The big question on the eve of an election that Republicans are desperate to rig is can Stacey Abrams turn Georgia blue?
On the election eve edition of the Politicus Pod, Sarah Jones and Jason Easley discussed Georgia.
Listen to the Georgia Politicus Pod:
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Sarah discussed, as a former resident, how Georgia voter suppression and intimidation operates:
So here are just a number one when you sign up, when you register to vote in Georgia, if they, um, they had this exact match program which you’ve probably heard about on the media now, uh, because there, George was getting a lot of coverage right now. But what that means is that if you fill out your registration form and say you, your name is John Smith Jr, and you don’t put a period after the junior or you spell the junior, but put jr period on your license or any kind of discrepancy like that, they will, they can deny you a year to be registered to vote for over that because you don’t match if you wrote street, but on your registration you put st or on your driver’s license the opposite.
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And a bus involved many buses to get from here to there. The social security office, your driver’s license office, these are never in the same place. So you’re going all over the place. Um, and if you’re in a rural area or going into the city, you’re talking about missing days and days of work for that and you don’t have a car. That’s why this works so well. Number two, I witnessed this with my own eyes. I was registering people to vote in a very remote, rural area.
There were a lot of minorities in this area. I was registering this African-American man and the police officer came up and asked him what he was doing and I knew, and people that are listening to this, they’re going to say, why didn’t you report him? Because I knew right then that if I got involved in, inserted myself in this, he was going to take it out on the man who was registering to vote, wasn’t going to take it out on me and he was going to do it after I left because that’s the way these communities work. So the man stopped registering and walked away and that is just one story. I took people to the, to the polls to vote, and I saw the police there.
Can Stacey Abrams Win?
Stacey Abrams can win in Georgia, even with all of the voter suppression and intimidation, because her campaign has assembled the best voter turnout operation that the state has ever seen. Abrams is going to need all of those voters because the electoral playing field is not even. The most likely outcome is that this election goes to a runoff with neither candidate getting more than 50% of the vote.
A win by Abrams would have huge ramifications on Georgia politics for years to come.
If Stacey Abrams does win, it will be the biggest upset of the entire midterm election.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
