If you were following the news such as CNN, MSNBC, or another one of those few-letter cable networks that now play to empty airplane terminals, empty rows of ellipticals, and empty doctor’s office waiting rooms, you’ve heard of a woman called Stacey Abrams, a woman who was “making her case for VP“, who “deserves applause“, who “galvanized voters” in Georgia, for whom “revenge is a dish best served blue“.
from her Vogue piece humbly entitled, “Can Stacey Abrams Save American Democracy?”
Seems like a proportionate amount of press coverage for the person who most recently held office as a former member of the Georgia State House of Representatives.
Per the demure Vogue piece, “Abrams’s run for governor in 2018 ended in a loss of just 54,723 votes—a stunning, public blow. And yet she emerged from it as a kind of bellwether Democrat, a vision of her party’s future.”
Ahh yes, now you should remember Stacey Abrams, the Georgia gubernatorial candidate who refused to concede her election in 2018. It was brought up in the 2020 primaries, where painfully-white candidate Pete Buttigieg stated:
“Racially motivated patterns of voter suppression are responsible for Stacey Abrams not being governor of Georgia right now.”
Far be it from Pete to hastily attempt to shore up some support among black voters; the claim has been repeated by other big-name Democrats too:
A host of prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, former attorney general Eric Holder, Senators Kamala Harris of California, Corey Booker of New Jersey, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have endorsed Abrams’s claim that Kemp stole the election through a series of nefarious voter “purges” in the run up to election day.
This claim has turned out to be so dubious that even the Washington Post stepped away unable to validate it:
Even if every provisional ballot not counted and every rejected absentee ballot had been awarded to Abrams, it would not have necessitated a runoff, much less overcome Abrams’s vote deficit.
The 2018 turnout was far greater than any previous midterm, according to FiveThirtyEight, and more African Americans voted in 2018 than in 2016.
Even if 54,000 to 84,000 had not voted because precinct closings, “Abrams would have had to have won between 82% and 100% of those additional votes to close the gap,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said.
Georgia purges lots of voters because of death, moving or not voting in recent elections, but it also makes it very easy to register because of automatic voter registration (AVR) when people obtain driver’s licenses. Registration has grown 94 percent in Georgia because of automatic voter registration, according to the Brennan Center.
55,000 votes might not seem like much when nearly 3.9 million votes were cast in an off-year gubernatorial election – it’s a slim 1.4% margin.
Which brings us to 2020, a Presidential election year, with 5 million votes (and counting) in the state of Georgia, which has been announced as a 16 electoral vote victory for former VP Joe Biden by:
CNN: “Joe Biden becomes first Democrat in 28 years to win Georgia“
New York Times: “Biden Wins Georgia“
MSNBC: “NBC projects Joe Biden apparent winner in Georgia”
So of course, he must have a far and away lead for such a projection, right?
According to the Wall Street Journal, Biden is currently ahead by a whopping 12,781 votes in Georgia with, again, over 5 million votes cast.
These numbers troubled the Associated Press, who has refused to call Georgia for former VP Biden, including the following under a helpful title, WHY AP HASN’T CALLED GEORGIA:
The Associated Press has not declared a winner in Georgia, where Democrat Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump by 0.3 percentage points.
Under state law in Georgia, the trailing candidate may request a recount if the victory margin is less than 0.5 percentage points. It is AP’s practice not to call a race that is — or is likely to become — subject to a recount.
Also under Georgia law, one race in the general election must be audited by hand to check that machines counted ballots accurately. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger chose to audit the presidential race and said the tight margin meant a full hand count of ballots was necessary to complete the audit.
Speaking of audits, let’s go to Floyd County, Georgia:
Floyd County — where 2,600 uncounted ballots were found during the recount because they hadn’t been scanned when the county tallied its early vote, an oversight that has been attributed to human error…[The] updated results will give Trump a net pickup of 778 votes.
With human error discovered in the 26th largest county in Georgia, what are the chances a hand-recount (which is automatically triggered) could discover other discrepancies in more populous areas?
Let’s go to Stacey “voter fraud is, by and large, a myth” Abrams, who when asked again why she never conceded her gubernatorial election, stated “I have sufficient and I think legally sufficient doubt about the process to say that it was not a fair election.”
“Legally sufficient doubt” sounds like a working title for a bad Grisham novel, but to give Abrams credit, she’s not given up the fight since 2018, pushing her time and energy into registering new voters in Georgia:
Building on the efforts of New Georgia Project and others, Abrams and Fair Fight registered a staggering estimated 800,000 new voters since 2018 and helped squash suppressive policies like “exact match,” which had required registrations to precisely match voters’ licenses down to the hyphen, or else risk being tossed out. Abrams told NPR on November 2: “45% of those new voters are under the age of 30. 49% are people of color. And all 800,000 came on the rolls after November ’18, which means these are voters who weren’t eligible to vote for me but are eligible to participate in this upcoming election.”
That led to Vogue to proclaim: “In no uncertain terms, if Georgia clinches Biden the presidency, he has Abrams (who had been a reported V.P. contender) to thank.”
Writing these headlines before we know how the story ends is dangerous.
If the recount discovers more discrepancies, does Biden have Stacey Abrams to blame for losing Georgia? After all, she allegedly brought in a large swath of new voters, ostensibly some of whom voted for Trump.
Maybe if Biden had picked Stacey Abrams for his VP nominee he could’ve decidedly won Georgia, instead of triggering an automatic recount that could potentially place the state back in Trump’s column.
NPR has noticed this obvious discrepancy in outcome, in a piece titled: “Trump Hasn’t Conceded Georgia. Neither Did Stacey Abrams. What Changed?”
Both Trump and Abrams agree, when it comes to Georgia, “the game is rigged“:
And if Trump wins, he has to look no further than Stacey Abrams, vote registrar extraordinaire, for helping him clinch the state of Georgia:
