Voting rights activist Stacey Abrams, whose advocacy is credited with Georgia’s vote for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election and for both of the state’s new Democratic senators in last month’s runoff, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Lars Haltbrekken, a Socialist Party member of Norway’s Parliament, said in a statement Monday that he nominated Abrams because her “work follows in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s footsteps in the fight for equality before the law and for civil rights.”
“Abrams’ efforts to complete King’s work are crucial if the United States of America shall succeed in its effort to create fraternity between all its peoples and a peaceful and just society,” Haltbrekken said, per Reuters.
Abrams did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Nominations for the distinction may be submitted by elected officials, professors and certain others who meet “nomination criteria,” according to the Nobel Peace Prize website. The Norwegian Nobel Committee selects recipients in October. The names of nominees aren’t officially disclosed for 50 years, but nominators can reveal who they’ve suggested.
In addition to Abrams, this year’s contenders include the group Black Lives Matter, former President Donald Trump, former White House adviser Jared Kushner, Russian politician Alexei Navalny, climate activist Greta Thunberg and WikiLeaks.
Abrams’ work boosting voter turnout has been widely praised for flipping Georgia to Democrats in the presidential and Senate elections. She was the first Black woman to become a Georgia gubernatorial nominee of either party in 2018, and a year later became the first African American woman to deliver a response to the State of the Union address.
She was recently lauded as the “American dream” by musician Pharrell Williams, who credited her with an “incredible analysis of how you could engineer change.”
Of that praise, Abrams said in an interview with People: “I have no right to victory. No politician running for office has the right to win, but as a citizen of Georgia, I had the right to make certain that the votes were counted, that the people who wanted to participate could.”
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