Stacey Abrams, the founder of voting rights organization Fair Fight, helped register 800,000 people in Georgia to vote, empowering them to use their voice at the polls. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
Getty ImagesTo quantify a concept as subjective as power, the Forbes list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women relies on a fairly traditional algorithm: power equals money, populations, media mentions and measurable impact. This formula results in a ranking that is, by and large, logical. It makes sense that the woman who leads Europe’s largest GDP sits at the top of the list. Likewise, it’s not crazy to suggest that a billionaire who volunteers to give away half her fortune to charity is influential in ways that many others in the world are not.
But in a year marked by mass protests around the globe—for Black Lives Matter, for democracy, and against the status quo—it’s worth thinking about power a little differently. And as the Cambridge professor Mary Beard writes in “Women & Power: A Manifesto,” reconsidering the meaning of power means “thinking about the power of followers, not just of leaders. It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb (‘to power’), not as a possession.”
By this definition, few people were more powerful in 2020 than Stacey Abrams.
Abrams was a longtime representative in Georgia’s state house and ran to be its governor in 2018. She lost that race by a margin of 55,000 votes, something she and political observers attributed to racially-motivated voter suppression. As a result, Abrams dedicated herself and her work over the last two years to empowering people to use their voice and their vote.
“We changed the trajectory of the nation.”
She founded the voting rights advocacy organization Fair Fight Action in 2018 to promote free and fair elections and to get eligible voters registered to vote (in Georgia and around the country). In this mission, Abrams was remarkably effective: she helped register 800,000 people in the state of Georgia, an effort that looks likely to have been a key reason the state just voted for its first Democratic presidential candidate since 1992.
“We changed the trajectory of the nation,” Abrams said in November. “Because our combined power show that progress is not only possible, it is inevitable."
The potency of Abrams’ work becomes even clearer when held in the light of recent protests in other parts of the world. In Belarus this August, women became the face of mass demonstrations against what was seen as an election rigged to favor incumbent president Aleksandr Lukashenko, a man who has been called Europe’s “last dictator.” When he claimed he’d won 80% of the vote against opponent Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya—a housewife with no political experience but who promised voters she’d install an honest electoral system and real elections—thousands of women poured into Minsk streets in outrage.
“The people of Belarus don’t have any right to express their opinion and protest fraudulent elections,” Nadya Myshelova, 32, an attorney, told Forbes. “The government goes against the Constitution and we don’t have any means to stop them.”
In true democracies, there are safeguards against authoritarians. Voting helps preserve the power of the people, but only if the people have the power to vote.
It is for this reason that Abrams has earned the No. 100 spot on the 2020 list of the most powerful women in the world. She is not the only woman, or only Black woman, fighting to protect fair and free elections in the U.S. or around the world. Her work is representative of an entire collective, but in a country where a portion of the Voting Rights Act has been dismantled, it is essential work. In a year defined by so much loss—of lives, of livelihoods—protecting people’s voices and votes was among the most powerful work a person could do.
Because power is, ultimately, subjective, there are plenty of people who will argue she deserves a different number; some will say higher, and plenty more will say Abrams’ name should be nowhere near a list that contains some of the world’s most well-known founders, CEOs and heads of state.
Abrams might even be one of those naysayers. “I’m nothing special,” she told Rolling Stone last month. “I just—I’m kind of relentless.”
See the full list of 2020’s World’s 100 Most Powerful Women here
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December 08, 2020 at 06:00PM
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Why Stacey Abrams Is One Of The World’s Most Powerful Women In 2020 - Forbes
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