South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg argued Stacey Abrams should be Georgia's governor at the Democratic National Committee’s African American Leadership Summit in Atlanta on Thursday.
"Stacey Abrams ought to be the governor of Georgia," Buttigieg said, according to Politico. "When racially motivated voter suppression is permitted, when districts are drawn so that politicians get to choose their voters instead of the other way around, when money is allowed to outvote people in this country, we cannot truly say we live in a democracy."
Abrams has refused to concede Georgia's gubernatorial election and has repeatedly claimed she was cheated.
In late April, Abrams said she is comfortable claiming she "won" the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election because "something happened" regarding voter suppression. One month prior, she told The View's Sunny Hostin she "can't say that empirically I won but I will never know because we did not have a fair fight." In the weeks following the election in November, she labeled it "tainted" and said it was not "free and fair."
Other Democratic presidential candidates have expressed support for Abrams.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D., Mass.) argued earlier this week that Abrams would have won "if this country wasn't racist." Former Texas congressman Robert Francis 'Beto' O'Rourke has said Abrams "met that defeat on an unfair, unlevel [sic] playing field." Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), and Sen. Cory Booker (D., NJ) have also suggested Abrams was cheated.
A Free Beacon report from November highlighted the fact that voter registration and turnout increased under the watch of Abrams's Republican opponent, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp. Last month, Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine, told Politifact Abrams did not have proof to support her cheating claims.