Failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams tried to distance herself from the “Big Lie” that she won the governorship in 2018, falsely stating that she “did not challenge the outcome of the election.”
“What I said was that the system was not fair,” Abrams said in an appearance on MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow Show. “And leaders challenge systems. Leaders say we can do better. That is what I declared.
Washington Examiner writer Becket Adams called Abrams a “liar” in an opinion piece, and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger commented that Abrams must stop spreading “lies.”
Stolen election claims are a threat to voter confidence and to our democracy. These lies must stop.https://t.co/WKI2a3dnzZ
— GA Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (@GaSecofState) January 7, 2022
After the 2018 election, Abrams filed a lawsuit that sought to make Georgia count every rejected absentee ballot and provision ballot—an unsafe proposal that became reality in the state’s 2020 election when election officials rejected a record-low number of ballots.
Abrams also considered taking the case to the Supreme Court, where she would have alleged “misconduct, fraud or irregularities … sufficient to change or place in doubt the results.”
She refused to concede the election and called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp “an architect of suppression.”
“The incompetence and mismanagement we witnessed in this election had been on display months before,” Abrams claimed. “The mistakes clearly altered the outcome.”
These lies spread through American politics, as Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe complained last October that Abrams would have won the election had Kemp not taken “the votes away.”
In the speech that she admits Kemp will become governor, she stated that “to be clear, this is not a speech of concession.”
In recent months, Raffensperger has taken a more critical stance toward voting fraud in Georgia by suing President Joe Biden’s Justice Department to determine whether it colluded with leftist groups after the 2020 election and by launching an investigation into ballot harvesting.
Raffensperger rejected former President Donald Trump‘s efforts to ensure election integrity after the 2020 elections, which has resulted in widespread dissatisfaction with him among the Republican base.
