Rev. of MLK's Church criticizes subpoena by GA SOS as a "shameless effort at voter suppression"

Georgia's Republican Secretary of State issued a subpoena on September 9th, alleging that a new and powerful voter registration group has committed fraud.

Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (MLK's Church), says:

This is a shameless effort at voter suppression.

Stacey Abrams, GA House Minority Leader, is the owner of the parent company for the New Georgia Project and was joined by Rev. Warnock in an interview with the AJC. Abrams explained:

It is clearly an attempt to put a chilling effect on our voter registration effort, but to put a chilling effect on every voter registration effort that’s working in partnership with us. That includes the NAACP and the Coalition for the People’s Agenda.

We have collected more than 85,000 forms statewide, and if this were to be effective against us, it could be effective against other groups. And we all see the subpoena as an opening salvo at voter suppression.
[snip]
to put it in context, we’ve registered 33,000 people in Fulton County. We’ve registered more than 11,000 in Muscogee County. And the complaints that he references, just based on our own internal analysis with them, we have found fewer than 25 [problematic forms].

If you look at the numbers, that’s less than one-one-thousandth of a percent.

The thing to know is that what state law requires is that we turn in every form we receive. If someone is filling out a form, and they get a phone call and they have to go into the house, and they don’t come back to the door, we by law must turn in that form. We do not have a choice.

So what we are being accused of is following the law. Because what we did was turn in every form we received, irrespective of quality. What we did, to go above and beyond, is that we actually flagged the forms that we thought they needed to look at. And we had clerks in each county where we submitted forms sign receipts saying that they were told we had forms we thought might need to get a closer look from the secretary of state’s office.

The initial story about the subpoena from the SOS made the rounds on blogs and local newspapers, but so far, there's been almost no mention of the counter-allegations from Rev. Warnock and Rep. Abrams, since being first published 10 hours ago. (GoogleNews currently returns 2 results for "'New Georgia Project' suppression" and 137 for "'New Georgia Project' fraud").

Where there are actual problems with voter registration forms, then of course it's good that the County Boards have caught the problem. The responsible employees should be held accountable.

In my opinion, the SOS subpoena is far too broad. They should focus on the alleged fraudulent forms. Was there criminal activity with some forms? If so, which specific field employees submitted those forms? And how was that person trained and supervised?

Instead the Republican SOS is using red tape to prevent thousands of perfectly valid voter registrations from occurring. Further, the SOS has contacted all the County Board of Elections about the (alleged) fraud, doubting the validity of all pending voter registration forms submitted by the group in question.