Stacey Abrams, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, speaks in Santa Rosa, advocates for abortion rights

Stacey Abrams came to the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts to talk about voter suppression, abortion rights and her new book, “Lead From the Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change.” But she couldn’t avoid talking about the biggest event of the weekend.

“I have seen ‘Game of Thrones,’ and I will not tell you what I think,” Abrams said early on in Monday’s event, hosted by Copperfield’s Books.

Abrams became nationally recognized last year while running for governor of Georgia in a hotly contested race amid allegations that the state’s Republican Party was guilty of voter fraud and disenfranchisement under the direction of her opponent, then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

She lost the election with 48.8% of the vote, while Kemp took 50.2%. But Abrams wasn’t ready to concede: 10 days after the election, with the votes still not certified, she took to the stage to announce Kemp would be named governor - and she was backing a lawsuit challenging the state’s election system.

At Santa Rosa’s Luther Burbank Center, Abrams said her mistake during the election was underestimating the lengths to which her opponent would go.

“I didn’t realize I was running against a cartoon villain,” she said to a packed theater.

And she still hasn’t conceded the race.

“A concession, you’re saying everything is fine,” she told the audience. “How can you fix something if you don’t acknowledge it’s broken?”

Less than two weeks after her non-concession speech in the governor’s race, the promised lawsuit was filed by Care In Action, a group that works to support domestic workers, and Fair Fight Action, a nonprofit she founded to advance voting rights and that is headed by her former campaign manager. The suit, still working its way through federal court, alleges that Kemp worked in concert with local and county officials to systematically disenfranchise minority voters using a variety of methods, such as voter purges and the closure of polling places.

Though the lawsuit mentions Kemp repeatedly, it does not name him as a defendant, and instead is aimed at Georgia’s current secretary of state and election board. The defendants deny the suit’s allegations, claiming that a list of election problems cited by the plaintiffs are not connected and are the responsibility of local and county officials, not the state.

Abrams has remained active in politics since the election. She delivered the Democrats’ official rebuttal to Trump’s State of fhe Union speech this year, and last week she joined four Democratic women running for president, including California Sen. Kamala Harris, in a video denouncing a wave of restrictive abortion laws in states around the country.

She urged the crowd at Luther Burbank Center for the Arts to donate to organizations in the affected states that promote access to abortion, as well as national organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Democratic Leadership Council.

The long-term solution to pushing back against what she calls “forced pregnancy” laws, she said, is to defeat Republicans at the ballot box, both by pushing back against voter-suppression strategies and by organizing people that didn’t vote in 2016.

Asked by an audience member about her plans for the future, Abrams remained coy.

“I’m going to run for something,” she said. “I’m not sure what something is.”

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Beale at 707-521-5205 or andrew.beale@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @iambeale.