Stacey Abrams, Fount of Disinformation By Rich Lowry
She says there’s a new Jim Crow. Here’s the truth.
Stacey Abrams opens her book, Our Time Is Now, with an anecdote about talking to her grandmother in 2018 when she was making her run for governor.
The Georgia Democrat’s grandmother grew up in Jim Crow Mississippi and, according to Abrams, told her how when she got her first opportunity to vote, in 1968, she was too frightened to go to the polling place. Abrams writes that this “perversion of democracy continues to play out across our country every day.”
“Voter suppression,” she continues, “works its might by first tripping and causing to stumble the unwanted voter, then by convincing those who see the obstacle course to forfeit the race without even starting to run.”
The problem with using her grandmother’s story to illustrate this point is that, after her initial hesitation, her grandmother indeed went and voted — just as pretty much all the people Abrams alleges are being scared away from the polls today are going to vote, too.
When Abrams writes that “across America, would-be voters continue to turn away like my grandmother did,” it’s literally true — because they aren’t turning away at all.
This isn’t in any way to discount her grandmother’s fear, born of living for so long under a system of racial tyranny. But the contemporary relevance of her experience is almost nil. In the old Jim Crow era, most blacks were barred from voting in the South by transparently pretextual measures, and sometimes by outright intimidation and violence; in what is supposedly the new Jim Crow era, blacks are full participants and often determine the outcome of races, as they did in the Georgia runoffs last January.
Spot the contradiction in this sentence that evidently escaped Abrams and her editors at Henry Holt. She writes of her experience running for governor: “I watched in real time as the conflicts in our evolving nation became fodder for racist commercials, horrific suppression — and the largest turnout of voters of color in Georgia’s history.”
Stacey Abrams is one of the great founts of disinformation in contemporary American political life. She’s managed to convince almost all Democrats to accept her ridiculous contention that she was the rightful winner of her 2018 gubernatorial race against Brian Kemp, which she never conceded. Her framework of looking at disputes over voting rules not as matters reasonable people can disagree about, or as fights for partisan advantage, but as an existential struggle over the attempted imposition of a new system of racist repression has prevailed on the center–left. Finally, she’s led the way in characterizing the new Georgia electoral law as the onset of Jim Crow 2.0, prompting denunciations of her state from corporate America and leading Major League Baseball to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta.
She’s paid no price for her dishonesty and hysteria; rather, she’s been celebrated in verse and song. She’s been featured in Vogue (“Can Stacey Abrams save American democracy?” the headline asked) and was somewhere in the very outer orbit of Joe Biden’s VP short list. The way that Senator Elizabeth Warren slammed the new Georgia law is typical of her party’s Abrams-centric view of Georgia: “The Republican who is sitting in Stacey Abrams’ chair just signed a despicable voter suppression bill into law to take Georgia back to Jim Crow.”
Abrams is treated as an authority on all matters related to voting, when, in reality, the beginning of wisdom on such questions is realizing how utterly wrong she is.
In Our Time Is Now, published last year, Abrams writes that “modern-day suppression has swapped rabid dogs and cops with billy clubs for restrictive voter ID and tangled rules for participation.”
She contends that “the sheer complexity of the national voting apparatus smooths suppression into a nearly seamless operation.” Since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, according to Abrams, “we witnessed a ‘power grab’ from the minority desperate to hold on to power.” Republicans are “using convoluted rules to make it harder to register and stay on the rolls, cast a ballot, or have that ballot counted.”
If the aim in Georgia has been to disenfranchise people, as Abrams claims, though, the changes to the electoral system over the last couple of decades haven’t been well suited to the task. Georgia has had no-excuse absentee voting for 15 years. It has had widely available early voting for more than twelve years. It adopted automatic registration in 2016, making registering to vote the default option when people get a driver’s license. This change was implemented administratively by none other than Brian Kemp. People can also register online (although it requires a driver’s license). Prior to the 2020 election, the head of the Georgia chapter of the League of Women Voters told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that so many Georgians were already registered to vote, it was hard to find anyone new to sign up.
This isn’t the profile of a state consumed with keeping people from the polls. Indeed, Abrams makes the odd concession partway through her book that “my home state of Georgia allows both early voting and absentee balloting, as do several of the more aggressive voter suppression states like Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Florida.” Why, if they want to suppress the vote, these states would make these options widely available while some reliable blue states don’t is left unexplained.
By any reasonable measure, Georgia has been experiencing a voter-participation bonanza. In the 2018 election, 57 percent of Georgia’s registered voters cast a ballot, almost as high as turnout in the presidential election of 2016 and way up from 2014. Turnout in the presidential election of 2020 exceeded that of the banner Barack Obama election year of 2008. And turnout in the Senate runoffs doubled the turnout from the previous highest-ever runoff, in 2008, and beat the numbers from the 2016 presidential election.
Meanwhile, 25 percent of new voter registrations in Georgia between 2016 and 2020 were of black voters, more than any other ethnic group. Metropolitan Atlanta accounted for more than half of the state’s new registrations. Abrams can take some credit for this through her voter-registration drives, but these numbers don’t scream, “New Jim Crow.”
In her 2018 gubernatorial race, she lost to Brian Kemp, the sitting secretary of state, 50.2 percent to 48.8 percent, a close result but not a razor-thin one. The threshold for an automatic recount in Georgia is a margin of 0.5 percent or less. Abrams fell considerably short of that, but it didn’t stop her from litigating over the result and casting a cloud over the legitimacy of Kemp’s win.
She made much of Kemp’s running for governor while he was still the secretary of state responsible for supervising the state’s elections. Yet Georgia’s constitution allows that, and it’s not unprecedented. In 2006, Democrat Cathy Cox ran for her party’s gubernatorial nomination while serving as secretary of state. Regardless, localities count the votes, not the secretary of state’s office.
In the aggregate, as noted earlier, her case that she lost because of suppression doesn’t make any sense. Abrams boasts that she got 1.9 million votes, the highest number of Democratic votes in Georgia history; turned out more black voters than had voted in the 2014 election for governor; tripled turnout rates for Latino and Asian/Pacific Islander voters; and increased youth turnout by 139 percent.
Yet she still alleges that she “ran against one of the worst purveyors of voter suppression and xenophobia since George Wallace.” By her account, she was “dogged by a racist demagogue who carefully disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Georgians and who controlled the levers of the election. I watched him be rewarded for joining a growing pool of political leaders who revel in a pervasive, systemic process of stripping the right to vote from some and building obstacles to access for others.”
She refused to acknowledge that she had lost. “In conceding the election,” she explains, “I would validate the system that slashed voters from the rolls, ensured thousands could not cast ballots, and blocked thousands more from being counted.”
What of her specific charges? She complains of polling places’ getting shut down prior to the election, putting it in the darkest possible light. “One of the favored schemes during Jim Crow,” she writes, “was making polling places so difficult to reach that voters simply gave up.” She cites a report in the Journal-Constitution that between 2012 and 2018, 8 percent of Georgia’s polling places were shuttered and almost 40 percent relocated. But these decisions were all undertaken by counties on their own, overwhelmingly to save money or because precincts were located in dilapidated buildings that weren’t accessible to people with disabilities.
Clay County is typical. One of the least populated counties in the state, it is 60 percent African-American and went for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, both by about ten points. The county consolidated from five precincts to one in 2015, in part because of the greater availability of early and absentee voting. The county’s election supervisor at the time told the Journal-Constitution that the proposal met with little opposition from the county election board and that some of the cinderblock precincts were in such disrepair that poll workers didn’t want to work at them.
Then there’s Randolph County, another lightly populated, majority-black, Democratic jurisdiction. It caused an uproar when it considered consolidating seven of its nine precincts before the 2018 election. Brian Kemp came out against the plan. The county backed off, and then a year later closed three precincts, this time making sure that the locations were disproportionately used by white voters. But the rationale was the same — the county didn’t have the money to upgrade the ramshackle aluminum buildings, especially when they weren’t heavily trafficked (one precinct had just 73 registered active voters).
Abrams should be more understanding of the practical considerations at work in such decisions, given that she used exactly this kind of reasoning in 2011 to justify slashing the days available for early voting in Georgia. As a member of the state legislature, she cosponsored legislation, which was passed and signed into law, to cut the days for early voting from 45 all the way down to 21.
Why? Abrams explains that early voting could be “a cost-prohibitive burden” to local governments. Smaller jurisdictions, she writes, complained they would have to cut back in other budgetary areas to maintain the longer period of early voting, and the expense of keeping a facility open was the same whether people were using it or not.
In 2018, she also made a big deal of the so-called list maintenance — or, in more pejorative terms, “voter purges” — that Kemp oversaw as secretary of state. She writes, in sinister tones, that Kemp “strongly favored the ‘use it or lose it’ power in Georgia, where he removed over 1.4 million voters in a state with 6 million registered users. In July 2017, he removed more than half a million voters in a single day, reducing the number of registered voters in Georgia by 8 percent. An estimated 107,000 of these voters were removed through ‘use it or lose it.’”
No one should object, though, to clean, up-to-date voter rolls; in fact, it’s a practice mandated by the federal Motor Voter Act. Clearly, if people die or move out of the state, they should be taken off the rolls. As for the “use it or lose it” rule that Abrams finds so objectionable, it isn’t harsh or unreasonable.
Under “use it or lose it,” if a registered voter didn’t vote for three years, he’d get notified in the mail. If he didn’t reply, he’d be put in the “inactive” file but still be allowed to vote. If he didn’t vote in the next two federal elections and didn’t answer after getting notified again, he’d finally be struck from the rolls. The process took about seven years. After a change in 2019, part of a legislative package to make Abrams-supported lawsuits go away, the timelines were stretched out a bit, and the process now runs about nine years.
There’s never been a case of thousands of people complaining that they’ve been erroneously knocked off the rolls. Besides, people struck from the rolls can reregister, provided they still live in the state and are otherwise eligible.
Another count in the Abrams indictment is that registrations were sent to voting purgatory, the so-called “pending” file, for no good reason. Under the policy of “exact match,” she alleges, minor discrepancies were a pretext to deny registrations. “This use of exact match,” she writes, “led to 53,000 voter registrations being held hostage in 2018, 80 percent of whom were people of color and 70 percent of whom were black voters.”
This, also, is much ado. At the time, if information on a voter registration didn’t match a driver’s license or Social Security records, the voter got 26 months to address the problem. In the meantime, the voter went to the “pending” file, which didn’t keep anyone from voting. As long as the voter could verify his information with an ID at a polling place (which is required in any case), he could vote.
This arrangement was also updated slightly in 2019. Now, voters with mismatching information go to “Active-ID Required” status, meaning they have to show ID before they vote absentee or in person.
In short, the Abrams parade of horribles about 2018 doesn’t hold up to even modest scrutiny. Nonetheless, she moved on from alleging voter suppression in 2018 to alleging yet more voter suppression in 2021, this time over Georgia’s new election law.
On CNN in March, Abrams denounced the changes: “I do absolutely agree that it’s racist. It is a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie.”
“The only connection that we can find,” she explained, “is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like. And so, instead of celebrating better access and more participation, their response is to try to eliminate access to voting for primarily communities of color.”
Note, by the way, the shift from saying just two years earlier that Georgia’s approach was suppressive to saying it had led to “better access and more participation.” That aside, Abrams claimed “a direct correlation” between, among other things, “the use of vote by mail and a direct increase in the number of people of color voting.”
This, like so much that Abrams says, isn’t true. In 2016, according to a report by the progressive Brennan Center for Justice, whites used vote-by-mail at slightly higher rates than blacks in Georgia. The trend ticked the other way in 2020, when roughly 30 percent of blacks voted by mail while 24 percent of whites did. Whites still constituted the majority of vote-by-mail voters, although at a lower percentage than in 2016 (down from 67 percent to 54 percent).
What’s more, a study published by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research shows that the emphasis on no-excuse absentee voting as a key determinant of turnout is misconceived. It found that in 2020, turnout increased equally whether a state had newly adopted no-excuse absentee voting or not. In Texas, no-excuse absentee voting was available only to voters 65 and older. Nonetheless, 64-year-olds in Texas voted at about the same rate as 65-year-olds.
In any case, after considering scaling back no-excuse absentee voting, the Georgia legislature left it intact. More and more commentators have begun to recognize that the Georgia law isn’t the travesty it is advertised as. The law expands hours available for early voting. It keeps ballot drop boxes, which had been a pandemic-driven innovation in Georgia, although it creates tighter rules around them (voters can always simply drop their absentee ballots in the mail). Perhaps its most notorious provision, a ban on giving food and drink to voters in line within 150 feet of a polling place, is based on a similar provision in New York State and is meant to forbid politicking near the polls, not to starve and dehydrate voters.
There are a number of provisions that Abrams should welcome in the Georgia law. She complains about the reliability of signature match in validating absentee ballots, noting that signatures can change over time. “Yet,” she writes, “states use this mismatch as a reason to disqualify otherwise eligible voters from having their duly submitted ballots counted.”
The law dispenses with signature match. Instead, it requires that voters provide a driver’s license or state-ID number to apply for a ballot and that they produce one of those numbers, or the last four digits of a Social Security number, when returning the ballot. (The voter still has to sign to attest that the information is correct.)
Abrams considers long lines at polling places another means of voter suppression. “In 2018,” she writes, “Georgia posted the longest wait times in the nation for minority voters.” But long lines have traditionally been a problem of poorly run jurisdictions, usually Democratic. Addressing this issue has been a focus of Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, and the new law will force counties with long lines to reduce the size of the relevant precincts, or add new equipment or workers.
She complains about the handling of provisional ballots (which allow voters to vote even if there’s a problem, on the assumption that it can be sorted out later). “In the hands of vote suppression masters,” Abrams writes, “the provisional ballot provides not safety but a guarantee against full democratic rights.”
First of all, before the advent of provisional ballots, which were mandated in the 2002 Help America Vote Act, a voter with a flawed registration or some other issue would simply have been turned away. Second, provisional ballots are inherently difficult for election administrators to deal with. They have to put the ballot in a secrecy slip and then must follow up to verify it, a time-consuming process.
In Georgia, many provisional ballots result from voters who are voting out-of-precinct. The new law attempts to diminish the need for such ballots by requiring people who show up at the wrong precinct to go to the right one if they arrive before 5 p.m. From 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., they can vote at the wrong precinct if they sign an affidavit saying that they can’t get to the right one.
Abrams finds it nefarious when absentee ballots get rejected. A large share of these ballots are disqualified for not having arrived on time. Hence the rationale for another provision in the new law: A voter can no longer request a ballot later than eleven days prior to the election. This deadline is meant to keep voters from requesting ballots they can’t return in time. According to Gabriel Sterling of the Georgia secretary of state’s office, if ballots were requested more than ten days before the election, more than 90 percent of them were voted; if they were requested fewer than ten days before the election, only 52 percent were voted.
It’s worth noting that other large claims Abrams makes about American elections don’t accord with the facts, either. She makes much of the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2013 Shelby case, which ended so-called pre-clearance — the requirement under the Voting Rights Act that the federal government sign off on any changes to the electoral system in places that had a history of disenfranchisement.
“The results,” she writes, “have dramatically undermined access to full participation in our democracy.” She continues, not putting too fine a point on it: “Without a Voting Rights Act–style oversight, voters of color once again face the specter of being outside the protections of our Constitution. Without a protected right to vote, the Shelby decision and the proliferation of anti-voting laws have destabilized the whole of our democratic experiment.”
This isn’t borne out. A paper by Kyle Raze, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Oregon, concludes: “The removal of preclearance requirements did not significantly reduce the relative turnout of eligible black voters.”
She calls voter-ID provisions “a key tool in the suppression toolbox.” No, not so either. According to a 2019 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “strict ID laws have no significant negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any subgroup defined by age, gender, race, or party affiliation. These results hold through a large number of specifications and robustness checks.”
To the extent that she’s arguing in good faith, Abrams is wrong about so much because she is beholden to an extreme version of the convenience theory of voting – the notion that voters are easily discouraged and highly sensitive to how much effort it takes to vote. There’s no doubt that turnout can be affected by radical changes in the voting system – the adoption of universal mail-in voting, which entails sending a ballot to everyone, seems to increase turnout perhaps by 2 to 4 percent. But run-of-the-mill changes don’t make much difference.
As the authors of the aforementioned Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research study note, “in high-salience elections like 2020, there are probably very few marginal voters who base their decision to participate on the relative costs of one mode of voting over another, so long as the inconvenience and difficulty of in-person voting remains within reasonable bounds.” From this perspective, the threshold question for voting is whether someone is interested and engaged in an election or not. Once someone is, he is going to vote regardless of the particular rules.
Certainly, this explanation best accords with Stacey Abrams’s own experience. A talented base politician, she has excelled at motivating Democratic voters, who have turned out despite all the obstacles she says are in their way.
Or, to be more precise, probably because of all the obstacles she says are in their way. There are few more compelling means of engaging and firing up voters than to tell them that the other side is trying to take away their rights, especially if the message plays on emotional memories of a terrible time when this was actually true. Cynical? Sure. Effective? Absolutely. Abrams likely plans to run for governor again in 2022. If successful, she’ll be the first candidate in American history to get “disenfranchised” all the way into a governor’s mansion.
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