Stacey Abrams: Georgia GOP election proposals are ‘Jim Crow, in a suit and tie’

Former Georgia gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams said Sunday that Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer was right to label GOP election proposals in her state as “racist.”

“I do absolutely agree that it’s racist. It is a redux of Jim Crow, in a suit and tie,” Ms. Abrams, a voting-rights advocate, told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Ms. Abrams, who led a successful Democratic effort in Georgia’s last election cycle, said Republicans are sore over the results. The election featured greatly expanded use of mail-in ballots and drop boxes amid health fears around the coronavirus pandemic.

Republican state lawmakers say it is important to ensure faith in election and root out fraud. They are pushing laws that would end automatic voter registration and restrict drop boxes, absentee voting and early voting on weekends.

But Ms. Abrams said access to those tools led to direct increases in participation among people of color.

President Biden beat then-President Donald Trump by a razor-thin margin in Georgia — a major upset — and Democrats tilted the balance of the U.S. Senate by swiping both Georgia seats in January.

Ms. Abrams said top GOP election officials have assured the nation there wasn’t widespread fraud in Georgia, as Mr. Trump charged, so the proposed laws are politically motivated.

“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 did not like,” Ms. Abrams said. “Instead of celebrating better access and more participate their response is to try and eliminate access to voting for primarily in communities of color.”

Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a Republican, said there are over 80 election-related bills in the General Assembly, and about a quarter of them are written by Democrats.

But he thinks members of his party “lost credibility” with falsehoods around election fraud and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that was inched by then-President Donald Trump.

He said the GOP needs to deliver for American families if they want to win again.

“There’s a lot of solutions in search of a problem. Republicans don’t need election reform to win, we need leadership,” Mr. Duncan told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I think there’s millions of Republicans waking up around the country that are realizing that Donald Trump’s divisive tone and strategy is unwinnable in forward-looking elections.”

He said the party needs a “new focus, a GOP 2.0 that includes moderates in the middle, to get us to the next election cycle.”