Stacey Abrams believes that not only was there mismanagement in the 2018 Georgia elections, there was deliberate interference. Though she acknowledges that in the current process, her opponent, former secretary of state Brian Kemp, had enough votes to win the election for Georgia’s governor, Stacey Abrams’ fight to end voter suppression in Georgia has only just begun.
“The law as it stands says that he (Kemp) received an adequate number of votes to become the governor of Georgia,” Abrams said. “And I acknowledge the law as it stands…But we know sometimes the law does not do what it should, and that something being legal does not make it right. This is someone who has compromised our Democratic systems, and that is not appropriate.”
Stacey Abrams was referring to the fact that Kemp, as Georgia’s secretary of state, oversaw crucial elements of his own election, and in the time leading up to the election, Kemp and his office worked to delay the processing of new voter registrations, deny many other registrations, and purge voting rolls.
Even though, technically, Kemp was within the law in his efforts to purge voter rolls of names of people who hadn’t voted in years, he has systematically been setting up a system to make voting inaccessible to large groups of people, many of them minorities.
“…I believe it began eight years ago with the systematic disenfranchisement of more than a million voters,” Stacey Abrams said. “It continued with the underfunding and disinvestment in polling places, in training, and in the management of the county delivery of services, and I think it had its pinnacle in this race.”
Brian Kemp, in a massive voter-purge effort, issued a policy that required voter registrations to be an exact signature match to personal identifications. He also changed the status of more than 50,000 voter registrations (90 percent of which belonged to minorities) to “pending.” Though the court enjoined this action before the election, voting was still hindered by events such as underprepared precincts, excessively long voter lines, and voting machine malfunctions.
Though Stacey Abrams lost the gubernatorial election to Brian Kemp, she has vowed to help repair the system in Georgia that allowed “Eight years of systemic disenfranchisement, disinvestment, and incompetence (to have) its desired effect on the electoral process…” Stacey Abrams is confident that those systems can be defeated.
Stacey Abrams: ‘Democracy failed’ in Georgia governor race | CNN [2018-11-18]
Stacey Abrams speaks to supporters | Fox News [2018-11-16]
