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Stacey Abrams’ Opponent Accuses Her Of Telling Illegals To Vote For Her. Her Response Is Brilliant

Stacey Abrams’ Opponent Accuses Her Of Telling Illegals To Vote For Her. Her Response Is Brilliant

Written by Dana Sanchez

Oct 30, 2018

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Jamarlin talks to Andrew Gillum, mayor of Tallahassee and leading Democratic candidate for Florida governor. They discuss the DNC taking the Black vote for granted, its silence on the killing of 60 Palestinian protestors, and whether big tech and Silicon Valley elites can be regulated at the state level.

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Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams scored points in a recent debate by staying on point.

Her opponent in the governor’s race, Brian Kemp, is also the Georgia Secretary of State and he has a problem that has “conflict of interest” written all over it. Kemp has been sued for suppressing the minority vote in Georgia.

A month before the upcoming Nov. 6 midterm election, an Associated Press investigation showed that Kemp’s office has not approved 53,000 voter registrations – most of them filed by African-Americans.

So Kemp did what works for Donald Trump — he tried to deflect the criticism onto his Democratic opponent for governor, Stacey Abrams.

Former President Jimmy Carter, a Georgia native, is a recent high-profile critic who’s calling on Kemp to step down as secretary of state and hand off oversight of the state’s elections to someone else since he is currently running for governor.

Popular confidence is threatened not only by the undeniable racial discrimination of the past and the serious questions that the federal courts have raised about the security of Georgia’s voting machines, but also because you are now overseeing the election in which you are a candidate,” Carter wrote in a letter to Kemp dated Oct. 22, CNN reported.

Kemp says he’s in compliance with a 2017 state law that requires voter registration information to match exactly with data from the Department of Motor Vehicles or Social Security Administration, PBS reported. However, the civil rights groups suing him say the law disproportionately affects Black and Latino voters.

Stacey Abrams
Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Georgia Stacey Abrams, left, speaks as Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, and Libertarian Ted Metz, right, look on during a debate Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2018, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, Pool)

“As a scholar of African-American history, I recognize an old story in this new electoral controversy,” wrote Frederick Knight, an associate professor of history at Morehouse College, in The Conversation. “Georgia, like many southern states, has suppressed black voters ever since the 15th Amendment gave African-American men the right to vote in 1870. The tactics have simply changed over time.”

In August, a plan was thwarted to close seven out of nine polling locations in a rural, majority-Black county in Georgia.

In September, Kemp sent a flier to potential voters falsely claiming that Abrams plans to allow undocumented immigrants the right to vote, Mother Jones reported.

In the first debate between Abrams and Kemp on Tuesday, Oct. 24, Kemp accused Abrams of calling on illegals to vote for her in this election.

“You were clearly asking for documented and undocumented folks to be part of your winning strategy,” Kemp said. “Why are you encouraging people to break the law for you in this election?”

Here is Abrams’ response:

I am one of the foremost experts in the state on expansion of voting rights and I have never in my life asked for anyone who is not legally eligible to vote to allow them to cast a ballot. What I’ve asked for is for you to allow folks who are legally eligible to vote to allow them to cast their ballots.

“We took you to court in 2016 and a federal judge said that you had illegally canceled 34,000 registrations. You used the exact same system — the match system that is under dispute right now. Now I realize in the next response you’re going to say that it’s a function of my organization because your tendency is to blame everyone else for the mistakes that you made.

“My responsibility as a leader is to see a problem and try and solve it. When I saw that we had 800,000 unregistered people of color in Georgia, I started an organization that has reached into every county and increased those registrations. When I saw that people were being unlawfully denied the right to vote I worked to make certain we held you accountable.

“As the next governor of Georgia I will continue to do my job to make certain that every legally eligible vote that gets cast gets counted.”