On Friday, Democrat Stacey Abrams, the Georgia gubernatorial candidate who narrowly lost to Brian Kemp, delivered the single most ungracious and self-serving concession speech we can remember. “So let’s be clear,” she said,
Vowing to “fight on” or “keep the movement alive” is de rigueur in concession speeches, but Abrams was trying to rob her opponent of legitimacy. On Sunday, speaking to Jake Tapper on State of the Union, Abrams acknowledge that Kemp, who has been secretary of state since 2010, is legally the governor-elect, but entangled herself in a double-negative rhetorical question to avoid calling the election legitimate: “Will I say that this election was not tainted, was not a disinvestment and a disenfranchisement of thousands of voters? I will not say that.”
She claims her opponent suppressed Democratic votes, but there is no evidence for this. Abrams and her allies point out that large numbers of people have been removed from voter rolls—1.5 million Georgians since 2012—but their contention that Kemp “purged” these names as secretary of state is false. The state’s “Use It or Lose It” law, passed in 1997 by a Democratic legislature and signed by Democratic governor Zell Miller, requires that voters who don’t vote or otherwise respond to requests from local voting offices to update their registration status be deemed inactive. This ensures that people who’ve died or moved away can no longer “vote” in state elections—i.e. that their identities can’t be used for untoward electoral purposes.
The Abrams campaign alleges that the number of voters purged spiked in 2017, when 107,000 voters were declared inactive. But the secretary of state’s office points out that the biannual voter-roll maintenance didn’t take place in 2015 owing to a legal challenge and so there was an unusually high number last year.
The final vote tally in Georgia had Abrams down by 54,723 votes.* If her implied claim that the Republicans stole the election has any truth in it, there must be thousands of legal voters across Georgia who can show that they were denied the right to cast their vote for Stacey Abrams on November 6. We await their outcry.
Democrats have become adept at making excuses for narrow losses in recent times—Russian trolls in 2016, voter intimidation in Florida in 2000, etc. We persist in believing that elections in America are free and fair, and that Abrams lost for the mundane reason that she didn’t get enough votes. The gracious thing to do was to admit it and congratulate Brian Kemp.
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Correction, November 19, 2018, 8:46 a.m.: The editorial originally stated that “The final vote tally in Georgia had Abrams down by 17,488 votes.” The final vote tally in Georgia actually had Abrams down by 54,723 votes. The piece has been changed to reflect the correct number.
