Secretary of State candidate Bee Nguyen with some of the Tifton residents who came out to hear her.

TIFTON — Bee Nguyen, the Democratic candidate for Georgia secretary of state, recently visited Tifton to speak with residents and share her plans for the position.

Nguyen, a state representative, was slated to visit Valdosta alongside gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, but the latter’s recent bout with COVID-19 postponed the trip. Instead, Nguyen met with residents of other communities in South Georgia.

In Tifton, she met with residents and officials that included Tift County Commissioner Melissa Hughes in Fulwood Park.

Nguyen serves as a state representative for District 89, though has also provided service to public schools in the form of a nonprofit she founded. The daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, she considers both her upbringing and experience in education as major motivators behind her current goals and campaign.

While growing up, Nguyen said she often noticed many people looked past or through her mother, and grew frustrated with her mistreatment simply due to her being a minority. Likewise, her time working with her nonprofit revealed that many schools were underperforming, some even yielding a grad rate of less than 50%.

“I started to understand the power of our Georgia General Assembly,” Nguyen said. “That was the body that was making decisions on how we fund our public education, whether or not we’re going to invest our taxpayer dollars to make sure that people don’t die when they don’t have health care, whether to invest our dollars in making sure people have access to secure, affordable housing, and what I saw was our state not doing those things.”

At her rally, Nguyen said she wants to help provide Medicaid to Georgians who need it, support students struggling with the return to in-class education, and loosen many of the regulations on voting, such as those that restrict the ability to mail in ballots or provide water to voters in line waiting to vote.

The Secretary of State candidate expressed numerous grievances with many of the policies enacted or dropped by Republicans in the Georgia government, citing the controversy over the 2020 election that many Georgian Republican politicians became involved in and their campaign to restrict voting practices, which she claims is an effort to control the vote.

Nguyen expressed disappointment in incumbent Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican seeking reelection, for allowing and encouraging some of these practices, claiming that change needed to be implemented and the value of every person’s vote needs to be preserved.

“When we talk about these different issues – voter subversion, voter suppression, voter intimidation – all of those are anti-democratic in nature,” Nguyen said. “We cannot have somebody in that office that believes that putting that thumb on the scale to prevent people from showing up is the job of the Secretary of State. Every eligible voter should have access to the ballot box without barriers.”

Mickeayla Brockington, state representative for District 169, was also in attendance of Nguyen’s rally, and offered her support for the candidate, expressing her appreciation for Nguyen’s eagerness to communicate and visit the various communities of Georgia.

“Thank God, we have people like Bee Nguyen to come down and show us that she has our back,” Brockington said. “How many of you have seen other people come down from the Secretary of State office to show people on the ground that they have our back?”

In closing her rally, Nguyen promised she would support both Stacey Abrams in becoming governor and Sen. Raphael Warnock in returning to his position, as well as working on electing an attorney general “for the people.”

She encouraged rally attendees to spread the word about her campaign, noting that people supporting Democrats Warnock and Abrams might not be as familiar with her, but would certainly find merit in her mission.