The GOP’s six-month-long fight to steal a Supreme Court seat in North Carolina was a prime example of MAGA’s new playbook: If the voters beat you, beat the voters right back.
Through the courts, Jefferson Griffin tried to overturn his loss by challenging over 65,000 votes — including those cast by his opponent’s parents. His strategy centered on invalidating ballots, such as those by eligible Americans overseas, including military members, and voters without ID numbers in their records.
Voters who are Black or young were twice as likely to have their ballots challenged by Griffin, regardless of the fact that their votes were valid.
Griffin’s effort may have failed — but Republicans have been trying similar strategies in plenty of other places. And in a Georgia case to be heard by a federal appeals court Tuesday, we have a chance to draw a hard line in the sand against the kind of dangerous mass voter challenges that threaten to undermine democracy if they aren’t stopped.
In fact, the case might even offer a rare chance to strengthen the Voting Rights Act, at a time when it’s never been more imperilled.
Just before Georgia’s 2021 U.S. Senate runoff, a far-right anti-voting group called True the Vote tried to disenfranchise over 364,000 voters.
The group facilitated over 250,000 voter challenges using a Georgia law that allows any resident to challenge the right to vote of an unlimited number of their neighbors. The challengers used lists of voters provided by True the Vote, created with outdated and unreliable data.
Black, brown, and first-time voters were disproportionately targeted — the very communities whose record turnout had flipped Georgia in the 2020 presidential election weeks earlier.
Fair Fight sued, arguing the mass challenge scheme was illegal voter intimidation under Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act.
The Georgia case is an opportunity to further expose the MAGA anti-voter machine, and affirm that the Voting Rights Act still has teeth.
In 2024, a judge found that True the Vote’s approach “verges on recklessness,” and that its data “utterly lacked reliability,” but ruled against Fair Fight under the narrowed scope of voting rights protections. The ruling came after other court decisions like Shelby County v. Holder and Brnovich v. DNC, which made challenging voter suppression in court more difficult.
Now, Fair Fight’s case is headed to an appellate court — and the outcome could be critical for how federal law protects against modern voter intimidation.
These days, voter suppression has evolved from mainly physical intimidation and violence, poll taxes and literacy tests into subtler but no less pernicious schemes, in which officials use administrative rules and red tape to limit ballot access.
Now, MAGA extremists in the White House, Congress and state legislatures want to impose new laws to synergize with the bureaucratic tactics from Georgia and North Carolina.
The House recently passed the SAVE Act, a voter suppression bill that could disenfranchise tens of millions by requiring expensive government documents to prove citizenship when registering and forcing states to conduct problematic mass voter purges.
SAVE Act copycats have been filed in state legislatures across the country — one is about to pass in Texas. Trump’s elections executive order mirrors the SAVE Act — and voter challenge measures, like the ones in Georgia, are now showing up in Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Texas. Taken together, these bills turn conspiracy theories into law, baking in the bureaucracy that voter challenges rely on.
The SAVE Act and its copycats go beyond voter ID laws, making it more expensive and time-consuming to register to vote. Meanwhile, mass voter challenges make it easier for people to be removed from the voter registration rolls. Together, they make up a key pillar of MAGA’s full-scale attack on our elections: making it harder to get or stay on the rolls.
None of this is random. A network of political operatives has spent years laying the groundwork.
Lawyer Cleta Mitchell helped create the SAVE Act and even got a personal thank you from its sponsor when it passed the House. She joined Trump’s infamous 2020 call to “find” votes after he lost Georgia and was subpoenaed for a plan to seize voting machines.
Mitchell heads the Election Integrity Network (EIN), one of the most effective groups supporting Trump’s election lies. The group trains activists to challenge voters, pressure election officials, and support anti-voter legislation. It has several state chapters and Mitchell works with groups like Heritage Action and ALEC to convert her ideas into legislation that can be copy-pasted into red-state legislatures — like the SAVE Act.
In Georgia, Mitchell’s network backed EagleAI, a software program that helps far-right activists target voters using flawed data. “The left will hate this. But we love it,” she said during an EIN chapter’s EagleAI demonstration.
In North Carolina, the legal strategy behind Griffin’s attempt to overturn his loss came straight from EIN’s state chapter, and his election challenges were supported by the Honest Elections Project and Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, groups tied to far-right legal kingpin Leonard Leo.
Leo’s groups are part of a larger dark-money machine, often staffed with Trump-connected operatives. They helped flip North Carolina’s supreme court to a conservative majority in 2022. The result: a court willing to reverse rulings on redistricting and voter ID — which one observer called “the logical outcome of the court system Leonard Leo helped create.” The court even was willing to put thousands of voters at risk of disenfranchisement in order to boost Griffin’s chances of overturning the results of his race, until the federal courts stepped in.
Anti-voter operations like Griffin’s campaign and True the Vote’s mass challenge never operate alone. Cleta Mitchell and Leonard Leo represent two sides of a vast network — one mobilizing activists to challenge votes and supporting voter-suppression laws, the other funding the legal firepower and helping install judges to maximize the chances that those challenges will succeed.
Fair Fight’s appeal is a pivotal battle in a long war over who holds power in this country: voters or those who seek to silence them. This isn’t just about procedures — it’s about who gets to vote and what happens when political operatives weaponize bureaucracy to silence Americans.
The Georgia case is an opportunity to further expose the MAGA anti-voter machine, and affirm that the Voting Rights Act still has teeth. And it’s a chance for the courts to call out mass voter challenges for what they are — reckless voter suppression.
So don’t tune out. Get involved. The best way to stop MAGA’s anti-democracy agenda is to keep showing up — in the voting booth, at local election board meetings, and in court.
Max Flugrath is the communications director at Fair Fight and a political strategist who has worked on statewide campaigns in Georgia and Florida, including a successful statewide race.