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Georgia’s electoral council forwarded two cases to prosecutors on Wednesday linked to organizations that helped mobilize a record number of voters in the state during the 2020 election, a move that critics say is an intimidation effort.
One case involves the New Georgia Project (NGP), a group founded by Stacey Abrams in 2014, which helps to mobilize voters of color. In 2019, investigators claim, the group violated state law by failing to deliver 1,268 voter registration applications within the 10 days required by state rules. The interviewee named on the issue is Senator Raphael Warnock, who the group says was serving as chairman of its board at the time, but was incorrectly listed in documents as the group’s CEO, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“The February 10 State Electoral Council meeting was the first time that NGP heard about allegations about NGP’s important electoral registration work in 2019,” said Nse Ufot, who has served as the group’s CEO since 2014, in an announcement. “We have not received any information on this matter from the secretary or any other Georgia official, so we will have no further comment on the investigation.”
The episode marks the most recent example of Republicans targeting the group. In 2014, Brian Kemp, then the state’s top electoral officer, announced an investigation into allegations of falsified registration materials, but found no widespread offense. Late last year, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, accused the group of asking people outside Georgia to register with the state – which the group denied.
These investigations force the organization to allocate resources to lawyers who, she said, could be invested in the electoral register.
“Every dollar that we have to spend to defend ourselves against discomfort and party investigations is a dollar that we cannot put in the field to register new voters and have high-quality conversations about the power of their vote and the importance of this moment,” Ufot told the Guardian last year.
The second case that the state council referred to involved a canvasser from the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, another group that played a key role in registering new voters. The canvasser allegedly filed 70 false voter records while working on behalf of the group.
Helen Butler, the group’s executive director, said the group picked up the forged electoral registration forms in 2019 and that she was the one who reported the canvasser to the secretary of state’s office for investigation. That fact was not mentioned in a press release on Thursday at Raffensperger’s office announcing the references.
“We have an entire process to make sure we have legitimate forms,” Butler said in an interview. “We want people to vote. We are not spending our time trying to obtain fraudulent forms. “
Cliff Albright, co-founder of the organization Black Voters Matter, said it was not uncommon to have isolated cases of errors or forms delivered at the end of the campaigns. But the effort to sue voter registration groups, he said, was “an intimidation tactic”.
“The state of Georgia is just trying to reaffirm that, although it did not agree with Trump’s attempted coup, it still wants to make it clear that it is still the chief suppressor of voters,” he said.
Georgia has quickly emerged as the center of the struggle for the right to vote in America. Joe Biden won the presidential race there, the first Democrat to do so in almost 30 years, by just 12,670 votes. Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both Democrats, also won impressive surprises in two runoff runs for the Senate in January. Georgia Republicans are already considering a set of measures that would make it more difficult to vote, including requiring people to show their identity twice during the postal voting process and getting rid of the vote without an excuse for absent.
The cases are among the 35 electoral violations that the council referred to the prosecution, Raffensperger’s office said in a statement. The cases were referred both to the state attorney general and to local prosecutors, who can decide whether to proceed with the cases.
“Electoral fraud is not tolerated in Georgia. When there is evidence, those responsible are prosecuted, ”he said. “Georgia has a number of safeguards that allow our team of investigators to discover fraudulent votes. They worked to detect the crime in these cases and to maintain the security of the elections in Georgia ”.