During a speech commemorating the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” Hillary Clinton claimed white supremacist views are being espoused in the White House, and she propagated conspiracy theories about the Georgia gubernatorial election.
“When racist and white supremacist views are lifted up in the media and the White House, when hard-fought-for civil rights are being stripped back, when the single most important fight of our time … the fight to protect our vote … is not gathering the momentum and the energy and the passion it deserves, we have a lot of work to do, don’t we?” Clinton said Sunday in Selma, Alabama to a largely black audience.
The event marked the 54th anniversary of the original “Bloody Sunday” march in 1965 when civil rights demonstrators marched from Selma to Montgomery and were attacked by law enforcement near the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
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“We know, don’t we, that candidates both black and white lost their races because they had been deprived of the votes they otherwise would have gotten,” Clinton continued. “And the clearest example is from Georgia. Stacey Abrams should be governor, leading that state right now.”
Clinton’s comments closely mimic the complaints currently being made by Abrams, a former Democratic state legislator and romance novelist who lost her gubernatorial bid to Republican Brian Kemp.
Despite losing by a margin of over 54,700 votes in November, Abrams continues to claim she was the victim of voter suppression. She has accused Kemp, who ran for election while serving as the state’s secretary of state, of maliciously suppressing black and Democratic voters by removing them from the rolls and removing polling stations in black precincts.
Kemp has countered these claims by pointing out that the state of Georgia experienced record turnout in the 2018 election, and that many of the voters who have been taken off the state’s voter rolls were due to Abrams’ own voter drive initiative that enrolled people with incorrect information. Additionally, Kemp has pointed out that decisions over polling locations are made by local election boards, not Georgia’s secretary of state. (RELATED: Stacey Abrams’ Nonprofit Slapped With Its 7th Tax Lien)
Stacey Abrams speaks to the crowd of supporters announcing they will wait till the morning for results of the mid-terms election at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. November 7, 2018. REUTERS/Lawrence Bryant
During her speech on Sunday, Clinton also suggested that the end of the Voting Rights Act allowed Georgia officials to suppress voters because there were fewer voters in 2016 than there were in 2012.
“Between 2012, the prior presidential election where we still had the Voting Rights Act, and 2016, when I was on the ballot, there were fewer voters in Georgia than there were in the prior election,” the twice-failed presidential candidate said. “Think about it.”
However, election results from 2016 and 2012 show that statement to be incorrect.
In 2016, there were 5,443,046 registered voters in Georgia and 4,165,504 of them cast ballots. In 2012, there were only 5,428,980 registered voters and 3,919,355 of them cast ballots.
Not only did 2016 see a rise in registered voters and total votes cast from 2012, voter turnout also climbed by 4.3 percent.
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