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The White House tore into Democrat activist and failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on Monday after she argued President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to rein in mail-in voting was “illegal.”
“Has Stacey Abrams conceded the multiple elections she lost yet or is she still pretending to be Governor?” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told Fox News Digital. “Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump, and the American people sent him back to the White House because they overwhelmingly supported his commonsense election integrity agenda.”
The comment was in response to Abrams, who said during an appearance on MSNOW over the weekend that Trump’s order would disenfranchise voters, resurfacing long-held tensions with the president amid his latest push to enhance voter security ahead of the midterms. Abrams previously ran for Georgia governor twice and refused to formally concede her 2018 election.
“It is patently illegal, and it is entirely in the playbook of voter suppression that Republicans, including Donald Trump, have been using for the last decade or so,” Abrams said.
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Stacey Abrams speaks onstage during the Clinton Global Initiative 2025 Annual Meeting, Sept. 25, 2025, in New York City. (JP Yim/Getty Images for New York Hilton Midtown)
Trump’s order, called “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” directs the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration, in coordination with state leaders, to create a list of citizens, and then directed the U.S. Postal Service to only deliver mail-in ballots to people on the list.
“The President will do everything in his power to defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them – that’s only controversial for Democrats like Stacey,” Jackson added.
Abrams founded Fair Fight Action after her 2018 loss to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, saying Georgia’s election system suppressed voters. The group was later ordered to reimburse the state more than $200,000 in legal costs after an unsuccessful lawsuit.
Separately, Abrams-linked advocacy groups have faced campaign-finance and nonprofit-compliance scrutiny, including a Georgia Ethics Commission case involving the New Georgia Project and a 2025 IRS complaint targeting Fair Fight Action.
Abrams has since criticized Republican-led voting initiatives at the federal and state level as relics of the Jim Crow era and designed to disenfranchise racial minorities.
“The Constitution gives to the states the authority to determine how elections are held,” Abrams said. “What the Republican regime is upset about is that democracy has been working.”
President Donald Trump displays a signed executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 2026. Trump signed an executive order Tuesday intended to make it harder for voters to cast mail-in ballots, escalating his long-running campaign against a practice used by millions of Americans. (Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Trump criticized Abrams as far back as 2018 over her stance on voting, accusing her of wanting “illegal aliens to vote.” Abrams “opposed requiring proof of American citizenship at the ballot box,” Trump said at the time.
Trump has long argued that noncitizen voting, which is illegal, is a widespread problem in U.S. elections. In addition to his executive order, Trump has urged Congress to pass the SAVE Act before the 2026 elections to impose a physical identification requirement on people registering to vote, though it lacks the needed support from Democratic senators to advance in the upper chamber.
While the White House has framed Trump’s executive order as an effort to bolster election integrity, Abrams and other critics argued it intruded on state authority and would unfairly suppress votes.
“The biggest risk for Americans right now is that we see these as piecemeal, and we don’t recognize it’s part of a pattern,” Abrams said. “This is step 10 in an authoritarian playbook. You end democracy.”
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Vote by Mail ballots are inspected at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center on November 4, 2025 in City of Industry. California. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Abrams also alleged that the executive order would serve to create a master list of voters, effectively usurping state control over voter registration lists and federalizing elections.
“The creation of a database … should terrify all of us,” Abrams said. “That is an attempt to do national surveillance.”
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In addition to Abrams’ criticisms, roughly two dozen states and voting rights groups filed lawsuits seeking to block the executive order, arguing Trump’s directives violated the Constitution by encroaching on states’ authority to administer elections.
Fox News Digital reached out to an Abrams representative for comment.
