A federal judge has ruled in favor of a Texas-based conservative group in a lawsuit over its effort to lodge more than 364,000 challenges to Georgia voters\u2019 eligibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones, the same jurist who upheld state\u2019s new congressional and legislative district maps last week, declared Tuesday that True the Vote\u2019s actions did not constitute illegal voter intimidation as alleged by Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
True the Vote filed challenges in December 2020 ahead of two runoff elections that vaulted Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock into the U.S. Senate, claiming the affected voters appeared to be ineligible to vote because of changes in residency. Local elections offices rejected most of the challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jones found that the groups\u2019 actions did not rise to the level of violating the Voting Rights Act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis decision is monumental,\u201d said Jake Evans, lead attorney for True the Vote in the case. \u201cIt vindicates True the Vote in totality and establishes that eligibility challenges under Section 230 (of the federal law) are a proper method to ensure voter rolls are accurate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But other portions of Jones\u2019 ruling criticized the organization\u2019s process for challenging voters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAs the federal court weighed the evidence presented about True the Vote\u2019s tactics in the 2021 runoff elections, it did not hold back its criticisms of the Texas group\u2019s methods,\u201d said Cianti Stewart-Reid, Fair Fight\u2019s executive director. \u201cTo the contrary, the 145-page opinion expressly states the court \u2018in no way is condoning (True the Vote\u2019s) actions in facilitating a mass number of seemingly frivolous challenges.\u2019 “<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A sweeping overhaul of state election law the General Assembly passed in 2021 after the Senate runoffs and after the lawsuit was filed allows individuals to file an unlimited number of voter eligibility challenges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A federal judge has ruled in favor of a Texas-based conservative group in a lawsuit over its effort to lodge more than 364,000 challenges to Georgia voters\u2019 eligibility. U.S. District Judge Steve Jones, the same jurist who upheld state\u2019s new congressional and legislative district maps last week, declared Tuesday that True the Vote\u2019s actions did […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[8514,11662],"class_list":["post-165937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","tag-election","tag-fair-fight","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=165937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=165937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=165937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=165937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}