Stacey Abrams has blasted Republican efforts to restrict voting rights in Georgia, calling them “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie.”
Abrams, the former senior state legislator who played a crucial role in flipping Georgia during the U.S. Senate runoff elections in January, has come out against such Republican efforts.
The Republican-backed bill, SB241, would tamper with voting rights, ending the right to vote by mail without having to provide an excuse, and adding other new identification requirements, Abrams said. Republicans say they’re backing the legislation due to a risk of voter fraud, despite any evidence.
On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Abrams said the GOP effort would curtail voting access and is unrelated to GOP voter fraud claims.
“Well, first of all, I do absolutely agree that it’s racist,” Abrams said. “It is a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie. We know that the only thing that precipitated these changes, it’s not that there was the question of security. In fact, the secretary of state and the governor went to great pains to assure America that Georgia’s elections were secure. And so the only connection that we can find is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like.”
Abrams added that the effort isn’t celebrating more voter participation, but rather trying to “eliminate access to voting for primarily communities of color.”
“And there’s a direct correlation between the usage of drop boxes, the usage of in-person early voting, especially on Sundays, and the use of vote by mail and a direct increase in the number of people of color voting,” Abrams said.
