Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has slammed Republican-led states’ efforts to redraw their congressional maps to favor their party as “evil incarnate”.
In an interview with the Guardian’s new podcast, Stateside with Kai and Carter, Abrams argued that what she said amounted to intentional “cheating” to suppress racial minority voting power must be fought in the courts and on the ballot.
“We’ve got to point out that they are not just rigging the game,” she said. “They are not just cheating. They’re kneecapping the players. They are taking out the opposition. That’s not fair. That is not right. That is not American.”
The gerrymandering question has raised the stakes beyond party lines, she stressed. “This is not just cheating so Republicans can beat Democrats – this is cheating so that authoritarians can dismantle our systems so they don’t have to compete ever again.”
Two weeks after the US supreme court effectively gutted a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v Callais, a string of Republican-led states have scrambled to redraw their congressional maps to favor the GOP in upcoming elections by actively eliminating majority-minority districts.
“Let’s be clear,” said Abrams. “This is evil. When evil is about what you strip from another in pursuit of power, this is evil. This is evil incarnate.”
Abrams underlined that her nieces and nephews are “the first generation to lose civil rights during their lifetime since Reconstruction”. The Voting Rights Act, while imperfect, had still provided “a cheat code to overwhelm voter suppression”, she said, and is now significantly weakened.
Voting rights activists must continue to fight this redistricting drive in the courts, Abrams argued, even if they lose. “This is no longer a battle of Democrats v Republicans,” she said. “We’re in a competitive authoritarian state,” she said, claiming that democratic institutions have “become the weapons of authoritarianism because you hollow out what they mean, you compromise their accountability, you erase their legitimacy by using the very laws that people have come to accept as the tools for governance”.
In Tennessee, one of the first states to have section two of the Voting Rights Act stripped away in practice, the last remaining majority-Black district has been erased. Tennessee’s ninth congressional district, which includes Memphis, lies cracked into three pieces, each containing almost a third of the city’s Black voters. The new maps mean all nine of Tennessee’s congressional districts are now Republican-leaning.
“Winning in Tennessee was never going to be about stopping the maps,” Abrams said, but in how voters respond to it. One response is to continue the fight using the courts, even if they don’t rule in favor, she said. “Long before we got Brown v Board of Education, we had Plessy v Ferguson, we had Dred Scott. Fighting in the courts is how we build the record, but it’s also how we build the muscle memory – for why we fight and how we sharpen and refine our arguments.”
The other is to build and grow voter registration and turnout in those districts. In those fractured communities, Abrams said, while the GOP is now likely to win, it has also “created three new opportunities”. “Our job is to grow. Our job is to use the scattering and say, okay, fine. You took the one we had. Well, now you’ve given us three opportunities to come back,” she said.
“The numbers are on our side,” Abrams argued. “We’ve got to remember the reason for the urgency, the reason for the speed – the reason it took less than a week for Tennessee to take advantage of the Callais decision is that they can look at demographic numbers across this country. And in 2046, this is a country that becomes majority-minority. They can count, and so should we.
“Look at what happened in Hungary,” she added, where exceptionally high voter turnout saw the historic election of Péter Magyar last month and the ousting of authoritarian leader and Trump ally Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power. “Hungary pulled it off,” Abrams said. “But we don’t have 16 years to wait.”
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