Georgia gubernatorial candidates Stacey Abrams (D) and Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (R) faced off in a heated debate on Tuesday night, with Kemp on the defense about his controversial record on voting rights.

This farce about voter suppression and people being held up from being on the rolls is absolutely not true, Kemp said after the moderator asked whether he could stand here tonight and say there is no attempt on your or your campaigns part to suppress the minority vote?

In the first debate of the competitive and potentially historic governors race, the issue of voting rights took center stage. Earlier this month, a report from The Associated Press found that over 53,000 voter applications in Georgia nearly 70 percent of which were from black people were on hold for verification with Kemps office.

As secretary of state, Kemp oversees elections in the state. After the AP report came out, civil rights groups sued Georgia in federal court over its process of verifying new voter registrations, saying it was discriminatory. Abrams has accused Kemp of voter suppression .

Kemp has denied purging the voter rolls of people of color, saying the states policy amounts to routine roll maintenance.

Abrams who is vying to become the nations first black woman governor said Kemp regularly purges voter rolls and that in his time as secretary of state, more people have lost the right to vote theyve been purged, theyve been suppressed.

Georgia purged twice as many voters 1.5 million between the 2012 and 2016 elections as it did between 2008 and 2012, according to the Brennan Center for Justice . Kemp took office in 2010.

Voter suppression isnt only about blocking the vote, she said during the debate, which was broadcast by Georgia Public Broadcasting and the Atlanta Press Club. It is also about creating an atmosphere of fear, making sure their votes wont count.

Kemp said anybody whose registration was pending could simply show their identification to vote on Election Day. (The 53,000 voters on the suspense list can still vote with a regular ballot if they show up to polls with an accepted form of photo ID on Election Day. But they cant vote absentee or by mail until they resolve the discrepancies with their voter registration.)

Kemp later claimed former President Barack Obama was the reason so many voter registrations are pending: If you want to blame somebody, blame President Obama, he said, noting that the Obama Justice Department had approved the exact match process in 2010. He didnt mention that the DOJ had objected to an earlier version of the system in 2009.

With two weeks left until Election Day in the 2018 midterms, recent polls show the two candidates neck and neck in the race for governor. If the election were to come to a recount, Kemp said during the debate that he would not step down from his role overseeing elections as secretary of state.

I took an oath to serve as secretary of state and that is what I will continue to do, Kemp said, noting that if there were a recount, he was certain there would be a lot of people watching that.