CNN "State of the Union" interviews during 2018: on Government Reform

Gerry Connolly: Investigate election fraud in NC-9 district race

The call for a congressional probe comes as North Carolina's elections board and local officials investigate the possibility that a man working for Republican candidate Mark Harris' campaign--who got 905 more votes than Democrat Dan McCready in the race--used absentee ballots to alter the vote in Bladen County. The NC State Bureau of Investigations is probing whether absentee ballots were gathered ballots in areas considered to be supportive of McCready but never turned them in.

Brian Kemp: 1.5 million voters removed from the voting rolls

STACY ABRAMS: Maintaining clean voter rolls is absolutely appropriate, but the vigor with which he did so--a perfect example is the 92-year-old civil rights activist who's lived in the West End of Atlanta for more than 40 years, has voted in every single election since 1968, and was removed from the polls. She went to vote, and had to take more than 2 hours to get a provisional ballot. This is someone who has never failed to vote. The problem we have is that it's death by 1,000 cuts. It's not sufficient to simply purge voters from the rolls for inactivity. He removed voters who were eligible. And the larger issue is this. Trust in our democracy relies on believing that there are good actors who are making this happen. And he was a horrible actor who benefited from his perfidy.

Jeff Flake: Block judicial appointments until special counsel protected

FLAKE: Well, this legislation was passed back in April. And it was on a bipartisan basis, which we don't often get out of the Judiciary Committee. It passed 14 to 7, including our chairman voting for it. Since that time, we have processed 50 judges. This has to be a priority now. We have a situation where the president has fired the attorney general and has installed and has given responsibility for the Mueller investigation to somebody who has not been confirmed by the Senate and somebody who has expressed hostility to the Mueller investigation. How in the world my colleagues don't see this as priority now, I just don't understand.

Stacey Abrams: Deliberate interference & disenfranchisement in `18 election

[VIDEO CLIP] ABRAMS: This is not a speech of concession, because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true, or proper.[END VIDEO]

Q: Abrams is now planning to launch a federal lawsuit against the state for what she called gross mismanagement of the election. Leader Abrams joins us. You said that "Democracy failed in Georgia," referring to, as you called it, incompetence and mismanagement. But do you think that there was deliberate interference in the election?

ABRAMS: Yes. And I believe it began eight years ago with the systematic disenfranchisement of more than a million voters. It continued with the underfunding and disinvestment in polling places, in training, and in the management of the county delivery of services. And I think it had its pinnacle in this race. There has been a dramatic discrepancy in the way absentee ballots are both allocated & counted across the 159 counties.

Stacey Abrams: Disenfranchisement was death by 1,000 cuts

STACY ABRAMS: Maintaining clean voter rolls is absolutely appropriate, but the vigor with which he did so--a perfect example is the 92-year-old civil rights activist who's lived in the West End of Atlanta for more than 40 years, has voted in every single election since 1968, and was removed from the polls. She went to vote, and had to take more than 2 hours to get a provisional ballot. This is someone who has never failed to vote. The problem we have is that it's death by 1,000 cuts. It's not sufficient to simply purge voters from the rolls for inactivity. He removed voters who were eligible. And the larger issue is this. Trust in our democracy relies on believing that there are good actors who are making this happen. And he was a horrible actor who benefited from his perfidy.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Puerto Ricans suffer neglect from not having a federal vote

OCASIO-CORTEZ: Puerto Ricans have no right to vote in federal elections. They cannot choose a president. They do not have a representative vote in the House or the Senate, which means that they did not even have the capacity to choose for this president, yet they continue to suffer at the hands of this administration. And, for that reason, you do have the chronic neglect of the island. And it is acute situations like [the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, in which 3,000 died] in which Puerto Ricans continue to be treated like second-class citizens.