Stacey Abrams: Conceding Georgia governor’s race would mean the process was ‘fair’

Democrat Stacey Abrams on Monday allowed that she is not the governor of Georgia, but said formally conceding the 2018 election to Gov. Brian Kemp would be an implicit acknowledgment that the system was “fair.”

“Because concession means to say that the process was fair,” Ms. Abrams said on “CBS This Morning” when asked why she didn’t formally concede defeat in the race.

“But when I run an organization that in 10 days between election night and the night I refused to concede, we received more than 50,000 phone calls of people who were denied the right to vote — I am complicit if I say that that system is fair,” she said.

Ms. Abrams came up short against Mr. Kemp in 2018, but has risen to national stardom among Democrats and has won praise from 2020 Democratic presidential contenders, who have said on the trail she would have won but for voter suppression.

Many Democrats have raised questions about the outcome, amid a significant number of voters who ended up purged from the state’s voter rolls in the run-up to the 2018 election.

“I did not deny the legal sufficiency of the election — I am not claiming to be the governor of Georgia, despite what Breitbart and others like to say,” Ms. Abrams said on Monday. “What I have said is that we won the battle of making sure more voices were heard because we had the highest record turnout in Georgia history for Democrats.”

Ms. Abrams has launched a push to combat voter suppression ahead of the 2020 elections. She said recently she is not running for president in 2020, but that she’d be honored to be considered as a vice presidential selection for the eventual Democratic nominee.

“But the other thing to remember is, look, because there are more people in the water that doesn’t mean there are fewer sharks,” she said. “You can have higher turnout, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that voter suppression is real and [affecting] people across the country.”