- A judge ruled that conservative group True the Vote did not violate the Voting Rights Act in challenging the eligibility of over 360,000 Georgia voters before a 2021 runoff election for two U.S. Senate seats.
- U.S. District Judge Steve Jones issued a 145-page decision in favor of True the Vote, stating that the evidence did not show voter intimidation.
- Despite the ruling, Jones expressed concerns about the reliability of the group’s list of challenged voters, stating it “utterly lacked reliability.”
A conservative group did not violate the Voting Rights Act when it announced it was challenging the eligibility of more than 360,000 Georgia voters just before a 2021 runoff election for two pivotal U.S. Senate seats, a judge ruled Tuesday. But he expressed concerns about the group’s methods.
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones issued a 145-page decision in favor of Texas-based nonprofit True the Vote. Fair Fight, a group founded by former Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, had sued True the Vote and several individuals, alleging that their actions violated a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that prohibits voter intimidation.
The evidence presented at trial did not show that the actions of True the Vote “caused (or attempted to cause) any voter to be intimidated, coerced, or threatened in voting,” Jones concluded. But he wrote that the list of voters to be challenged compiled by the group “utterly lacked reliability” and “verges on recklessness.”
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“The Court has heard no testimony and seen no evidence of any significant quality control efforts, or any expertise guiding the data process,” he wrote.
In the weeks after the November 2020 general election, then-President Donald Trump and his supporters were promoting false claims of widespread voter fraud that had cost him the election. In Georgia, two U.S. Senate races that would ultimately decide control of the Senate…
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