Though Brian Kemp is now officially the governor of Georgia, the fight over how elections are run in the state is far from over. After Kemp managed to steal the election by suppressing votes, his opponent, Democrat Stacey Abrams, and her campaign staff launched an organization called Fair Fight Georgia and subsequently filed a lawsuit against the state “for the gross mismanagement of [the 2018] election and to protect future elections from unconstitutional actions.”
On Monday, the recently sworn-in Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and state election board members requested that a judge toss out the lawsuit, citing that it had failed to bring valid claims. Talking Points Memo also reports that the state is arguing that its officials cannot be held responsible “for any of the harm alleged and are immune from such suits.”
But the state isn’t stopping there. In addition to the claim that there is no evidence for the lawsuit, they want a judge (and the public) to believe that this entire thing is all happening because Abrams is a sore loser.
“Their candidate having lost the election, Plaintiffs now seek to litigate the consequences of the 2018 election not in the elected branches of state government, but in this federal court,” the state lawyers wrote. “Put simply, Plaintiffs seek to enact their preferred policies not through state government or the legislature, but through the federal judiciary.”
For the record, Abrams didn’t lose. She won more votes than any other Democratic candidate in the history of the state of Georgia and without the interference of Kemp and his Republican buddies, she would have won the race. But Kemp didn’t begin this in 2018. Instead, his plan to purge nearly 1 million voters off the rolls began nearly a decade prior to the election. Kemp made a lousy secretary of state but an excellent vote suppressor-in-chief—and he couldn’t have done it without the help of local officials.
But in an interesting turn of events, the state is also claiming that if there was any wrongdoing, it would have occurred at the county level, something that they deny responsibility for. So which is it, Georgia Republicans? Is it the fault of the state or the counties? Either way, the message is clear: The state is pretending that it had absolutely nothing to do with the massive voter disenfranchisement that took place in this election. But Fair Fight Georgia knows better. The organization’s CEO, Lauren Groh-Wargo, says, “With the motion to dismiss defendants filed today, the state continues to pretend they are not culpable of disenfranchisement.”
Republicans will continue to lie to the people of Georgia (and to the country) about what happened in this election. They’ll keep doing it in court, too. Luckily, absolutely no one is buying it.