Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams on Tuesday claimed the Republican National Committee is going to send law enforcement officers into minority neighborhoods to scare them from voting.
Abrams appeared on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, where she discussed her new multi-million dollar voter protection initiative. The initiative, which is called Fair Fight 2020, will be spread out across 20 battleground states during the 2020 cycle, and she said it was meant to stop Republicans from "dismantling democracy."
She went on to say her initiative is going to "educate, staff, and fund" voter protection teams to make sure they are ready to look for the same voter suppression tactics that she claims occurred in Georgia, North Dakota, Florida, Texas, and Wisconsin.
"We know that we also face foreign influence that is being denied by the White House, by the would-be tinpot dictator of Donald Trump, but also that Moscow Mitch is stopping voter rights legislation and election security legislation," Abrams said. "But we also know they just lifted a consent decree that's kept Republicans and the RNC from going into local communities and intimidating voters by having off-duty officers tell people that they are monitoring their votes."
"For the first time since 1981, the RNC will be allowed to cheat and lie and go into polling places and scare voters, particularly voters of color," Abrams said. "Fair Fight 2020 is designed to anticipate all those challenges, but not just worry about them, work against them and that's what we learned from 2018. We cannot wait for the cavalry to come. We have to be the army and we have to stand up now."
Abrams, who lost to Republican Brian Kemp last year by almost 55,000 votes in Georgia's gubernatorial election, has repeatedly claimed her loss was the result of voter suppression tactics. MSNBC's Katy Tur asked her on Sunday about her loss during an episode of American Swamp.
"Do you think the vote was stolen from you, the election was stolen from you?" Tur asked.
"I think the election was stolen from the people of Georgia," Abrams said. "I don't know that empirically I would have won, but if you add together the thousands of people who faced extraordinarily long lines, who faced hurdles that should not happen in a democracy, the votes that we know were not counted, the secretary of state, who was also my opponent in the race, purged more than 1.4 million voters over basically an eight-year period."
Abrams announced Tuesday she would not run for president in 2020. She has hinted at challenging Kemp when he runs for a second term in 2022.
RNC communications director Michael Ahrens told the Washington Free Beacon that Abrams's claims are "totally baseless and irresponsible. The RNC's job is getting more people to vote, not less. If Abrams actually cared about the integrity of elections, she'd finally concede the governor’s race she lost by 55,000 votes. Even liberal election law experts have dismissed her claims as irresponsible and without merit."