(The Center Square) – A federal appeals court panel heard arguments Tuesday from a Georgia group accusing True the Vote of voter intimidation.
True the Vote challenged the eligibility of 364,000 Georgia voters after President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden. The challenge came before a January 2021 runoffs in the U.S. Senate races that Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won.
Fair Fight sued the group, saying the effort was an attempt to intimidate Georgia voters. U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones ruled after a seven-day bench trial in 2024 that the challenge did not reach the standards for voter intimidation. The state did not provide records showing if any of the voter challenges were viable, according to testimony in Tuesday’s hearing.
Jake Evans, an attorney for True the Vote, told the three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals Court that the organization made no attempts to contact any of the voters in question.
“The attempted act was to submit the voter challenge,” Evans said. “The attempted act was not to contact or intimidate a voter.”
Uzoma Nkwonta, who presented the case for Fair Fight, said while there is no evidence in the record that there is a record of how many challenges were unsuccessful, no one presented evidence of a meritorious challenge or one that was not frivolous or incorrect.
“The natural cause of the mass challenge is intimidation, it’s preventing people from voting,” Nkwonta told the panel.
Fair Fight was founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams in 2018 after her unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 2018. Abrams lost the governor’s race again in 2022 to Republican Brian Kemp.
True the Vote is a Texas-based organization that says on its website it is challenging election security, transparency and integrity. Tuesday’s hearing is “one of the most consequential legal battles yet,” the group said.
“This isn’t just about one hearing – it’s about holding the line for election integrity and defending the voice of we the people,” the group said on its website.
