(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) On Jan. 2, 2024, the conservative vote-monitoring organization True the Vote won a federal election lawsuit when a federal judge ruled that the organization’s challenges to Georgia voters’ eligibility didn’t amount to voter intimidation in the 2020 election.
In a 145-page ruling that was issued a little less than two months after the end of a civil trial, U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones found that the defendants didn’t violate the Voting Rights Act, according to the Epoch Times.
Questions were raised by Texas-based True the Vote, its founder Catherine Engelbrecht and several other people about whether 364,000 Georgia voters were improperly registered because their voter registrations conflicted with their mailing addresses.
A group that was formed by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, Fair Fight Inc., sued on behalf of several plaintiffs, which resulted in two groups fighting in court for seven days and ending the legal battle in early November 2023 in a nonjury trial in Jones’s courtroom in Gainesville, Ga.
In addition to Engelbrecht, the defendants included two data analysts, Mark Davis and Derek Somerville, mailing list printer Mark Williams and two other people, Ron Johnson and James Cooper.
“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,” Jones wrote.
He then continued explaining why True the Vote did not commit any crime.
“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,” Jones added.
He then wrote about how the organization’s advertising, podcasts and press releases about the challenges weren’t intimidating in the way that direct calls to their telephone numbers would be.
