Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams called on Congress on Tuesday to restore a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act voided by the U.S. Supreme Court six years ago.

In testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Abrams said the high court's 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder voiding Section V of the Voting Rights Act “created a new channel for the troublesome practice of voting suppression.” The hearing took place on the sixth anniversary of that ruling.

Abrams—an attorney and a former state House minority leader—urged Congress to apply the law nationwide and not just to the nine southern and western states that were originally required to secure permission from the U.S. Justice Department for nearly 50 years in order to implement changes affecting the vote.

“I do believe there is a broader need, and not just states that have a history of bad actions,” Abrams said. She added that legislators in states that once were exempt from preclearance requirements “have joined the fight” to implement policies that have created more hurdles to voting, particularly for communities of color, “because they have decided they can't win elections fairly.”

“It is dangerous to democracy,” she said. “While it may target voters of color, it affects us all.”

Abrams said that after Shelby was handed down, states that had previously chafed under preclearance requirements “raced to reinstate or create new hurdles” to voting. “Georgia has been one of the most aggressive in leveraging the lack of federal oversight … to target voters of color,” Abrams said.

Abrams specifically targeted practices implemented by Brian Kemp—her Republican opponent for governor—who oversaw Georgia's elections as secretary of state while running against her.

Abrams said the state implemented a number of policies under Kemp's watch that made voting more onerous. Some of those policies were later overturned by the federal courts in Georgia.

Abrams singled out an unofficial policy that imposed a 90-day blackout period on processing voter registrations prior to an election that was barred by the federal courts in 2017.

She also pointed to Kemp's policy requiring that voter information on registration forms exactly match information contained in the Georgia drivers license and national Social Security databases.

That policy resulted in a failure to process tens of thousands of registrations because, “It requires perfect entry of data by government employees,” she said.

Abrams said that in 2009—four years before Shelby was handed down—the U.S. Justice Department rejected Georgia's request to implement the exact match policy. Post-Shelby, Kemp put it in place, but a federal judge blocked the practice and restored about 34,000 registrants to the voter rolls.

A year later, Kemp promoted the successful passage of legislation codifying the exact match policy, Abrams said. That policy resulted in the suspension of 53,000 registrations, more than 70% of them African American voters, Abrams said.

The policy was rejected a second time by a federal judge last year.

Abrams said the exact match policy provided “the most obvious, deliberate, and strongest” case to restore preclearance because the U.S. Justice Department rejected it before the high court voided preclearance, she said.

Abrams also said that, absent preclearance, organizations battling voter suppression must sue, often at a cost of millions of dollars. “It is a crippling burden that has been placed on organizations that they have to seek outside financial support to secure the fundamental right to vote,” she said. “Those organizations are forced to combat massive state budgets that allow taxpayers to fund voter suppression.”

Georgia has been sued multiple times only to have judges rule that its actions were racially discriminatory, she said.

“But people were denied the right to vote. They will never be unable to ring that bell,” Abrams said. If the Voting Rights Act's preclearance provisions were still in place, she said, “Those policies limiting the right to vote would never have been enacted.”

Fair Fight Action, a group Abrams founded and chairs, is currently suing the Georgia secretary of state and the state elections board, alleging multiple constitutional violations and is seeking a court order that would restore preclearance in Georgia.

Abrams acknowledged that the Georgia lawsuits “brought remedies to some.” But “thousands more may have faced discrimination without the knowledge or the resources to gain relief,” she said.