Failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams revealed on Tuesday that she supports abolishing the Electoral College and changing the United States’ voting system to elect the president based on the popular vote.
“Absolutely,” Abrams replied to MSNBC host Chris Hayes when asked whether she backs Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) recent calls to abolish the American voting institution.
“The Electoral College was not designed to make certain that people in small states weren’t subject to the tyranny of urban area, that wasn’t the conversation at the time,” Abrams said. “It was because those in power did not believe that working people had the intellectual capacity to directly elect the leader of the free world.”
“We have long passed that time,” she added.
Abrams remarks come a week after the self-proclaimed “radical” congresswoman argued that the Electoral College is racist and therefore is discriminatory against minorities.
“The Electoral College has a racial injustice breakdown,” Ocasio-Cortez said on her Instagram. “Due to severe racial disparities in certain states, the Electoral College effectively weighs white voters over voters of color, as opposed to a ‘one person, one vote’ system where all are counted equally.”
Abrams has made changing the American voting system to elect Democrats her top priority going into the 2020 election cycle. In early August, she launched her new initiative, Fair Fight 2020, which is billed as an organization fighting for “free, fair, and secure elections.” However, Fair Fight 2020 will only be working with Democratic state parties and local allies across the country to elect Democratic lawmakers.
“If we start early and work together, we will ensure that every American voter’s voice is heard and that Democrats up and down the ballot will win,” the organization’s website reads.
While speaking with Hayes, Abrams further claimed that there has been a nationwide trend in Republican-leaning states, that as they turn blue, Republicans have been increasing the amount and severity of voting restrictions.
“The point of the work we’re doing is that we know that as this country becomes more and more diverse, and as Democrats gain more and more power, the impetus to restrict [voting rights] is going to get stronger,” Abrams said. “And we are trying to get here ahead of time by being embedded early so that we’re there before the primaries happen, long before the general.”
Abrams has long accused Republicans of racist voter suppression. During her unsuccessful gubernatorial bid in 2018, her campaign released a statement claiming that her GOP challenger, now-Gov. Brian Kamp was “maliciously wielding the power of his office to suppress the vote for political gain and silence the voices of thousands of eligible voters – the majority of them people of color.”
Through her initiative Fair Fight Action, an extension of Fair Fight 2020, Abrams filed a lawsuit against Kemp and the state of Georgia for what she alleges is widespread voter suppression. While the lawsuit is still ongoing, there has been no evidence to corroborate her claims.