A federal judge ruled that a conservative vote-monitoring group that challenged the voter eligibility of hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters during a 2021 runoff election didn’t engage in voter intimidation.
The group True the Vote claimed that nearly 365,000 voters in Georgia weren’t qualified to vote in a 2021 Senate runoff election just after early in-person voting began. True the Vote claimed that many of the voters they listed no longer lived in the counties where they were registered, making them ineligible to vote.
In 2021, Georgia lawmakers upheld individuals’ rights to submit unlimited voter eligibility challenges in restructuring a state election law. This gave True the Vote the opportunity to file their mass challenge. While many of the challenges were dismissed, some people on the list had to appear in front of their local election board to prove their eligibility.
In response to the challenge, Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group founded by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, accused True the Vote of voter intimidation, alleging that their mass voter challenge violated a clause in the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
However, a judge just sided with True the Vote and ruled that Fair Fight Action didn’t sufficiently prove that “any Georgia voter was reasonably intimidated.”
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones, a Barack Obama appointee, ruled that True the Vote’s actions never “caused (or attempted to cause) any voter to be intimidated, coerced, or threatened in voting.”
However, Jones did find fault with True the Vote’s methods for issuing the challenge. He wrote that the list of voters the group compiled “utterly lacked reliability” and “verges on recklessness.”
State election officials only rejected a few dozen ballots cast in the runoff, which Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff ended up winning, giving Democrats control of the U.S. Senate.
Jones concluded that the arguments Fair…
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