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Georgia State Election Commission on Wednesday referred two cases to prosecutors related to organizations that helped mobilize a record number of voters in the state in the 2020 election, a move critics say is an attempt at intimidation .
One case concerns the New Georgia Project (NGP), the group founded by Stacey Abrams in 2014 that helps mobilize voters of color. According to investigators, in 2019 the group violated state law by not submitting 1,268 voter registration applications within 10 days required by state rules. The named respondent in the case is Senator Raphael Warnock, whom the group says was the chairman of the board at the time but was falsely listed on documents as the group’s CEO, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“The February 10 State Election Board meeting marked the first time NGP heard about the allegations related to NGP’s important 2019 voter registration work,” Nse Ufot, who has been the group’s CEO since 2014, said in a statement. “We have not received any information on this matter from the Secretary or any other Georgian official, so we will have no further comment on the investigation.”
The episode marks the latest example of Republicans targeting the group. In 2014, Brian Kemp, then the state’s highest-ranking election official, announced an investigation into allegations of falsified registration materials but found no widespread misconduct. Late last year, the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, accused the group of people from outside Georgia to register in the state – which the group denied.
Those investigations are forcing the organization to allocate resources to attorneys that it believes could otherwise be invested in voter registration.
“Every dollar we have to spend to defend ourselves against the nuisance and partisan investigations is a dollar we can’t put into 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 referred by the state administration involved an investigator for the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, another group that played an important role in registering new voters. The enrollee reportedly filed 70 false voter registrations while working on behalf of the group.
Helen Butler, the group’s executive director, said the group caught the falsified voter registration applications in 2019 and she was the one who reported the investigator to the Secretary of State for investigation. That fact was not mentioned in a Thursday press release from Raffensperger’s office announcing the referrals.
“We have a whole process of making sure we have legitimate forms,” Butler said in an interview. “We want people to vote. We don’t spend our time looking for fraudulent forms. “
Cliff Albright, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter organization, said it was not uncommon for isolated instances of errors or forms to be submitted late during campaigns. But the attempt to prosecute voter registration groups, he said, was “an intimidation tactic.”
“The state of Georgia is only trying to confirm that while they have not agreed to Trump’s coup attempt, they still want to make it clear that they are still the voter suppressors,” he said.
Georgia has quickly emerged as the center of America’s struggle for the right to vote. Joe Biden won the presidential race there, the first Democrat to do so in nearly 30 years, with just 12,670 votes. Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both Democrats, also won stunning setbacks in two Senate games in January. Republicans in Georgia are already weighing up a range of measures that would make it more difficult to vote, including requiring people to show their ID twice during the vote-by-email process and abolishing voting without excuse in case of absence.
The cases were among 35 electoral violations the board referred for prosecution, Raffensperger’s office said in a statement. The cases have been referred to both the Attorney General and the local prosecutors, who can decide whether to continue the cases.
“Election fraud is not tolerated in Georgia. If there are indications, those responsible will be prosecuted, ”he said. “Georgia has multiple safeguards that enable our team of investigators to detect fraudulent votes. They worked to track down the abuses in these cases and they monitor the security of the elections in Georgia. “