor of Georgia, campaigning against Democrat Stacey Abrams. As you may know, our stated policy on Techdirt is that we tend not to name the party affiliation of any politician, unless it truly matters to the story. That's because in this age of red team/blue team insanity, many people determine what they agree or disagree with depending on the color of the uniform. However, in this story, the party affiliations matter, not for which one is which (we could have posted an identical story with the party's changed), but because the dispute here clearly involves partisan politics.