True the Vote Wins Federal Election Lawsuit in Georgia

[Valin]

NDT

Dan M. Berger
January 2, 2024

The conservative vote-monitoring organization True the Vote’s challenges to Georgia voters’ eligibility did not amount to voter intimidation in the 2020 elections, a federal judge ruled on Jan. 2.

U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones, in a 145-page ruling issued a little less than two months after the end of a civil trial, found that the defendants thus did not violate the Voting Rights Act.

Texas-based True the Vote, its founder Catherine Engelbrecht, and several others had raised questions about whether 364,000 Georgia voters were improperly registered because their voter registrations conflicted with their mailing addresses.

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Judge Jones expressed some reservations in his decision.

“Having heard the evidence presented and the arguments made by the Parties, the Court maintains its prior concerns about the manner Defendants utilized (Georgia law) to challenge individual voters. The Court, however, ultimately concludes that, as a legal matter, Plaintiffs have not carried their burden to show a violation of Section 11(b) (of the Voting Rights Act.) Accordingly, the Court enters judgment in favor (of) Defendants.

“There is no evidence that Defendants attempted to make any of the voters in this case feel timid or fearful, or that they experienced any actual reasonable intimidation,” the judge wrote in his opinion.

True the Vote’s advertising, podcasts, and press releases about the challenges, he wrote, were not intimidating in the way that direct calls to their telephone numbers would be.

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