Stacey Abrams Is Trying to Save Our Democracy One Vote At a Time

With her Georgia-based organizations like Fair Fight 2020, Stacey Abrams — on Joe Biden’s VP shortlist — has become one of America’s leading voting rights activists.

Stacey Abrams has become a national force of nature as she leads the fight against voter suppression in Georgia and around the country. Photo courtesy Debbie Elliott/NPR

When Stacey Abrams was the featured guest of a “virtual” conversation in the popular 92Y Talks series on Thursday June 11 (viewed on the 92Y website and on Facebook), nobody would have blamed her if she was still experiencing a range of emotions from frustration to outrage to downright anger. Just two days before, the Atlanta-based voting rights activist, potential Joe Biden Vice-Presidential running mate, and a victim of voter suppression in her 2018 race for Georgia Governor, had spent her entire day and evening watching the primary election process in her beloved state of Georgia totally implode. If that wasn’t enough, this meltdown of local democracy was happening during the Covid-19 pandemic (at that point Georgia was at 53,249 cases and 2,285 deaths) and the second week of nationwide “Black Lives Matter” protests (after the May 25 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police).

Words such as “catastrophe,” “disaster,” and “fiasco” peppered media coverage of a Primary Day during which new-fangled voting machines malfunctioned…