As Republicans across the country continue their work to enact restrictive new election guidelines, voting rights activist and former (for now) Georgia politician Stacey Abrams is continuing her work to help defend the right to vote. In newly shared remarks to CBS, Abrams explained the importance of approaching voting rights as “an issue of citizenship versus partisanship” instead of one of Democrats versus Republicans or the like. Protecting the right to vote should not in any reasonable way be a partisan issue!
As Abrams put it:
‘The undermining of our democracy is a danger to everyone—regardless of their party. And that’s why it’s so urgent we stop treating this as a binary conversation between Democrats and Republicans and focus on this as an issue of citizenship versus partisanship.’
Check out Abrams’s comments below:
Abrams leads a Georgia-based organization called Fair Fight, which conducts voter outreach like registration drives and related educational initiatives. In Georgia, the state’s Republican leaders recently enacted a host of new voting restrictions that serve no purpose but suppressing marginalized communities. No systematic issues were discovered with the state’s previous election guidelines, so they’re not solving problems, but now, Republican leaders have imposed new voter ID requirements for mail-in voting, new restrictions on the times that mail-in ballot drop boxes can be made available, and more. The Georgia legislation has already been hit with repeated lawsuits.
Stacey Abrams to CBS: "The undermining of our democracy is a danger to everyone—regardless of their party. And that's why it's so urgent we stop treating this as a binary conversation between Democrats and Republicans and focus on this as an issue of citizenship v. partisanship."
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 11, 2021
During further recent chats with CBS, Abrams also discussed issues like the January rioting at the Capitol, where demonstrators (among other things) carried the Confederate flag. The Confederate flag, she noted, has “always been a declaration of domestic terrorism against communities they thought were not worthy of being able to call themselves citizens.”
Discussing broader issues, Abrams poignantly added as follows:
‘When you’ve never had to think about the hardship of voting, then yes, these conversations about voter suppression seem absurd to you. When you’ve never spent more than seven minutes in line, it is nearly impossible to imagine that there are poor Black people who stand in line for eight hours, miss an entire day’s wages, risk losing their jobs, simply to cast a ballot in an election that may or may not have any benefit in their lives.’
Check out Abrams’s comments below:
