ATLANTA (AP) - Democrat Stacey Abrams ended 10 days of post-election drama in Georgia's closely watched and even more closely contested race for governor Friday, acknowledging Republican Brian Kemp as the victor while defiantly refusing to concede to the man she blamed for "gross mismanagement" of a bitterly fought election.
The speech Abrams delivered at her campaign headquarters Friday evening marked the close of the 44-year-old attorney and former lawmaker's unsuccessful attempt to make history as America's first black woman governor. Since Election Day her campaign fought on, insisting efforts to suppress turnout had left thousands of ballots uncounted that otherwise could erode Kemp's lead and force a runoff election.
Kemp, the 55-year-old businessman who oversaw the election as Georgia's secretary of state, will keep the governor's office in GOP hands as the state's third Republican governor since Reconstruction. He responded to Abrams ending her campaign by calling for unity and praising his opponent's "passion, hard work, and commitment to public service."
The kind words came just days after Kemp's campaign spokesman derided Abrams' efforts to have contested ballots counted as a "disgrace to democracy."
Abrams made no such retreat from her criticisms of Kemp, saying she refused "to say nice things and accept my fate." Instead, she announced plans to file a federal lawsuit to challenge the way Georgia's elections are run. She accused Kemp of using the secretary of state's office to aggressively purge the rolls of inactive voters, enforce an "exact match" policy for checking voters' identities that left thousands of registrations in limbo and other measures to tile the outcome in his favor.
"Let's be clear: This is not a speech of concession," Abrams said. "Because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede that."
The race grabbed the attention of the nation, with Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey campaigning for Abrams in the final days and President Donald Trump holding a rally for Kemp.
Unofficial returns showed Kemp ahead by roughly 60,000 votes out of nearly 4 million cast on Nov. 6. Kemp declared himself governor-elect the next day and stepped down as Georgia's secretary of state, though thousands of absentee and provisional ballots remained uncounted.
Abrams, meanwhile, sent volunteers across the state in search of voters whose ballots were rejected. She filed suit in federal court to force county elections boards to count absentee ballots with incorrect birthdates. Her campaign even planned for possible litigation to challenge the election's certified outcome.
Abrams didn't take that route. She said she had concluded "the law currently allows no further viable remedy." Instead, she said she would fight to restore integrity to Georgia's election system in a new initiative called Fair Fight Georgia.
"In the coming days, we will be filing a major federal lawsuit against the state of Georgia for the gross mismanagement of this election and to protect future elections from unconstitutional actions," Abrams said, though she gave no details.
Kemp tried to move past the contentious campaign even if his opponent wasn't willing.
"The election is over and hardworking Georgians are ready to move forward," he said. "We can no longer dwell on the divisive politics of the past but must focus on Georgia's bright and promising future."
Kemp had been secretary of state since 2010. He was backed by and had embraced Trump as he tried to maintain GOP dominance in a state that hasn't elected a Democrat to the governor's mansion since 1998.
Trump praised the Democrat in lauding Kemp's victory, tweeting: "Congratulations to Brian Kemp on becoming the new Governor of Georgia. Stacey Abrams fought brilliantly and hard -- she will have a terrific political future! Brian was unrelenting and will become a great Governor for the truly Wonderful People of Georgia!"
Kemp stormed to the GOP nomination with ads featuring everything from the candidate cranking a chain saw and jokingly pointing a gun toward a teen male suitor of his daughter, to Kemp's offer to "round up criminal illegals" himself in his pickup truck. He's promised a tax cut and teacher pay raises and pledged to continue Georgia's refusal to expand Medicaid insurance under President Barack Obama's 2010 health care overhaul.
Abrams' campaign sparked huge energy across the state and she became a national Democratic star. Election turnout among both sides' energized bases nearly equaled that of the 2016 presidential vote.
Aides close to Abrams said that since the election she had been wrestling with competing priorities: She wanted to advance her assertions that Georgia's elections process - which Kemp managed as secretary of state - makes it too hard for some citizens to vote. But she also recognized that a protracted legal fight would harm that cause and potentially her political future.
Kemp's victory is an important marker for Republicans ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Kemp's narrow margin already suggests that Georgia, a state Trump won by 5 percentage points in 2016, could be a genuine battleground in two years. Trump bet big on Kemp, endorsing him ahead of Kemp's Republican primary runoff and campaigning for him the weekend prior to the Nov. 6 election. Now, Trump will be able to return with an incumbent governor as he seeks a second term.
Abrams' political future is less certain. She made believers of old-guard Democrats in Georgia who didn't think a black woman could compete in a general election, and she emerged as the party's clear leader. But the party also has plenty of other ambitious politicians who will want to take advantage of the path that Abrams' has charted. The next big shot for Democrats is a 2020 Senate race, with Republican Sen. David Perdue making his first re-election attempt.
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PREVIOUS STORY: ATLANTA (AP) - Stacey Abrams' campaign is preparing an unprecedented legal challenge in the unresolved Georgia governor's race that could leave the state's Supreme Court deciding whether to force another round of voting.
The Democrat's longshot strategy relies on a statute that's never been used in such a high-stakes contest. It is being discussed as Georgia elections officials appear to be on the cusp of certifying Republican Brian Kemp as the winner of a bitterly fought campaign that's been marred by charges of electoral malfeasance.
Top Abrams advisers outlined her prospective case to The Associated Press, stressing that the Democratic candidate hasn't finalized a decision about whether to proceed once state officials certify Kemp as the victor. That could happen as early as Friday evening.
Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, Abrams' campaign chairwoman, is overseeing a team of almost three-dozen lawyers who in the coming days will draft the petition, along with a ream of affidavits from voters and would-be voters who say they were disenfranchised. Abrams would then decide whether to go to court under a provision of Georgia election law that allows losing candidates to challenge results based on "misconduct, fraud or irregularities ... sufficient to change or place in doubt the results."
The legal team is "considering all options," Lawrence-Hardy said, including federal court remedies. But the state challenge is the most drastic. And some Democratic legal observers note Abrams would be dependent on statutes that set a high bar for the court to intervene.
Kemp's campaign, which already has shifted into transition mode presuming he'll be inaugurated in January, said Abrams is pushing a "publicity stunt" and said her refusal to concede is a "ridiculous temper tantrum."
She already faces a narrow path to the governor's mansion. Unofficial returns show Kemp with about 50.2 percent of more than 3.9 million votes. That puts him about 18,000 votes above the threshold required to win by a majority and avoid a Dec. 4 runoff. The Associated Press is not calling the race until state officials certify the results.
Abrams would assert that enough irregularities occurred to raise the possibility that at least 18,000 Georgians either had their ballots thrown out or were not allowed to vote.
Lawrence-Hardy told the AP that Abrams will weigh legal considerations alongside her belief that many of her backers - particularly minority and poorer voters who don't regularly go to the polls - heeded her call to participate and ran into barriers.
"These stories to me are such that they have to be addressed," said Lawrence-Hardy, who was among the army of lawyers who worked on the Bush v. Gore presidential election dispute in 2000. "It's just a much bigger responsibility. I feel like our mandate has blossomed. ... Maybe this is our moment."
Kemp, who served as the state's chief elections officer until two days after the election when he resigned as secretary of state and declared victory, has maintained that any uncounted ballots won't change the outcome. Kemp supporters have gathered at some local elections offices protesting what they cast as an attempt to steal the election.
The circumstances leave Abrams, a 44-year-old rising Democratic star, with a tough decision. The former state lawmaker became a national political celebrity with her bid to become the first black woman in American history to be elected governor. Her strategy of running as an unapologetic liberal who attracts new voters to the polls resonated in a rapidly changing state. Yet Abrams also must consider her own political future and the consequences of a protracted legal fight she might not win.
All of that is playing out against the backdrop of Kemp's unabashed embrace of President Donald Trump's nationalism.
Since Election Day, Abrams campaign workers have transitioned from get-out-the-vote efforts to helping voters determine whether their ballots were counted and documenting reported problems. The idea is to assemble a body of evidence to support the claim that the problems could account for Kemp's 18,000-vote margin above the runoff trigger.
Affidavits from poll workers reviewed by the AP describe long lines that discouraged people from voting, poll workers failing to offer provisional ballots to people who didn't show up on the rolls or were at the wrong polling place and election equipment that froze and had to be rebooted.
Cathy Cox, a Democrat who served as secretary of state from 1999 through 2007 and is now the dean of Mercer University's law school, said Georgia law puts a heavy burden on candidates such as Abrams who ask a court to intervene.
"I would say with pretty great confidence there has probably never been an election ... without some irregularity, where some poll worker did not make some mistake," Cox said in an interview. The key, she said, is proving someone erred to the point that it could change the outcome.
Lawrence-Hardy agreed the law requires a quantitative analysis. She said Abrams' team doesn't have a list of 18,000 disenfranchised voters. The evidence, she said, would consist of hundreds, if not thousands of such examples, along with data analysis of projected lost votes based on other problems, such as a lack of paper ballots at precincts where voting machines broke down and voters left long lines.
Cox said courts must attempt to apply a nonpartisan standard of "doubt" to the election. "Would a reasonable person have a reason to doubt this election? Not would a hard-core partisan Democrat doubt a partisan Republican opponent," she said.
Abrams and voting rights activists have argued for months that Kemp mismanaged the elections system as secretary of state, with Abrams often calling Kemp "an architect of suppression."
Under Georgia law, Abrams could file a challenge against Kemp or his successor as the secretary of state. The challenge must be filed within five days of certification in a trial court of the county where the chosen defendant resides. The defendant has between five and 10 days to respond, and the presiding judge sets a hearing within 20 days after that deadline, a calendar that could push a dispute well beyond what would have been a Dec. 4 runoff.
If the judge determines the election is so defective that it casts doubt on the results, the judge can declare the election invalid and call a new vote among the same candidates. Cox called that "the real extreme remedy."
A more "surgical" course, she said, would be to affirm irregularities but only order that certified results be reopened and recertified once those problems are remedied. The judge could then declare a winner or order a runoff if the results are close enough.
The judge could also declare a winner after hearing the evidence, but Cox said that's unlikely because the case will probably hinge on uncounted votes and there's no way to know before a count which candidate won those votes.
Once the judge rules, the loser has 10 days to appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court.