When I spoke to former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams about the perils voters might face in the upcoming presidential election, two words kept coming back to me: voter suppression.

Abrams, a lawyer who rose to become minority leader during her decade in Georgia’s House of Representatives, resigned in 2017 to run for governor. Her campaign was a long shot. After all, a Black woman couldn’t possibly become governor of Georgia, where Confederate generals are carved into a mountain and the legacy of slavery is carved into the soil.

Yet, by October 2018, Abrams, a Democrat, was polling slightly ahead of her Republican opponent, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp. Abrams was in the midst of a potentially history-making political feat. There was just one thing standing between Abrams and her unlikely victory: voter suppression.