Voter suppression trial gets underway in Georgia

ATLANTA (CN) — A civil bench trial kicked off on Thursday to determine whether a conservative “vote-monitoring” group violated the federal Voting Rights Act by intimidating voters in Georgia.

Fair Fight, a national voting rights group, filed suit nearly three years ago claiming the Texas-based conservative group True the Vote unlawfully “launched a massive, multifaceted campaign” of voter intimidation and suppression in an attempt to disqualify voters in Georgia based on questionable addresses.

That was in the late 2020 lead-up the contentious Jan. 5, 2021 U.S. Senate runoff election in Georgia that would determine whether Democrats or Republicans dominated the upper chamber. True the Vote challenged more than 360,000 voters’ eligibility in the state. At the time, former President Donald Trump and his campaign spread false claims that voter fraud had cost him the presidential election.

To aid its efforts, True the Vote recruited volunteers to serve as “citizen watchdogs” and monitor voters as they returned their ballots and offered a $1 million reward fund to “incentivize” individuals to report instances of “election malfeasance.”

“The obvious effect of this million-dollar bounty will be to encourage Defendants’ supporters to generate even more baseless accusations of voter fraud — an effort that is likely to subject Georgia voters, and particularly Georgians of color, to harassment, particularly if they appeared on Defendants’ erroneous and unsubstantiated lists of purportedly ineligible voters,” Fair Fight wrote in its original complaint.

County election boards ultimately rejected the vast majority of the challenges, which relied on spreadsheets that listed voters who had submitted change-of-address forms with the U.S. Postal Service.

But challenges caused harm to who wanted their mail forwarded, but remained Georgia voters with full voting rights, including members of the military, students and relocated workers, Fair Fight attorney Uzoma Nkwonta told the court.

Fair Fight also argues that True the Vote’s frivolous accusations of voter fraud have prompted harassment and threats against many of Georgia’s election workers. The group was founded by Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for Georgia’s governor in 2018 and 2022.

Fair Fight wants to bar True the Vote from operating in George or initiating any future challenges in the battleground state that President Joe Biden won by roughly 12,000 votes in 2020. The group hopes a ruling in their favor could deter similar mass challenges filed in Georgia and other states.

Meanwhile attorneys for True the Vote say that such a ruling would deprive the group of engaging in a “lawful state procedure that they lawfully employed to protect their right to vote,” and that their client’s challenges stemmed from detailed research identifying registered voters who no longer lived in the county of record or the state of Georgia.

“Plaintiffs push a narrative where the big bad state yanks people out of line at polling stations as trained killers patrol nearby or humiliates them by asking for added proof of county residency already required of every voter,” attorneys Jake Evans and Michael Wynne said in a trial brief filed Monday.

True the Vote also argues it was engaging in protected free speech. However, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, which joined the case, applying the section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that prohibits voter intimidation in this instance does not violate the First Amendment.

Over 92,000 registrations were contested last year, mostly by right-wing activists, according to an accounting by Fair Fight. County election boards upheld about 5,800 of the challenges.

Despite Trump and his supporters’ allegations of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, voting fraud is rare in Georgia, with few cases of illegal ballots confirmed by the State Election Board in recent years. Investigations have repeatedly debunked claims of widespread ballot stuffing, counterfeit ballots and dead voters.

Proceedings before U.S. District Judge Steve Jones in Gainesville are expected to last between one and two weeks. Jones, who was nominated to the court by former President Barack Obama, ruled against Fair Fight last year in its lawsuit opposing Georgia’s “exact match” voter registration policy, absentee ballot cancellation practices and registration inaccuracies.

True the Vote’s expected witnesses include Abrams and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whom Trump called out for refusing to take steps to overturn his narrow election loss in the state.

Attorneys for Fair Fight plan to call True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht, who has called the case a “critical battle” and said that the group’s actions were “defending the rights of every American voter.” They also listed as a potential witness Clemson University professor Vernon Burton, who has studied how voter challenges have been used throughout the state’s history to disenfranchise voters, especially Black Georgians.

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