GOP attacks Georgia’s Abrams on voting as judge rejects suit
ATLANTA — When Democrat Stacey Abrams narrowly lost the Georgia governor’s race to Republican Brian Kemp four years ago, she didn’t go quietly.
She ended her campaign with a nonconcession that acknowledged she wouldn’t be governor, while spotlighting her claims that Kemp had used his post as secretary of state to improperly purge likely Democratic voters. Abrams founded Fair Fight Action, a group focused on fair elections, which within weeks filed a wide-ranging federal lawsuit alleging “gross mismanagement” of Georgia’s elections. That lawsuit sputtered out Friday with Fair Fight losing its last remaining arguments, more than a year after the judge had tossed most earlier claims.
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People are already voting by mail in a Georgia governor’s race that again pits Abrams and Kemp against each other, with fewer than 40 days remaining before voting ends on Nov. 8.
And Republicans are now using the loss to attack what they see as the “big lie” that underlies Abrams’ career. They label her claims that Georgia’s election system has been discriminatory as a fraud she used to enrich herself and aggrandize her political career after her 2018 loss.
“This is existential to who Stacey Abrams has become as a public and political figure,” Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican who defended the case, said Saturday. “She put herself in the political spotlight nationally, potentially globally, all over the narrative that she lost the governor’s race because of voter suppression. And here you have a federal judge saying, it’s all untrue. It didn’t happen.”
Carr and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger are among a faction of Georgia Republicans who say that Democratic President Joe Biden beat Donald Trump fair and square in 2020 for Georgia’s 16 electoral votes and that Kemp also beat Abrams fairly in 2018. They argue that Trump’s claims about voter fraud in 2020 and Abrams’ claims about voter suppression in 2018 both corrode faith in democracy.
“Stolen election and voter suppression claims by Stacey Abrams were nothing but poll-tested rhetoric not supported by facts and evidence,” Raffensperger said.
Abrams, though, has said that her actions in 2018 are not equivalent to what Trump did.
“I will never ever say that it is OK to claim fraudulent outcomes as a way to give yourself power,” Abrams told news outlet The 19th last month.
