Democrat Stacey Abrams may resort to an unprecedented legal challenge to force another vote in the Georgia governor’s race once Republican Brian Kemp is officially declared the winner, the Associated Press reported Friday.
Abrams, who is trailing Kemp by more than 50,000 votes, is expected to file suit under a Georgia law that allows a losing candidate to call for a second round of voting in response to “misconduct, fraud or irregularities … sufficient to change or place in doubt the results.”
A legal team of more than three dozen lawyers is expected to argue that Kemp, in his role as Georgia Secretary of State, unlawfully disenfranchised at least 18,000 voters, whose ballots, if counted, would have reduced Kemp’s lead to under 50 percent, forcing a run off.
“These stories to me are such that they have to be addressed,” said Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, Abrams’ campaign chairwoman who worked on the presidential recount in 2000. “It’s just a much bigger responsibility. I feel like our mandate has blossomed. … Maybe this is our moment.”
Kemp, who resigned as secretary of state two days after the election, has called Abrams’ legal maneuvering a “disgrace to democracy.”
Democrats castigated Kemp in the closing months of the campaign for purging the state’s rolls of some 53,000 voters whose voter registration signatures did not match those on existing forms in state databases.