Over the weekend, voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams tore apart outgoing President Donald Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud during an appearance on ABC’s This Week. As she noted, there’s simply no legitimate supporting evidence for Trump’s claims about the electoral process, which have included the repeated idea that he won where he simply did not actually win. He’s claimed that he won Georgia, where Abrams is from, in the recent presidential election, but that’s just not true. Judges across the country, including in Georgia, have rejected Republican claims.
At present, Georgia has two ongoing U.S. Senate races in which Democrats are hoping to unseat the state’s two incumbent Republican Senators and thereby take control of the Senate. Asked on ABC if she thinks that Trump’s lies about the electoral process are impacting Republican candidates, Abrams commented as follows:
‘I think it’s always dangerous to undermine the integrity of elections without evidence. When we challenged voter suppression, we were able to prove it, we were able to correct for it in many ways, and that’s why we saw a dramatic increase in turnout from 2018 to 2020, where more voters were able to cast their ballots and have those ballots counted. In contrast, the continued notion that undermines the elections — I think [it’s] having a deleterious effect on Republicans, but my mission is to make sure that everyone trusts the system, and that we make sure that it’s a system that’s worthy of that trust.’
Abrams ran for governor against Georgia’s current chief executive Brian Kemp in 2018, and as that race drew to a close, she and her team raised serious claims of voter suppression in the state. No matter original intentions on the part of state officials, the clear net effects of certain policies were the suppression of people’s votes via their unfair exclusion from the process. Georgia’s incumbent Republican Senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, recently backed a lawsuit that would have instituted a suppressive policy, lowering the threshold for setting aside mail-in ballots for further scrutiny. They wanted to require one instead of two participating election workers to conclude that there’s an issue with a submitted signature before designating a mail-in ballot for further verification from voters.
On ABC, Abrams added as follows, discussing the president’s claims:
‘President Trump has lost every single one of his challenges in the state of Georgia, and he has no evidence. In fact, an audit — the fourth, I think, of this election — found that there was zero fraud in our signature match process.’
The mail-in ballot-associated signature audit that she was referring to took place in Cobb County. Check out Abrams’s comments below:
On whether Pres. Trump's unsubstantiated claims about voting hurt his campaign in Georgia, Stacey Abrams tells @martharaddatz: "I think it's always dangerous to undermine the integrity of elections without evidence." https://t.co/KyzgyJnDtW pic.twitter.com/DP8URWyTTb
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 3, 2021
