Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Georgia GOP, conservative nonprofit face campaign finance complaint

Campaign signs

Ahead of the Senate runoffs in January, True the Vote coordinated with the Georgia GOP on election integrity initiatives.

Paul Hennessy/Getty Images

The Georgia Republican Party and a conservative nonprofit have come under scrutiny for allegedly violating federal campaign finance law during the state's Senate runoff elections in January.

A pair of good-government groups, the Campaign Legal Center Action and Common Cause Georgia, filed a complaint Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission alleging that True the Vote, which says its mission to restore confidence in elections by combating voter fraud, illegally coordinated with the Georgia Republican Party ahead of the runoffs.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, True the Vote is prohibited from donating directly or indirectly to a political committee. Because it coordinated with the Georgia GOP, the complaint alleges, both parties violated campaign finance rules.


In December, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht announced in an email to supporters and in a press release that the Texas-based organization would assist the Georgia Republican Party with the runoffs. Her group helped with signature verification training, ballot curing support, a voter hotline, absentee ballot drop box monitoring and other election integrity initiatives.

Federal law prohibits corporations from making contributions — which include "coordinated expenditures" — to a political committee (other than a super PAC). The complaint alleges that the services True the Vote provided constitute expenditures and because they were done at the request of and in coordination with the state GOP, the activity amounts to prohibited in-kind contributions.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

"It doesn't matter if True the Vote expressly urged voters to elect Republicans, the relevant legal question is whether True the Vote spent money 'in connection with an election' and coordinated that spending with the Georgia Republican Party," said Brendan Fischer, CLCA's director of federal reform. "The evidence shows that it did."

True the Vote did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At the time the partnership was announced, Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer wrote that he was grateful for True the Vote's help in fighting for election integrity. "The resources of True the Vote will help us organize and implement the most comprehensive ballot security initiative in Georgia history," he said in the press release.

While working with the Georgia GOP, True the Vote challenged the eligibility of more than 364,000 voters ahead of the runoffs, claiming those voters may have recently moved and therefore weren't eligible to vote. In response, Stacey Abrahm's voting rights group Fair Fight filed a lawsuit alleging True the Vote's challenge amounted to voter intimidation.

A federal judge ultimately denied Fair Fight's request to stop the challenge, but expressed "grave concerns" about True the Vote challenging hundreds of thousands of voters' eligibility so close to the runoffs.

CLCA and Common Cause Georgia went further, filing a complaint.

"Corporations are not supposed to act as arms of campaigns, and since coordinated spending is just as valuable to candidates and political parties as direct contributions, coordination between outside spenders and their preferred political party must be strictly policed and enforced," the groups wrote in their press release about the complaint.

It will now be reviewed by FEC staff attorneys, who will develop a report and recommendation to the six commissioners about whether there is reason to believe the law was violated.

But this won't likely be a quick process. While the complaint's review will only take a few months, it could sit in the FEC's backlog of pending cases for as long as two years, Fischer said, since the agency has been slow to move on such issues.

If the FEC fails to take action in a timely manner, CLCA and Common Cause Georgia could sue the agency in order to have the complaint addressed more expeditiously.

"This is a striking example where the violations were hiding in plain sight," Fischer said. "We hope and expect that the FEC would enforce the law here and penalize both True the Vote and the Georgia Republican Party for this unlawful coordinated activity."

Read More

Women voting
Edmond Dantès

Election anxiety: Voters are no better off now than they were in 2020

Reid-Vanas is a clinical therapist at, and founder of, Rocky Mountain Counseling Collective.

New research by Rocky Mountain Counseling Collective reveals that American voters are already experiencing more election anxiety in 2024 than they did on Election Day 2020 (typically the day of highest election anxiety). The findings come from analyzing the Household Pulse Survey, a collaboration between the Census Bureau and federal agencies.

At the height of the 2020 election, just over half (51 percent) of surveyed Americans reported experiencing anxiety.

Keep ReadingShow less
‘Stories about the way the nation is organized are dividing us’: A conversation with Richard Slotkin

‘Stories about the way the nation is organized are dividing us’: A conversation with Richard Slotkin

Berman is a distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-editor of Vital City, and co-author of "Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age." This is the 11th in a series of interviews titled "The Polarization Project."

Is the United States on the brink of a civil war? Few people are better placed to answer that question than historian Richard Slotkin.

Slotkin, an emeritus professor at Wesleyan University, has devoted his career to the study of violence and American history. In an award-winning trilogy of books (“Regeneration Through Violence,” “The Fatal Environment,” and “Gunfighter Nation”), Slotkin explained how the myth of the American frontier — the idea that violence against a racialized other must be employed to conquer the wilderness and make way for civilization — has been used to justify government action across the history of the United States.

Keep ReadingShow less
Tim Walz speaking at a rally

The Dignity Index scored politicians, such as Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, on their language.

Peter Zay/Anadolu via Getty Images

Bipartisan citizens panel issues new Dignity Index scores

UNITE, a nonprofit created to ease the country's political divisions, on Sept. 20 released the second round of scores from its national citizen's panel analyzing political speech. The latest results offer support for founder Tim Shriver's idea of a political "dignity strategy."

"When our political parties use the contempt strategy — demonizing their opponents to energize their supporters — it has an unintended effect," said Shriver, who founded UNITE in 2018. "It turns away the voters they need to win. The candidate that can treat the other side with dignity has a better chance of winning the swing voters who may decide this election."

Keep ReadingShow less
"Swing state" sign under a cutout of Pennsylvania
gguy44/Getty Images

Election Overtime project prepares Pennsylvania media for Nov. 5

A new set of complementary tools designed to support accurate reporting of contested elections will be unveiled by the Election Reformers Network and other election law experts on Wednesday.

The Election Overtime project will provide journalists covering Pennsylvania’s 2024 general election with media briefings by election specialists; guides for reporting on election transparency, verification processes and judicial procedures; and an extensive speakers bureau. The briefing is designed for journalists but is open to the public. Register now.

Keep ReadingShow less