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      Stacey Abrams files lawsuit after being blocked from fundraising for Georgia governor campaign

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      Stacey Abrams files lawsuit after being blocked from fundraising for Georgia governor campaignA dispute over whether Abrams can be declared the nominee has prevented her from legally raising funds Stacey Abrams has filed a lawsuit seeking to immediately begin fundraising for her campaign for governor under a state law that prevents her gubernatorial leadership committee from doing so.Abrams is requesting to take advantage of a new kind of fundraising committee created by Georgia lawmakers last year, which her opponent, the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, has already been able to make use of. Called a leadership committee, it allows certain people and groups to accept unlimited contributions. Giving to direct candidate committees, on the other hand, is limited to $7,600 apiece for the primary and general elections and $4,500 for any runoff election.Under the law, the committees can be formed by the governor and lieutenant governor, opposing major party nominees, and both party caucuses in the state house and senate. The committees can coordinate with candidate campaigns, unlike most other political action committees.Although Georgia has not yet officially approved Abrams as the Democratic party nominee, Abrams argues that because no one filed to run against her in the 24 May Democratic primary and because write-in votes are not allowed, she became the nominee when qualifying closed.“Ms Abrams – the sole qualified and declared Democratic candidate for Governor of Georgia – and her campaign committee will be unable to operate, control, chair, or otherwise use One Georgia, a leadership committee … to support her campaign without credible and justified threat and fear of legal proceedings being instituted against Plaintiffs,” the lawsuit said.“As a direct consequence, Plaintiffs will suffer ongoing and irreparable injury to their ability to use political speech to advocate for Ms Abrams’s campaign, especially compared to her chief opponent, sitting Governor Brian P Kemp.”Georgia has not yet approved Abrams’s leadership due to disputes over whether she qualified as a nominee before the primary, even though the state’s Democratic party chair, representative Nikema Williams, has recognized her candidacy and recognized Abrams as the sole nominee.In an affidavit, Williams wrote, “The only candidate who qualified with DPG [Democratic Party of Georgia] to run for the office of Governor of the State of Georgia prior to the end of the 2022 candidate qualifying period on March 11, 2022 is Stacey Y Abrams.”Abrams said in court pleadings that when a lawyer for her contacted the state ethics commission to confirm that her leadership committee could begin raising and spending money before 24 May, a commission lawyer said Adams’s legal team first needed to seek legal advice from Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr, and secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, as to whether state law considers Abrams the nominee. In the absence of any further clarification since, Abrams’s team filed the lawsuit seeking a temporary order to be allowed to raise money right away.Meanwhile, Kemp created the Georgians First leadership committee after signing the law and had raised $2.3m through January.Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams’s campaign manager, said that Kemp’s early fundraising advantage causes “severe harm” to the fairness of the election.“Early fundraising supports later fundraising by demonstrating a candidate’s political viability and widespread appeal, particularly in a high-dollar statewide election in a swing state like Governor of Georgia,” she wrote.TopicsStacey AbramsGeorgiaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Star Trek makes Stacey Abrams president of United Earth – and stokes conservative anger

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      Star Trek makes Stacey Abrams president of United Earth – and stokes conservative angerNational Review says candidate for governor in Georgia and self-confessed superfan does not deserve fictional title The Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights campaigner Stacey Abrams has been made president – of United Earth.‘Champion for Alaska’: Don Young, longest-serving House Republican, dies at 88 Read moreThe honour, which a leading conservative website said Abrams did not deserve, was bestowed by the Paramount+ TV series Star Trek: Discovery, in its season four finale.Abrams is a self-confessed Star Trek superfan. In 2019, she told the New York Times she binged on episodes during her last run for governor.“I love Voyager and I love Discovery and of course I respect the original,” she said, “but I revere The Next Generation.”Michelle Paradise, executive producer of Star Trek: Discovery, told Variety the show decided it needed a figure of suitable gravitas.“When the time came to start talking about the president of Earth,” she said, “it seemed like, ‘Well, who better to represent that than her?”Abrams is a former Democratic member of the Georgia state house as well as a prolific romance novelist. She has said she will be US president by 2040.In 2018, she ran the Republican Brian Kemp close for governor of Georgia. She is seeking a rematch this year and in part thanks to her work on voting rights has risen to prominence in the national party, having been considered for vice-president to Joe Biden.Abrams’s work helped secure both Biden’s win in Georgia in 2020 and Democratic control of the US Senate, via two Georgia run-offs.Such work has made her a target of the right. On Friday, the National Review, a conservative site, published a column about her Star Trek cameo: Stacey Abrams Does Not Deserve to Be President of Earth.Abrams, the Review said, “is, at this time, most famous for losing the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and then proceeding to deny she had lost it”.Abrams refused to concede to Kemp, who as Georgia secretary of state oversaw the purging of voter rolls before the election he contested.Brad Raffensperger, the current Georgia secretary of state, has argued that Abrams’ refusal to concede was “morally indistinguishable from – and helped set the stage for – former president Donald Trump’s behavior after the 2020 presidential election”.Raffensperger famously stood up to Trump, whose request that Raffensperger “find” sufficient votes to flip the state is at the heart of a grand jury investigation.In 2019, Abrams told the New York Times that while she “legally acknowledge[d] that Brian Kemp secured a sufficient number of votes under our existing system to become the governor of Georgia. I do not concede that the process was proper, nor do I condone that process.”She also said: “I have no empirical evidence that I would have achieved a higher number of votes. However, I have sufficient and I think legally sufficient doubt about the process to say that it was not a fair election.”The Review complained that Star Trek would never make Trump president of Earth, not even “in the way that the evil genetic superman Khan Noonien Singh once despotically ruled one-quarter of earth’s population”.It added: “In classic Trek fashion, Abrams [was] shown as the logical and inevitable result of the kind of technocratic progressivism that the show has long advanced, a fruition of our highest ideals. Her behavior in the political sphere does not seem to bear this out.”Elie Mystal, a writer for the Nation, responded: “Look at how conservative white people react to a FICTIONAL black woman president.”Mystal also tied the Review’s criticism to events in Washington, where Ketanji Brown Jackson will next week begin confirmation hearings to be the first Black woman on the supreme court.“Next week,” Mystal wrote, “this same publication that can’t handle a black women president ON A TELEVISION SHOW is going to claim to have reasonable and *totally not racist* thoughts about a real life black woman on the supreme court.” The makers of Star Trek: Discovery seemed happy just to have had Abrams on set. They also explained how they fulfilled her request not to be told of the plot of her episode, so she could enjoy it later.As the Washington Post reported, the episode, which was filmed in Toronto last August, ended with Abrams “telling the show’s protagonist … ‘There’s a lot of work to do. Are you ready for that?’“‘I am,’ [Captain Michael Burnham] responds. ‘Let’s get to it.’”Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays Burnham, told Variety she was “taken aback … and really moved” by Abrams’ performance.“It really signaled the culmination of the season having her there,” she said, “because she’s such this symbol of hope and strength and connection and sacrifice and building something bigger than yourself that will last generations, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about doing in the story.”In a “cherished moment”, Martin-Green said, Abrams was presented with a trophy, a captain’s badge and a poem.TopicsStacey AbramsStar TrekUS politicsDemocratsUS midterm elections 2022GeorgiaUS televisionnewsReuse this content More

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      Trump ally vows to block ‘the left’ from overseeing key Georgia elections

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      Trump ally vows to block ‘the left’ from overseeing key Georgia electionsFormer senator David Perdue, now running for Georgia governor, repeats false election fraud claims on campaign trail A Republican candidate for governor in Georgia has said he would not let “any of the left” run elections in his state, adding repeatedly that it would happen “over my dead body” and underscoring the violent tone that has come to shape discourse around democracy in America.Former Senator David Perdue railed against his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, in a video of a speech given on 4 February in Fayette county. Abrams, a voting rights activist, would be the first Black governor in the state’s history if elected. Perdue, who has been endorsed by Donald Trump, told his supporters: “My vision for Georgia is this: over my dead body would I ever, ever turn an election process over to Stacey Abrams or any of that woke mob ever again.”At another campaign event in Alpharetta, Georgia, Perdue repeated the “over my dead body” line,saying: “Over my dead body will we ever turn over an election to any of the left that we saw happening in 2020.”The Purdue campaign did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.The Georgia governor’s race is among the most closely-watched elections this year and a likely key battleground in the upcoming 2024 election. It played a vital role in president Joe Biden’s 2020 victory as he flipped the state, and it was also crucial to winning Democratic control of the senate when the party won two run-off elections there.That outsized role has seen Georgia become a ground zero for the national fight over voting rights and for Republicans’ baseless claims that the state’s election process was somehow fraudulent. It has also sparked a fierce fight for the office of the secretary of state, which helps run Georgia’s elections. The seat is currently held by Republican Brad Raffensperger. Perdue is one of 51 election deniers running for governor in 24 states, according to tracking by the States United Action , a non-partisan organization that monitors elections.Perdue lost his Senate seat in a runoff to Democrat John Ossoff last January. Now Perdue is running in the Republican primary against the incumbent Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who earned Trump’s ire after certifying Georgia’s election results, a process he was legally bound to uphold as governor.Perdue has earned Trump’s endorsement by expressing fierce loyalty and echoing the former president’s baseless claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election. In December Perdue went further and told Axios he wouldn’t have certified the state’s 2020 election results if he had been governor at the time.The same month, Perdue joined a lawsuit in Fulton county, Georgia, reviving unfounded allegations of voter fraud and seeking to review absentee ballots that he claimed would prove Trump won the 2020 election.Several recounts of the presidential vote affirmed Biden’s victory in Georgia. Raffensperger had also resisted pressure by Trump in an hour-long phone call in 2020 to “find” enough votes to overturn the election. Trump has now endorsed Raffensperger’s Republican opponent for secretary of state.Perdue is promising voters that if elected he will create “an election law enforcement division of the Georgia bureau of investigation”, the state’s criminal investigation agency, to ensure that only legal votes are counted.Trump falsely claimed 5,000 dead people voted in 2020 in Georgia, but a state review found only four cases of dead people voting. Perdue is already outlining how he would change the way elections are certified if he was elected. “I believe that before you can certify an election, whether it’s a president or a US senator, or a statewide basis, you have to have an outside third-party entity audit the results. Not the secretary of state,” Perdue told voters in Fayette, adding that he believed allowing the secretary of state to certify and audit elections was “sort of like you grading your own homework”.Perdue’s use of violent rhetoric comes on the heels of an unprecedented campaign of intimidation against election officials. A Reuters investigation found more 100 threats of death or violence to US election workers.It also comes as the Republican party increasingly embraces Trump’s “big lie” of a fraudulent election. In a recent poll only 21% of Republicans said they believed Joe Biden’s election was “legitimate”.Last week the RNC voted to declare the January 6 attack “legitimate political discourse’ and censured the Republican representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the House’s investigation into the attack.TopicsUS politicsRepublicansStacey AbramsGeorgianewsReuse this content More

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      ‘It’s an American issue’: can Georgia’s candidate for secretary of state save democracy?

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      ‘It’s an American issue’: can Georgia’s candidate for secretary of state save democracy? Bee Nguyen, who has led her party’s fight against Republican-backed voting restrictions, may prove vital to building election integrity and restoring voter confidence in GeorgiaGeorgia state representative Bee Nguyen has seemed destined to wage epic battles in her fast-changing state ever since replacing Stacey Abrams in its legislature four years ago when the now-nationally-recognized Democrat announced her first bid for governor.Or maybe it’s since former president and Georgia native Jimmy Carter decided, more than 40 years ago, to double the number of refugees admitted to the US from Vietnam – including her parents. Nguyen was born in Iowa, but has lived in Georgia since her parents moved here when she was seven.Now, events of recent months have made it clearer than ever what’s at stake for Nguyen in her next bid: becoming Georgia’s secretary of state, responsible for overseeing elections and other duties in a state that seems set to be at the center of 2022’s midterm elections and also a key battleground in the 2024 presidential race.Since becoming the first Asian American woman in Georgia’s legislature, she has led her party’s fight against Republican-backed restrictions on voting. Now, if she becomes her party’s nominee for secretary of state, her ideas may prove vital to building election integrity and restoring voter confidence in Georgia, and by example, elsewhere in America at a moment when US democracy itself seems in peril.She may have just received a boost last week when Abrams announced her intentions to run for governor again. If successful, Abrams would become the nation’s first Black woman governor. Having Abrams on the ballot should “mobilize resources and get people aware of the seriousness” of the midterm elections next year, said Adrienne Jones, political science professor at Morehouse College. Having Abrams in office may provide a backstop to protecting elections in Georgia as well, Nguyen said. “We need Stacey Abrams to veto further erosion of voting rights,” she said – especially if federal voting rights legislation isn’t passed.Still, the challenges Nguyen faces include Georgia being one of three states where Donald Trump has endorsed Republican candidates for secretary of state who believe the 2020 election was “stolen”, along with Arizona and Michigan. The plan is to help elect election administrators who will make it difficult for Trump to lose in 2024. The former president has already visited Georgia to stump for current member of Congress Jody Hice, who is hoping to oust incumbent Brad Raffensperger – the same official who taped Trump’s 2 January phone call, in which the former president asked the current secretary of state to find “11,780 votes”. Fulton county district Attorney Fani Willis is leading an investigation to determine if Trump committed a crime in that call and other efforts to change last year’s election results.These events, along with continuing threats against Georgia election officials and poll workers, have made Georgia emblematic of the chaos surrounding voting and elections in the US. The resulting situation has given the once-overlooked office of secretary of state new importance, Nguyen said.In that context, “We’re no longer looking at this as a Georgia issue,” she said. “It’s an American issue.”At the same time, the challenges for Georgia’s next secretary of state aren’t limited to overseeing elections in a state where millions of voters still believe the 2020 election was stolen. Or even sorting out the impacts of the state’s new election law, which allows the Republican-controlled legislature to take over local election boards, and is the subject of a handful of lawsuits alleging that the law makes it harder for thousands to vote.If elected, Nguyen will also have to face the fact that Georgia had already been struggling with election cybersecurity issues before 2020, resulting in a federal judge ordering former secretary of state and now governor Brian Kemp to scrap the entire state’s system – a historical first. Then the legislature ignored top cybersecurity experts and bought another vulnerable system – first used statewide in last year’s election. There’s also a 2018 US Commission on Civil Rights report that rated Georgia among the nation’s worst for violating the rights of voters.Against this backdrop, Nguyen has adopted a clear-eyed, practical approach to her campaign. Reached by phone after returning to Atlanta from meetings with community groups in coastal Georgia, she mentions a query she got about the Republican-controlled state legislature certifying elections under the new law. “I said, there’s nothing we can do about that. The secretary of state’s office is a safeguard to democracy – but it’s not a silver bullet.”Communicating transparently with the public, combating disinformation, and evaluating past elections for successes and failures are all key to protecting elections, said John S Cusick, counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund who is representing plaintiffs in one of the suits against Georgia’s new law. “While there are limitations, there are also opportunities,” he said.Nguyen has a host of ideas to “help offset” the new law, as well as restore voter confidence.They include building cybersecurity expertise into the secretary of state’s office, she said. “What I envision is hiring top-notch security experts,” she said. Their duties would include monitoring threats to the election system, as well as disinformation and conspiracies online, and communicating with the state’s 159 counties and their election officials in real time.As a legislator, Nguyen voted against the current $100-plus million computerized elections system, chosen despite top cybersecurity experts recommending that the state use hand-marked paper ballots, as in many other states.This decision is what Richard DeMillo, chairman of Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, calls the “original sin” underlying Georgia’s current situation. “They denied the ground truth … that these are opaque systems with vulnerabilities,” he said. “This is independent of whether the [2020] election was hacked, of which there is no widespread evidence.”Still, scrapping the entire system now would mean that Republican legislators “would have to admit they made an error”, said Nguyen. Her plan would at least make cybersecurity part of the central function of the secretary of state’s office, a first. She hopes to pay for it with federal funds.Other ideas include communicating by mail, text and email with registered voters when trying to maintain rolls current, instead of using only mail and then “purging” voters from the rolls when they don’t respond.“The state should be doing everything they can to notify voters,” she said – including about changes such as new deadlines for requesting absentee ballots or new polling locations. Also, she would make more information on voting available in languages other than English – a practice still controversial in Georgia. And, she would like to install computerized kiosks in grocery stores located in areas with spotty Internet access, to enable voters to do everything from updating registrations to sending in absentee ballots.As for election workers – the historically anonymous and now increasingly threatened key to running elections – “what I have witnessed as a member of the Government Affairs Committee [of the legislature] is that the secretary of state isn’t acting as a collaborative partner” with local election boards, Nguyen said. She wants to change that, improving training, and, she hopes, using federal funds to help counties obtain the equipment they need to avoid such issues as long lines due to a lack of voting machines.Although Nguyen allows that some of these ideas may seem “unsexy”, she says they are “necessary pieces to safeguard democracy. It’s like, ‘Here’s what we can do.’”One thing that Nguyen recognizes as necessary to run for secretary of state in the post-Trump era is a personal security plan.As an Asian-American woman in the public eye, she has become accustomed to bigotry; she noted that someone had posted on Twitter several days before we spoke, “Go back to your shit-hole country.” But “before last year, there was general harassment,” she said. “Now it’s more death threats.” Late last year, Nguyen personally contacted voters from a list Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s team had compiled, after the Big Lie promoter alleged they had voted fraudulently. Nguyen proved the accusation to be wrong. Video of her testimony was widely seen. The death threats increased. She contacted law enforcement officials; they advised that she remove personal information from the Internet as much as possible. “I asked family members to lock down their social media accounts,” she added. Police drove by her house.The situation is not without irony for Nguyen. “I have a frame of reference from my parents,” she said. “They saw a loss of civil liberties. My Dad was imprisoned by the government for three years. They have said to me that they never believed they would lose their country. I’m very concerned – we’re facing threats, disinformation, people actively trying to dismantle democracy. I believe we have a limited time to redirect ourselves.”TopicsGeorgiaStacey AbramsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Why Georgia is a battleground state to watch: Politics Weekly Extra – podcast

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      A week after Stacey Abrams announced she was running for Georgia governor again, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Oliver Laughland about why the southern state is shaping up to be one of the most interesting to pay attention to for the 2022 midterm elections

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Archive: NBC, CNN, WSB-TV, ABC. Read Oliver Laughland’s work in Louisiana Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com. Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts. More

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      Ilhan Omar at odds with Stacey Abrams over Georgia All-Star Game boycott

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      The Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar has backed Major League Baseball’s decision to move its All-Star Game from Georgia over a restrictive new voting law. But in doing so she placed herself at odds with another leading progressive, the voting rights campaigner Stacey Abrams.Abrams, who suffered a narrow defeat in the Georgia gubernatorial race in 2018, commended the MLB’s decision on Friday but said she was disappointed the game was being relocated.“I respect boycotts,” she said, “although I don’t want to see Georgia families hurt by lost events and jobs. Georgians targeted by voter suppression will be hurt as opportunities go to other states. We should not abandon the victims of [Republican] malice and lies – we must stand together.”On Saturday the PGA Tour and the PGA of America made similar arguments when they said they would not move events scheduled for Georgia this summer. The Masters, perhaps the biggest event in golf, begins in Augusta, Georgia this week.Many observers question the accepted wisdom that big sporting events bring economic benefits but on Sunday, on CNN’s State of the Union, Omar was asked if she agreed with Abrams.“We know that boycotts have allowed for justice to be delivered in many spaces,” Omar said. “The civil rights movement was rooted in boycotts. We know that apartheid ended in South Africa because of boycotts.“And so our hope is that this boycott will result in changes in the law because we understand that when you restrict people’s ability to vote, you create a democracy that isn’t fully functioning for all of us, and if we are to continue to be beacon of hope for all democracies around the world we must stand our ground.”Conservatives have protested the MLB decision to take the All-Star Game away from Georgia. On Friday, Trump told supporters they should “boycott baseball” in return.Among other measures, the Georgia law applies restrictions to early and mail-in voting, measures likely to affect minority participation.Republicans have countered Democratic protests by saying the law merely seeks to avoid electoral fraud, which Donald Trump claimed was rampant in his defeat by Joe Biden in Georgia and elsewhere – a lie repeatedly laughed out of court.Omar was asked if other states which do not even allow early or mail-in voting should examine their own laws.“They certainly should,” she said. “I mean, Minnesota is not No1 in voter turnout and participation because we are special, even though we are. It’s because we have made voting accessible for people. And it is really important that every single state, we examine their voting laws and make sure that voting is accessible to everyone.”Omar also referred to pending federal legislation which seeks to counter moves by Republican-led states. The For the People Act, technically known as HR1, has passed the House but seems unlikely to pass the 50-50 Senate unless Democrats reform or abolish the filibuster, under which bills must attract 60 votes to pass.“It’s also going to be really important for us to continue to push HR1,” Omar said, “which makes [voting] accessible nationwide and strengthens our democracy.” More

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      Threats to US voting rights have grown – what's different about this moment?

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,Since I joined the Guardian in 2019 to focus on voting rights, the topic has exploded and moved to the center of the American politics. After focusing on these threats in connection to the 2020 race, this week we launched the next phase of how we’re going to cover these threats, which only have grown since November.Yesterday, we published a story that explains why American democracy is facing a uniquely perilous moment. This story lays out what I think are the most urgent threats: aggressive measures to curtail the right to vote in state legislatures, a supreme court uninterested in defending voting rights, and extreme partisan gerrymandering, expected to take place later this year. These are going to be the pillars of Guardian US’s coverage over the next year.For this piece, I asked many people the same question: what specifically is different about this moment from what we’ve seen in the past? There’s been growing awareness of voter suppression in recent years, but over the last few months, something has changed.I posed this question to Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate who has helped make voter suppression a national conversation. She said that the last 15 years had seen a “slow boil” of voter suppression that was difficult to see if you weren’t closely tracking it. What’s happening now, she said, was something different.“What is so notable about this moment, and so disconcerting, is that they are not hiding. There is no attempt to pretend that the intention is not to restrict votes,” she said. (You can read our full conversation here.)I also spoke with LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, who has spent decades organizing voters in the south, about what it’s like to see such aggressive restrictions after an election that saw record turnout. She pointed out that the US has a long history of suppressing Black voters when they increase their political participation.“We’re in this hamster wheel of doing the work to register to vote. People exercise their vote, particularly Black voters, and then they’re punished for exercising that vote,” she told me.As alarming as things are now, they could be about to get a lot worse. Later this year, lawmakers across the country will begin the process of redrawing electoral districts, something the constitution mandates must happen once every 10 years. While both parties have manipulated this process for political gain, it has gotten out of control in recent years. Advances in technology and sophisticated data allow lawmakers to carefully carve up districts in such a way that they can virtually guarantee re-election.A decade ago, Republicans deployed this process to their extreme advantage, and they are well positioned to control the process again this year. They’ll have even fewer guardrails holding them back from maximizing their partisan advantage when drawing districts – the supreme court said in 2019 that federal courts could do nothing to stop the process. Lawmakers in places with a history of voting discrimination also no longer have to get their maps reviewed for racial discrimination before they go into effect.“Last decade Republicans tried to pack Black voters into districts in the south and claim that they were trying to do it because of the [Voting Rights Act]. Now there’s an open route for [Republicans] to say, ‘Well, we’re putting Black voters into districts because they’re Democrats.’ And the supreme court has said that’s OK,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center, told me.Democrats have placed a lot of effort into fixing these problems in a sweeping voting rights bill under consideration in Washington. The measure would require independent commissions to draw districts and require early voting as well as automatic and same-day registration, among other things. The Senate held its first hearing on the bill on Wednesday and Republicans are digging in their heels, hard. Passing the bill will probably depend on whether Democrats can get rid of the filibuster, a procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance legislation.Also worth watching
      The US slipped, again, in a global ranking of political freedoms, putting it on par with Panama, Romania and Croatia, and Mongolia. Over the last decade, the US has fallen 11 points, from 94 to 83, on the 100-point scale Freedom House, a democracy watchdog, uses to rank political freedoms. “Dropping 11 points is unusual, especially for an established democracy, because they tend to be more stable in our scores,” Sarah Repucci, Freedom House’s vice-president for research and analysis, told me. “Americans should see it as a wake-up call.” More

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      Stacey Abrams calls Republican efforts to restrict voting in Georgia ‘Jim Crow in a suit’

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      Stacey Abrams has described Republican efforts to restrict voting rights in Georgia as “racist” and “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie”.Abrams, who helped Democrats win two key US Senate runoff elections in her home state in January that gave the party a narrow control of the chamber, is a leading critic of voter suppression efforts by Republicans.The bill in Georgia, SB241, includes various measures including ending the right to vote by mail without having to provide an excuse, and other new identification requirements. Republicans have held up what they say is a risk of voter fraud as justification for the legislation despite the lack of evidence of wrongdoing.Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Abrams said the moves by lawmakers in Georgia would significantly curtail voting access after a record number of voters propelled Democratic victories in the 2020 race.“Well, first of all, I do absolutely agree that it’s racist. It is a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie. We know that the only thing that precipitated these changes, it’s not that there was the question of security.“In fact, the secretary of state and the governor went to great pains to assure America that Georgia’s elections were secure. And so the only connection that we can find 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. And there’s a direct correlation between the usage of drop boxes, the usage of in person early voting, especially on Sundays, and the use of vote by mail and a direct increase in the number of people of color voting.”Filibuster reformAbrams, a former senior state legislator and unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, also called on Sunday for the US Senate to exempt election reform legislation passed by the House of Representatives over Republican opposition from a procedural hurdle called the filibuster.“Protection of democracy is so fundamental that it should be exempt from the filibuster rules,” Abrams told CNN.The Democratic-led House on 3 March passed a bill intended to reform voting procedures, increase voter participation and require states to assign independent commissions the task of redrawing congressional districts to guard against partisan manipulation.There is a debate among Democrats, who narrowly control the Senate thanks to those two Georgia victories, on whether to modify or even eliminate the filibuster, a longstanding fixture that makes it so most legislation cannot advance without 60 votes in the 100-seat Senate rather than a simple majority.The filibuster already has been scaled back and does not apply to judicial or Cabinet appointments and some budgetary measures, Abrams noted, so it should be suspended for the voting rights legislation. Abrams, a former minority leader in the Georgia house of representatives, has emerged as a leading Democratic voice on voting rights.Democratic President Joe Biden has said he would sign the election legislation into law if it is passed by Congress, but also has indicated opposition to completely eliminating the filibuster.The House-passed bill faces long odds in the Senate under current rules, where all 48 Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them would need to be joined by 10 of the 50 Republican senators to overcome a filibuster.Democrats have argued that the legislation is necessary to lower barriers to voting and to make the US political system more democratic and responsive to the needs of voters.Republicans have said it would take powers away from the states, and have promised to fight it if it becomes law. More