Trump Allies Back Mass Challenge to Voter Eligibility in Georgia

Margaret Newkirk and Ryan Teague Beckwith
·6 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- A group backed by Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne is challenging the eligibility of tens of thousands of Georgia voters just weeks before the November election in the state where the former president fought hardest to overturn his 2020 loss.

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The group, VoterGA, filed eight boxes Monday containing what its leader says are 37,500 challenges to voters in Gwinnett County, a once solidly Republican area of suburban Atlanta that has voted Democratic since 2016.

The move comes less than 10 weeks before the Nov. 8 general election and its tight races for governor and a U.S. Senate seat that could help decide control of the chamber. The challenges promise to make it harder for some registered voters to cast ballots and put a heavy burden on already stretched county elections officials charged under state law with responding to them quickly.

Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, said the group has heard of similar efforts in Harris County, Texas; and Florida, but the challenges in Georgia are the most extensive currently underway.

She said it’s also troubling because Georgia law allows the state to take over local elections boards if it finds them incompetent. Many clerks are worried that if they don’t do a quick vetting of the mass challenges or the challenges lead to longer lines on Election Day, they’ll face a state takeover.

Asked how his office would handle the influx of challenges, Gwinnett elections supervisor Zach Manifold started to laugh combined with what sounded like despair.

“Well, it is interesting,” he said when he stopped. “These things usually take a while. And that’s with just 100 of them.”

The Gwinnett challenges bring the total this election cycle to about 65,000, due largely to a 2021 overhaul of Georgia voting laws enacted in response to unfounded allegations of widespread fraud in 2020. The law effectively encouraged mass challenges of voter eligibility.

VoterGA head Garland Favorito, best known in the state for fighting computerized voting machines, said his group’s sworn affidavits challenging Gwinnett registrations “shows how bad the voter rolls really are.”

He said 20,000 of those voters being challenged voted in 2020, “which is way more than the margin of victory in the presidential election.”

In a short video released Thursday, the group said that meant the 2020 election was still contested.

Mass Challenges

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Georgia or any other state during the 2020 election, despite multiple recounts, audits and lawsuits sought by Trump and his allies after he sought to contest his loss.

Favorito said his group also was working on mass challenges in other Georgia counties. VoterGA, which has sued the state and individual counties over the 2020 election, recently received funding from The America Project, an “election integrity” nonprofit founded by Flynn and Byrne, both of whom aggressively pushed Trump’s false stolen-election claims.

Joe Flynn, chief executive of the America Project, and Michael Flynn’s brother, told Bloomberg News that the group is supporting VoterGA as well as an election-related lawsuit and election audit in Arizona because of its concerns with “voting irregularities and anomalies” in 2020.

“We see this as a systemic technological and procedural failure manipulated by those in government wanting to maintain control,” he said.

The Gwinnett filings more than doubled the roughly 27,000 such challenges with Georgia counties so far this election season, including in the state’s most Democratic counties and in more Democratic parts of at least one Republican county. Fair Fight Action, an organization founded by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, is also suing Houston-based True the Vote in federal court over its challenges to more than 364,000 Georgia registrations in December 2020, just before the runoff election for the US Senate.

Although most counties rejected the True the Vote challenges, it was “the largest mass voter challenge program conducted in the United States since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965,” said Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias, writing on a voting-rights website.

The voting law Republican Governor Brian Kemp signed in 2021 included new restrictions making it harder to vote. It also had provisions -- less noticed than other changes -- that specified that mass challenges like True the Vote’s are legal and giving local elections boards a short window of time to respond to them. It said there was no limit on how many challenges a single person could bring and that elections boards had to hold hearings on challenges 10 days after providing notice to each targeted voter.

Forty-six states allow private citizens to challenge voter eligibility, according to a 2012 report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Some laws date back more than a century and were enacted to restrict newly enfranchised Black or female voters. Even those with more innocent origins have been used by political groups to target rivals, according to the Brennan Center report.

Email, Boxes

Georgia has allowed citizen challenges since 1981, but under a little-used law intended to address small-bore changes. “It was a family member reporting another family member had died, or someone saying a neighbor had moved,” said Anita Tucker, an elections board member in Forsyth County.

The new, mass challenges come in emails and boxes. Most are pegged to address discrepancies, based on comparisons with change-of-address data from the US Postal Service, which most people don’t have access to and which critics say is unreliable. Some ask that voters be flagged as “pending,” which means they have to sign address affidavits at the polls and cast provisional ballots subject to post-election review. Others ask that voters be kicked off the rolls.

“We expect to see more of this,” said Kristin Nabers, Georgia director for All Voting is Local, a voting rights group. “This is just going to spread all over the state.”

Nabers said most challenges are dismissed because they use bad evidence, but that they suck up elections officials’ time: A hearing on more than 300 challenges in Forsyth County next week is expected to last nine hours.

Forsyth, a Republican stronghold, had the most challenges in Georgia until this week. Of the 27,000 challenges before Gwinnett, 17,008 were filed there, all from three people. Board member Tucker said they targeted apartment buildings in the county’s south, where its Democratic minority is more likely to live.

The county dismissed most. Just over 1,000 voters have been flagged as pending. Another 108 were removed from the rolls.

Democratic Fulton County, home of Atlanta, has also seen challenges increase, said elections chair Cathy Woolard. The burden has been intense, she said.

Instead of meeting once a month for minimal compensation, the board is now meeting several times monthly with no compensation. It is paying for security, audio-visual equipment and lawyers for each hearing, which “generally take hours.”

She said the exercise has turned up no evidence of voter fraud, although it identified a small number of improperly registered voters. They include a homeless woman registered at a P.O. box, which isn’t allowed. After she showed up for her hearing, elections staff helped her re-register at the county courthouse, which is allowed.

“It’s contributed to making elections more expensive and more complicated without contributing anything to election security,” Woolard said. “It’s a terrible mess.”

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