Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams dismissed accusations from Georgia’s secretary of state comparing her refusal to concede after her 2018 defeat to Gov. Brian Kemp (R) to President Trump’s refusal to do the same.
In an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union,” Abrams responded to an op-ed penned by Brad Raffensperger in The Wall Street Journal calling Trump’s refusal to concede to President-elect Joe Biden straight out of “the Stacey Abrams playbook.”
In his op-ed, Raffensperger said that Abrams “refused to concede, announced that she would launch major litigation against Georgia’s election system, and began collecting hundreds of millions of dollars from donors convinced the election had been stolen from her” following her defeat to Kemp.
Abrams pushed back against that assertion on CNN, noting that hundreds of thousands of voters were purged from state voter rolls before her race went to the ballot box.
“First and foremost, he’s never listened to what I said,” Abrams said of Raffensperger’s argument. “I said that the election was stolen from Georgia voters because, under the previous secretary of state, Brian Kemp, millions of voters were — 1.4 million voters were purged from the rolls, thousands of voters were denied the right to vote because of [voter registration processes].”
Abrams went on to reject any comparison between herself and the president, who she argued was working to disqualify voters from having their voices heard. Her own efforts, she argued, were centered around voter registration efforts in Georgia and fighting against Republican efforts to purge voter rolls.
“There is absolutely nothing commensurate between what I have done and what Donald Trump is trying to do,” said Abrams. “My mission has been very clear since I was 17, and that is expanding access to the right to vote for those who are entitled to vote in our country and especially in the state of Georgia. What Donald Trump is arguing is that he only wants to count the votes that he likes. He wants to restrict access to the right to vote and restrict who gets to be heard in our country. That is not at all what I’m pushing for.”
Raffensperger’s comments come as Trump has vowed continuing legal efforts to overturn the presidential election results in recent days following two decisions by the Supreme Court to dismiss cases brought by pro-Trump attorneys in two states.
The General Services Administration authorized the Biden transition team to receive federal funding weeks ago, but the president’s White House team has thus far refused to acknowledge Trump’s defeat or begin the process of bringing Biden’s team fully up to speed.
Abrams has been credited with a widespread voter registration effort in Georgia that helped the state turn blue for the first time in a presidential race since 1992.