The Fight for a Fair Vote in Georgia

[tense music]

Last year, in one of the more closely-watched

gubernatorial races in the country,

Stacey Abrams, who was a minority leader

in the Georgia legislature for Democrats,

challenged Brian Kemp,

who was the secretary of state in Georgia.

And at the end of the race,

a set of circumstances occurred

such that Brian Kemp had more votes than Stacey Abrams did.

And the way he achieved that

has become a more complicated question

and has brought to the floor

issues and questions of voter suppression.

[camera clicking]

Given that I have family roots in Georgia

on my father's side,

were I able to talk to my paternal grandparents

they would probably be shocked

at the extend to which the world that we live in now

is familiar to them.

Certainly as it relates to black people and voting.

But I'm here tonight to tell you

votes remain to be counted.

There are voices that are waiting to be heard.

[audience exclaims in agreement]

Across our state, folks are opening up the dreams of voters

and absentee ballots,

and we believe our chance for a stronger Georgia

is just within reach.

At a certain point, the political reasoning became

that you have a certain number of people

who are going to vote,

a certain number of people who are not going to vote,

and that the most reasonable way to operate a campaign

is that you focus on the people

who are already going to vote.

The other part of it is just practical,

which is that registering people takes money.

And people may not want to commit money

to an unproven group of people.

So when Stacey Abrams came out and said

that she was going to devote most of her resources

to registering voters and getting them to come out,

people thought that this was

let's just say politically naive at best as a strategy.

Because I'll tell you this, in a civilized nation,

the machinery of democracy should work

for everyone everywhere,

not just in certain places and not just on a certain day.

She is a person who had a vision

about a political future in the state

that not very many people could see.

And if you live in Georgia, as I did for a decade,

if you live in Georgia for any period of time,

you will hear about the 1/2 million or so

unregistered African-American voters in the state.

And Stacey Abrams went out and actually created a campaign,

an organization called The New Georgia Project,

and they began registering

unregistered African-American voters.

The impact of this was that in 2018

she got about 1.2 million African-American votes in Georgia.

In the 2014 gubernatorial race,

the Democratic candidate got 1.1 million votes total.

And so she had vastly increased

the number of African-Americans who were voting,

she had a large significant share of white voters

in the state as well.

[gentle music]

I happened to live not terribly far from Stacey Abrams

when I lived in Georgia,

and we knew each other passingly,

and when I got word that she was thinking

about running for governor,

I give her a call and talk to her

to get an idea about whether or not

I would write a piece on the campaign.

And when she told me her strategy

was to register all of these hundreds of thousands of people

and get them to come out and vote,

I was quiet at the end of the line.

And later I said, You could probably hear my eyebrow raise

when you said that.

And she said, It's more like I could hear

your eyes rolling.

[Reporter] Long before the polls opened at 7:00 a.m.

it was clear something unusual

is going on in the American South.

It is a given in US elections

that turnout among African-Americans is low.

Not this time.

This race had themes that are significant for 2020.

For one, Georgia has been dealing with the question

of its changing demographics.

African-Americans are about 1/4 of the electorate there now.

There's a growing Latino population,

there's a growing Asian population in the state.

And the electorate for the Republican Party

is overwhelmingly white.

There's the question of people's access to the ballot.

The issue of voter purges was not simply

a question in Georgia,

the Supreme Court took it up and actually ruled last year

that it was valid that states could enact,

they could purge their voter rolls

with the kind of frequency that might also have the effect

of preventing people from getting access to the ballot.

One of the other quirks that we saw

was that the Republican candidate for governor

was also the secretary of state

charged with overseeing the election

in which he was running.

This is a glaring conflict of interest.

A group called Common Cause filed a lawsuit

saying that they had found a vulnerability

in the Georgia voter database.

They went before a judge and got a demand

that they address this,

and this was the day before the election.

There were polling places where they have machines

but they did not have power cords.

There were places where they did not have enough machines

for people to vote and you saw the lines

stretching out of the polls and down the street.

Some people who said that they had shown up to the polls

and were not allowed to vote

because they were told they were not US citizens,

and these were people who were in fact US citizens,

people who were born in the United States,

whose citizenship had never been in question

who found that they were not allowed to vote.

The results came in on election day,

and this is a very close election,

and at the end of the night Brian Kemp has a slim lead.

The Kemp campaign is demanding a concession speech

but the Abrams campaign is refusing to concede

until they know exactly what the tally is.

There's also the question of whether or not

Kemp will have a margin large enough

to prevent a mandatory recount.

And so the Abrams campaign was holding off

to see what exactly the finally tally would be.

And this stretches on for about a week.

I acknowledge that former secretary of state Brian Kemp

will be certified as the victor

in the 2018 gubernatorial election.

But to watch an elected official

who claims to represent the people in this state

boldly pin his hopes for election

on the suppression of the people's democratic right to vote

has been truly appalling.

She never concedes defeat,

and so she's referred to it as a non-concession speech,

and for very obvious reasons.

She was competing against the person

who was overseeing the election,

there were hundreds of thousands of voters who were purged,

there were all the irregularities that people saw

on election day itself.

And what the cumulative effect of that is, no one knows.

Without voter suppression, you would've probably won.

I think it is a very high likelihood, yes.

Pretty often when someone runs for office

and they don't win the office,

we forget about that person pretty quickly.

And with Abrams, one of the things that made me interested

in writing about her was that the opposite happened.

That the election concluded, her opponent was inaugurated,

and generally speaking in the United States

Stacey Abrams probably has a higher name recognition

than the person who actually went on to become governor.

It has partly been because of her association

with this cause of voting rights reform.

In 2008 and 2012, black women voted at a rate

that exceeded any other demographic in the country.

At the same time, you look at the data

around who holds elective office,

black women were among the least likely demographics

to hold political office.

And so there was a hope that Stacey Abrams,

along with other people who were emerging

around that same time, think Kamala Harris

as one of the people going about as well,

that they recognized them as maybe being hallmarks

of this new era of political participation.

And I will do everything I can to keep you safe

and help you live your best lives.

[audience cheers]

Because that's what leadership requires at this moment,

and it is how we breathe life back into our republic

when it seems to be shallow of breath.

[tense music]