A Critical Fight in Defense of the First Amendment

Fair Fight Sued Me - A Citizen’s Story

“They've set up a multimillion-dollar lawfare machine.”

Mark Davis, private citizen sued by Fair Fight and defended by True the Vote

Coming into the 2020 election cycle it was a well-known fact that Georgia's voter rolls were a mess. The state had been involved in a multi-year lawsuit (filed by Fair Fight) that sought to limit the state's ability to maintain accurate voter records. True the Vote heard from voters all over Georgia who were frustrated, and after November's debacle rightfully concerned, that these pervasive inaccuracies would persist into their January 5, 2021 run-off elections. They wanted to do something to address the problem …

We knew that Georgia election code provided a means, called an Elector Challenge, to address voter roll inaccuracies in an orderly manner. Under Georgia's Elector Challenge process, a registered voter may provide his or her county records for any voter believed to be ineligible based on state law, stating the basis for that belief. The county elections board may then hold a hearing to review the challenges and determine whether to accept the challenges, to deny then, or hold them for further consideration.

Significantly, in no case would a challenged voter be disqualified from voting -- the process simply calls for the county election board to verify the voter’s eligibility -- a small step for secure elections.

So, True the Vote offered to help citizens who wanted to file Elector Challenges by comparing residential addresses on record in the voter roll to residential addresses on record with the United States Postal Service. We identified over 300,000 inaccurate records. The process we used was an advanced comparison of several commercial data sets, including the National Change of Address Registry. This process has been acknowledged by the United States Supreme Court as the “gold standard”.

In December 2020, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht made a public statement about Georgia voters submitting Elector Challenges. Several private citizens were independently working on elector challenges in their counties. In her remarks, Catherine complimented their good work, recognizing them by name.

Within days of that statement, Fair Fight filed suit against Catherine, True the Vote, and every private citizen she'd recognized. We’ve been in court ever since.

Here’s a link to the lawsuit ([link removed])

Fair Fight's complaint against True the Vote reads like a laundry list of tired racial stereotypes. Marc Elias and Stacey Abrams contend that efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls, which are bloated with ineligible records, is an attempt to suppress and deter the vote of “Black and Brown people” (their terms not ours) and would somehow lead to threats and harassment of individual voters. Elias and Abrams set out to hold True the Vote et al liable for a fiction of Fair Fight's own creation, with sweeping accusations that evoked highly charged emotional responses. This gave Ms. Abrams lots of primetime media coverage and spurred a barrage of threats against us.

What should have been viewed as a positive effort in civic engagement and good government has now become a multi-year lawsuit. Here’s the story of one citizen, among many, sued by Fair Fight.

“I’ve been working with voter data since my father, Guy Davis, was the Republican nominee for governor in 1986, and I worked on the campaign. Having worked with voter data for that many years, you see a lot of issues. Because of all the problems that I was seeing, I became an advocate for election integrity over 20 years ago.

In the general election of 2020 in Georgia, I saw nearly 35,000 potentially unlawful ballots, and the margin between Trump and Biden was like 11,700 or somewhere around there. There were other issues we found, like voters that were registered at a commercial mail-receiving agency. There was one address in downtown Atlanta that had 2000 people registered at it. My goal is to raise awareness about the problems with our voter registration system and the management of our voter rolls.

Getting sued … well, it’s been a nightmare. We all got served on Christmas Eve, and I do not think that happened by chance. All the depositions and the request for production of documents, the whole thing has been a nightmare. The great irony here is they’re suing us for allegedly intimidating voters, when we didn’t talk to a single voter, we didn’t intimidate a single voter. With vote challenges, you are petitioning the government. You are not confronting voters.

Nobody should have to go through this. In my opinion, Fair Fight should be getting sued for trying to intimidate us from using our rights. Fair Fight is trying to prevent us from exercising our First Amendment right to petition our government for Redress of Grievances. OCGA 21, 229 and 230 were enacted for exactly that purpose. Our legislature set forth a procedure for petitioning the county government.

Thank God for True the Vote providing us legal support. When you get involved in a case like this the fees can add up real quick. There’s the light at the end of the tunnel here.”

Thank God for people like Mark Davis and all the other voters improperly and unfairly drawn into this case. We’ll keep you updated on the progress of this lawsuit (along with the many others). Please consider supporting us, you can donate here. ([link removed]) Our opposition is extremely well funded. We need you.

Stay strong. Never quit.

Ever onward -

The True the Vote Team
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