Fulton County Early Election Hiring Implicates Stacey Abrams

Thorne also explained that when the Secretary of State (SoS) offered staffing substitutes for warehouse workers who had been quarantined in the fall, “Fulton County declined their offer and brought in unqualified, untrained, hundred percent minority Happy Face employees.” Thorne quoted a 2014 Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) article regarding a company Abrams founded called NOWaccount, a company that “secures government contracts.” Stacey Abrams, according to Thorne:

“Owns 16 percent [of NOWaccount]…NOWaccount is registered as the only secured party provider for Happy Faces. NOWaccount provides the line of credit…with the purse strings connection of Stacey Abrams to Happy Faces, you must ask does she have influence over who gets hired to work for our elections. Can she or her activist groups also recommend employees? With Happy Faces working one hundred percent early voting, ballot adjudication, absentee ballot processing, warehouse, dropbox, signature verification—they are basically running our elections. Shouldn’t we know who they are recruiting? Shouldn’t we know who they are? Could an activist group have a special connection and ability to work our election while veteran poll clerks like me are shut out?”

The following document addresses her association with the founding of NOWaccount which describes the charitable organization as having:

“Pioneered a new way for small businesses to access the money owed to them for providing a service at a time when credit for small businesses was especially difficult to find. NOWaccount buys invoices from qualified small businesses so they can get paid right away, rather than wait the sometimes 30 or 60 days it takes to get paid by a customer with an outstanding invoice. NOWaccount works like a credit card but costs less to the business. With the NOWaccount payment system, companies invoice their customers as usual, and the full payment is deposited into the companies’ bank account within 5 business days, minus a flat, one-time service fee of 3%. The small business doesn’t incur any debt. You can read about how NOWaccount works here http://nowaccount.com/”

Abrams, Lara Hodgson, and “John Hayes in 2010 [started] NOWaccount, a company that provides a payment system to small businesses, improving their cash flow so they can grow and thrive.” Abrams and her partners took advantage of the Obama administration’s “Small Business Jobs Act of 2010, which included the State Small Business Credit Initiative” and “applied for this federal program to help small businesses across the country get access to capital after the recession so they could stay open, grow, and create jobs,” according to the statement released by Abrams on the project.

At the time, Abrams said it was not a conflict of interest to form the company during her tenure as House Democratic Leader. The organization has partnered with the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, among other organizations.