In election news, the controversy over voter suppression in Georgia took center stage Tuesday as audio of Georgia secretary of state and Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp was leaked just hours before his debate with Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams, who hopes to become the nation’s first African-American woman governor. In the recording, taken at a campaign event last week and published by Rolling Stone, Kemp expressed concern over Georgians exercising their “right to vote,” particularly in early and absentee voting.

Secretary of State Brian Kemp: “And as worried as were, going into the start of early voting, with the literally tens of millions of dollars that they are putting behind the get-out-the-vote efforts for their base—a lot of that was absentee ballot requests—they had just an unprecedented number of that, which is something that continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote, which they absolutely can, and mails those ballots in. We’ve got to have heavy turnout to offset that.”

At Tuesday’s debate, Brian Kemp accused Stacey Abrams of encouraging undocumented people to vote illegally. She responded that Kemp has used Georgia’s strict “exact match” voter ID law to put thousands of voter applications on hold.

Stacey Abrams: “Under Secretary Kemp, more people have lost the right to vote in the state of Georgia. They’ve been purged. They’ve been suppressed. And they’ve been scared. This is a man who had someone arrested for helping her blind father cast a ballot. He raided the offices of organizations to stop them from registering voters. That type of voter suppression feeds the narrative, because voter suppression isn’t only about blocking the vote. It’s also about creating an atmosphere of fear, making people worried that their votes won’t count.”