SAVANNAH — As Vice President-elect Kamala Harris spoke to Savannah-area voters Sunday afternoon, a theme began to emerge that may feel familiar to many Georgians by now: the right to vote.
Harris, speaking at a drive-in rally for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock ahead of Tuesday’s U.S. Senate runoffs, spoke about the history of some in Georgia being “deprived of the right to vote,” invoking the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis and former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
In recent years, voting rights in the state have become a major political issue and talking point. Those conversations have only been elevated since the presidential election.
Harris ran down a list of the ways Trump and other Republicans have sought to overturn the election results in Georgia since November. It culminated in a rebuke of the recent phone call in which President Donald Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the results of Georgia’s presidential election and “find” votes for Trump. On the call, Raffensperger refused to go along with Trump’s ask to reverse his election defeat.
Harris called Trump “certainly the voice of desperation.”
“Have y’all heard about that recorded conversation?” she said, adding that “it was a bald-faced, bold abuse of power by the president of the United States.”
After the November election, when Georgia’s electoral votes went to a Democrat for the first time since 1992, Harris said Trump and some other Republicans “have the gall to suggest you didn’t know what you were doing.”
State and federal elections officials have said there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud or irregularities in Georgia.
“They filed six lawsuits. ... and they failed every time,” she said, referencing the legal action taken by Trump’s campaign and supporters seeking to reverse the results of the election in Georgia.
Then she referenced Trump’s recent tweet calling the Senate runoff races “illegal and invalid.” It was sent just days before he is set to headline a rally for incumbent U.S. Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
Harris said Trump was suggesting “that the people of Georgia are trying to commit a crime.”
Wrapping up the section in her speech about voting rights, Harris asked the crowd a question: “Why are such powerful people trying to make it difficult for us to vote?”
She provided her own answer: “They know our power.”
Ossoff, who spoke earlier in the rally, also spoke about the the call between Trump and Raffensperger, saying the president is trying to disenfranchise thousands of Georgia voters. Warnock did not mention the call.
“When the president of the United States calls up Georgia elections officials and tries to intimidate them ... that is a direct attack on our democracy, and if David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler had one piece of steel in their spine, one shred of integrity, they would be out here defending Georgia voters from that kind of assault,” Ossoff said.
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms also brought up the Trump-Raffensperger recording during the rally. She said Trump was “at times pleading with him to turn over the results of our elections here in Georgia, but we know that’s not going to happen.”
Staff writer Greg Bluestein contributed to this article.
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