GAINESVILLE, Ga.—One side sees it as voter suppression. The other side sees it as election integrity. One cites the civil rights protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The other cites the Georgia law allowing and encouraging citizen challenges to the voter rolls.
The controversial 2020 presidential election and equally fraught Georgia Senate runoffs that followed are almost three years in the rearview mirror. But still at issue are the challenges to voter rolls that the True the Vote nonprofit group raised in the last few weeks before the runoffs on Jan. 5, 2021.
The Texas-based group started with a list of more than 364,000 registered Georgia voters who, postal records showed, didn’t live in the region in which they voted. They winnowed that down to 39,000 names for whom enough probable cause existed to raise challenges with county election boards. They recruited county residents to work with them because, under Georgia law, a voter’s registration can only be challenged by residents of the same county.
Even before the runoff, they were sued by Fair Fight, a group organized by two-time Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Fair Fight claimed that the massive voter challenges were designed to intimidate voters into not voting. They were aimed at minority voters, Fair Fight alleged, and echoed voter suppression tactics used in the Jim Crow era to keep black voters away from the polls.
Fair Fight seeks to stop True the Vote and six co-defendants, including the group’s co-founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, from operating in Georgia.
The nonjury trial before U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones started on Oct. 26. On Nov. 7, after days of testimony by four voters, six co-defendants, at least two expert witnesses, and others, lawyers for the two sides made their closing arguments to Judge Jones. They have eight days to submit final written statements to him. He hasn’t yet announced when he'll render his verdict.
Defense attorneys Michael Wynne of Houston and Jake Evans of Atlanta argued in their closings that True the Vote’s efforts were meticulous. Ms. Engelbrecht particularly took pains to abide by the letter of the law, consulting three lawyers, someone from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and even Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to ensure that she understood the process. She delayed her initiation of the voter challenges to, in part, do that due diligence, they said.
Plaintiffs’ counsel Uzoma Nkwonta of Washington argued, in contrast, that True the Vote’s work process was sloppy. An expert witness found thousands of discrepancies in their lists, he said. Their use of the lists was reckless, he argued. He labeled the challenges “frivolous” for relying on the U.S. Postal Service’s change of address lists, in and of themselves not enough to prove residency for electoral purposes.
Even one of True the Vote’s own volunteers, Clair Joseph Martin of Banks County, said in a video deposition that he'd withdrawn from the effort once he saw that his first few challenges were invalid, Mr. Nkwonta said.
All the individual plaintiffs testified that they found the process intimidating and discouraging in regard to exercising their right to vote, Mr. Nkwonta said.
The defense lawyers emphasized that none of the defendants had any contact with the voters in question and that True the Vote and its volunteer challengers had followed the law in submitting challenges to county boards of elections.
Those boards, Mr. Wynne said, represent a “firewall” in the process. By law, nonpartisan and empowered to investigate voter registrations, they could do so and take action if necessary.
And that process worked for one plaintiff, Stephanie Stinetorf, who had been in Germany at the time of the election. Once Muscogee County’s board of elections determined that she was of the military—members of which are granted broad latitude on where they vote—they dropped her from the challenge, as she should have been, Mr. Evans said.
Ms. Engelbrecht and two of her co-defendants, Mark Davis and Derek Somerville, who are independent election integrity advocates and data analysts, had all testified that they sought to exclude military members from the challenges and had eliminated thousands of names on that basis from their challenge lists.
Other plaintiffs testified to frequent moves, multiple addresses, and uncertain residencies, Mr. Wynne and Mr. Evans said.
Mr. Nkwonta argued that the challenge to Jocelyn Heredia’s registration in Banks County had discouraged her from voting since Jan. 5, 2021. She had previously taken pride in her parents becoming citizens and in wearing an “I Voted” sticker after casting her ballot. “After being challenged,” he said, “she stayed away in 2022.”
Ms. Heredia withdrew from the lawsuit shortly before trial but rejoined as a plaintiff when it began, Mr. Wynne told The Epoch Times.
“We’re not seeking to strike down the challenge law,” Mr. Nkwonta argued. “But it’s important to call these challenges what they are.”
The law may have evolved over the years “into a means of providing election integrity, but it still can be used for intimidation,” he said.
Georgia challenge laws, which are more than a century old, were once designed to allow legal harassment of blacks seeking to exercise their right to vote, according to Fair Fight’s lawsuit. They provided for public posting of challenged names, meaning that a black who registered to vote might suddenly find his rights or property targeted by whites seeking to keep him away from the polls.
There may be cases in which electoral challenges are used frivolously or to intimidate, Mr. Wynne said, but “this is not that case.”
He cited True the Vote’s efforts going back more than a decade to encourage voter participation, including an initiative for Latino voters in Texas and an initiative to get people “to embrace their democracy.”
And Mr. Wynne recalled that after the disputed 2020 general election, and with the Georgia runoff coming up for control of the U.S. Senate, “Georgia was at the center. It was a tinder box.”
Ms. Engelbrecht’s efforts through True the Vote were designed in part to give disillusioned voters a chance to participate and restore their faith in the process and to defuse any extreme electoral conspiracy theories that may have been circulating, he said.
Clean voter rolls, whereby people vote in the right place—for the people who represent them and for the taxes that they pay—“sustain confidence that elections represent the people who live there,” he said.
“This case is not about Donald Trump. It is not about January 6,” he told Mr. Jones. Neither is it about removing anyone’s right to vote. Some registered in the wrong district are happy to get that corrected, and the hassle becomes little more than an inconvenience, he said.
“Maybe at the poll you have to reboot your phone or dig in your pocket. Maybe you have to go out to your car to get something,” he said. “These are necessary sacrifices to maintain democracy.”
Both Mr. Wynne and Mr. Nkwonta were asked by The Epoch Times after the court adjourned whether there’s an underlying conflict between the federal and state laws.
Mr. Nkwonta deferred comment until he could consult with law partners and the plaintiff. Mr. Wynne told The Epoch Times that not only has the Georgia law not been struck down in the 58 years since the Voting Rights Act passed, but the Legislature recently strengthened it, allowing an unlimited number of challenges.
