“To be clear, this is not a speech of concession,” Stacey Abrams said in November 2018, after losing to Brian Kemp in the Georgia governor’s race. She refused to concede because she said Kemp engaged in “deliberate and intentional” voter suppression. Abrams called voting in Georgia itself as a “system of suppression that had already proven its bias.”
Turns out the entire thing was a fundraising charade.
Abrams concluded her non-concession speech by launching Fair Fight Georgia, a group that has raised $62 million (and counting) to support Abrams’ political dreams.
Fair Fight Georgia did bring a sweeping challenge to Georgia’s election laws, claiming, primarily, improper training on absentee ballots and discrimination in the way the Secretary of State’s office matched voter registrations to drivers’ license data, felon records, and death records.
But on September 30, the federal court announced its decision: “the Court finds for Defendants on all counts.”
What a waste of $62 million, for those blind enough to think Abrams was telling the truth.
Abrams’ could not identify any secretive Republican “voter suppression,” despite her grand claims. You’d think, in a state of 10.5 million people (and a war chest of $62 million dollars), it would be easy to find a sizable group of folks who couldn’t vote, and at least try to link their failure to some nefarious strategy.
Instead, all Fair Fight Georgia could find was that 0.89% of voters were flagged in the voter system as “missing identification required.” This meant a voter was registered, but his registration information did not match his drivers’ license or social security information. These voters could still vote by showing up with any sort of identification, like a drivers’ license, utility bill, paycheck, or so on. And only 0.045% of voters were flagged as lacking a citizenship match. Again, these voters could also still vote, with proof of citizenship.
Fair Fight Georgia could identify only one voter “unable to vote” due to absentee ballot issues. At the poll, this voter just needed to verify that she had not already sent in her absentee ballot. I suspect she would have succeeded, but she only waited 15 minutes at the polling station before her senior care facility rushed her back out.
This legal action has taken four full years. In the meantime, Abrams has branded not only individual politicians but the entire state as irreparably racist, causing tens of millions of dollars of damage to the state. It should not take a federal court and an army of lawyers to shut down an opportunistic politician who seeks to drive a wedge between Americans and detrimentally convince millions of Americans that they are victims.