Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past few days, you may have noticed that there’s a little thing called the counting of the votes after the US Presidential election on Tuesday 3 November.

At the moment of writing, the next President has not been confirmed. However, it is thought that Joe Biden may be the President elect after the end of the day.

One of the figures attributed to this moment in history is Stacey Abrams, a voting rights activist and politician who resides in Georgia. At the time of writing Biden is currently ahead of Trump by 1,561 votes. There is talk of a recount as both Biden and Trump currently have 49.4% of the vote (Source watching wall to wall CNN for the past 72 hours with some advert breaks of soaps, work and a little sleep). For those not familiar with US politics, Georgia has traditionally been viewed as a Red/ Republican state having last given their Electoral College vote to Bill Clinton in 1992, and before that Jimmy Carter in 1976 over the past 50 years. Bearing in mind elections take place every 4 years, and the fact this was also during the Obama years, this is a monumental feat.

Anyway, back to Stacey Abrams. Abrams ran for Governor of Georgia, on the Democratic Party ticket, in 2018, becoming the first black woman in the U.S. to be a major party’s nominee for governor, and even got the endorsement of former President Barack Obama. Unfortunately, Abrams did not win the gubernatorial vote amid claims that her opponent, the now Governor Kemp had cancelled thousands of votes when he was the secretary of state for Georgia. Abrams ultimately lost the gubernatorial election by 75,000 votes. Her experiences, as well as other advocacy work lead to her founding the non-profit organisation Fair Fight, which aims “to promote fair elections in Georgia and around the country, encourage voter participation in elections, and educate voters about elections and their voting rights”. It is said that 800,000 voters who had not been eligible to vote for Abrams back in 2018, were now available to vote in the 2020 Presidential elections.

Between 2012 and 2018, Kemp’s office cancelled over 1.4 million voter registrations, with nearly 700,000 cancellations in 2017 alone.

There is currently a campaign in a number underway to support Stacey Abrams work as an author, as a thank you for her voting rights work. With regard to her non-fiction work, Stacey writes under her name but under the pen name Selena Montgomery. Abrams is the award-winning author of several romantic suspense novels. According to Abrams, she has sold more than 100,000 copies of her novels.

If you want to check out her work, please find links to her books on Amazon or Waterstones below:

Amazon (Stacy Abrams) – https://amzn.to/32l3WlR

Amazon (Selena Montgomery) – https://amzn.to/354v22r

Waterstones (Selena Montgomery) – https://tidd.ly/2JyeLKP

Also read today’s Vogue magazine write up How Stacey Abrams Is Turning the Tide in Georgia to find out more about Stacey Abram and her work, and what they said back in 2019 – Can Stacey Abrams Save Democracy?

Happy Reading!