Judge Rules Against Stacey Abrams’ Group Contesting 2018 Georgia Gubernatorial Election

Judge Rules Against Stacey Abrams’ Group Contesting 2018 Georgia Gubernatorial Election

Despite her insistence to the contrary, Stacey Abrams did indeed lose her 2018 bid to become governor of Georgia. A federal judge ruled in favor of the Peach State, stating “Although Georgia’s election system is not perfect, the challenged practices violate neither the constitution nor the VRA [Voting Rights Act of 1965].”

Abrams became a national joke—the “real” governor of Georgia™—for her insistence that she didn’t lose to the actual governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp.  With everyone from Joe “I am the Democratic Party” Biden to Elizabeth Warren to Robert Francis O’Rourke chirping that Abrams would be the “real” winner if only there weren’t such voter suppression, Democrats couldn’t wait to leap on her delusional nonsense.

Stacey Abrams loses her long-running lawsuit based on her refusal to accept her 2018 election loss. All prominent Dems had joined her effort and false claims she was the victor. Media largely supported her efforts as well. https://t.co/wwtjlqO35e

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 1, 2022

So convinced was she that she had actually won, or would have won if only all of her voters had been able to vote, that her organization Fair Fight, filed against the state, claiming all sorts of impediments to Abrams voters.

The AP reports:

A federal judge on Friday found that Georgia election practices challenged by a group associated with Democrat Stacey Abrams do not violate the constitutional rights of voters, ruling in favor of the state on all remaining issues in a lawsuit filed nearly four years ago.

“Although Georgia’s election system is not perfect, the challenged practices violate neither the constitution nor the VRA,” U.S. District Judge Steve Jones in Atlanta wrote, referring to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He detailed his reasoning in a 288-page order.

The lawsuit was filed in November 2018, just weeks after Abrams narrowly lost the governor’s race to Republican Brian Kemp. Throughout that contest, Abrams had accused Kemp, then secretary of state, of using his position as the state’s top elections official to promote voter suppression. Kemp vehemently denied the allegations.

. . . . Georgia officials have created a landscape where it’s “harder to register, harder to stay registered and ultimately harder to vote,” Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, an attorney for Fair Fight and the other plaintiffs, said during her closing argument in late June. The barriers to voting aren’t caused by inevitable human errors but instead result from “choices designed to keep certain people from voting,” she said.

She highlighted testimony from voters who had trouble registering or casting their ballots, voters who shared their stories because they wanted the court to understand what they faced.

Josh Belinfante, a lawyer for state election officials, said in his closing that Georgia’s elections are constitutional and don’t violate the Voting Rights Act. Georgia’s automatic voter registration policy and significant recent increases in African American voter registration are not the signs of a state that is suppressing voters, he argued.

Despite her early claims that 18,000 voters (all voting for her, of course) were “disenfranchised,” Fair Fight found “very few who were unable to cast a ballot.”

The AP continues:

While Fair Fight collected stories from more than 3,000 voters, they found very few who were unable to cast a ballot and none during the 2020 election, Belinfante noted. Instead, he said, the evidence showed problems were generally resolved quickly once state officials were contacted.

Fair Fight’s goal was to get Democrats elected and to make Georgia a blue state, and the organization used a false narrative of voter suppression to motivate people to turn out for its cause, Belinfante said.

“You have to decide has the case matched the rhetoric,” Belinfante told Jones. “The answer is no.”

Things aren’t looking good for Abrams in her rematch against Kemp this year, either. Will more lawsuits follow, or will she shift her focus to becoming “president by 2040“?

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