No low is too low for these guys.

ATLANTA — It was a stray comment at the end of a conversation, but it said volumes about how a controversy over voter registration in Georgia might prompt African-American voters to head to the polls Tuesday.

I was walking out of the Rev. Raphael Warnock’s third floor office at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood east of downtown.

As we neared the door, Warnock was speaking about allegations that Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, has lost some 40,000 new voter registrations sent in from majority black counties. Kemp has called the complaint “frivolous.” But a coalition of groups, including Warnock’s church and the state and national NAACP, are pressing the issue.

“We hate what (Kemp’s) doing,” Warnock said, “but at the end of the day, he may have done us a favor.” Warnock predicted “historic African-American turnout” on Nov. 4.

“And we have him and his shenanigans to thank,” said Warnock. […]

Republicans say the whole “missing voters” controversy is just a way for Democrats to manufacture outrage and get African-American voters to turn out in a close election in which Democratic enthusiasm has consistently lagged Republican intensity.

Charlie Harper, a conservative and founder of one of the state’s most influential political websites, the Peach Pundit, dismissed the “missing voter” complaint out of hand.

The five counties named in the lawsuit by the New Georgia Project are all majority Democrat and majority black, he pointed out. “You’re telling me Clayton County and DeKalb County are suppressing black votes? No. I call BS on their lawsuit,” Harper told me. “I don’t know how anybody could say that with a straight face.”

The whole effort by Abrams, Harper said, is “clearly designed to make voters think that other votes like theirs are being stolen.”