Stacey Abrams, who lost her bid to be Georgia’s governor by over 50,000 votes but still refuses to concede, lost another high-profile battle, this time in a federal court of law.
Federal District Court Judge Steve Jones, an Obama nominee, rejected a request Friday to bar an election integrity group from challenging the eligibility of suspect voters in Georgia.
Fair Fight, a group that claims to fight voter suppression, filed a request for the order. Fair Fight was founded by failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a Marxist-Progressive Democrat.
Abrams has been at the epicenter of several issues involving activist groups in the run-up to the 2020 General Elections and the January 5, 2021, US Senate run-off elections in Georgia between incumbent Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue, and their Democrat challengers, Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, respectively.
The Fair Fight group accused Texas-based True the Vote, a group chartered to protect the integrity of elections, of engaging in a coordinated campaign to harass and intimidate voters across the State of Georgia.
But, Judge Jones’ 29-page ruling said Fair Fight didn’t provide evidence supporting that claim.
“While the Court does not doubt that Doe Plaintiffs have legitimate fear of retaliation, there is insufficient evidence at this point to connect intimidation or harassment (real or attempted) to Defendants. At this stage, the connection to Defendants is too tenuous to find they have violated” the law, Jones wrote.
https://twitter.com/TrueTheVote/status/1345737646329495559
However, Jones did not dismiss the case with prejudice saying the case wasn’t over. He called the challenges to voters just weeks before the Senate run-off elections “suspect.”
“The Court will not abide attempts to sidestep federal law to disenfranchise voters. Nor will it tolerate actors brandishing these voter challenges to intimidate and diminish the franchise, for such acts diminish democracy itself,” Jones said. “But the Court must rely on proper evidence and facts to determine whether these acts have in fact run afoul of federal law. The Court looks forward to seeing what evidence the Parties bring to bear.”
Fair Fight’s litigation had sought to stop True the Vote from “submitting or causing the submission of any further voter challenges, from participating in any poll watching or election observing activities, and from photographing or recording voters or election workers during the course of voting.”
Last month – in the aftermath of the hotly contested Georgia November 3, 2020 General Election, True the Vote announced it was partnering with Georgians in every county to challenge 364,541 “potentially ineligible voters.”
Their challenges resulted in two counties taking action to remove voters from voter rolls because True the Vote’s allegations were found to be valid.
A ruling by Abrams’ sister, Federal District Court Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, stayed those counties, but one of the counties appealed successfully and the order was partially rolled back.
