Stacey Abrams and her allies have been ordered to pay over $200,000 in court costs after a federal judge in September ruled against their Fair Fight Action organization on all counts in a voting-rights lawsuit tied to Abrams’s loss in her 2018 race for governor of Georgia.
In total, Fair Fight Action is required to pay $231,304 in fees related to transcripts and copies used during the trial, according to court documents released Tuesday. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the defendant in the lawsuit, called the order a “win for taxpayers and voters who knew all along that Stacey Abrams’ voter suppression claims were false.”
“This is a start,” Raffensperger said in a prepared statement, “but I think Stacey Abrams should pay back the millions of taxpayer dollars the state was forced to spend to disprove her false claims.”
The Fair Fight Action lawsuit was filed weeks after the 2018 election, when Abrams lost to now-Governor Brian Kemp but refused to concede. Abrams maintained that she was cheated, and she alleged that the race was “stolen from Georgians.”
Through the lawsuit, Abrams had sought to make far-reaching changes to the state’s elections by invoking the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial discrimination. However, many of Fair Fight’s allegations about voter-registration cancellations, long voting lines, and voting machines were thrown out.
By the time the case went to trial last year, the suit focused on several specific election processes, including the state’s handling of absentee ballots, its allegedly inadequate poll-worker training, its oversight of voter rolls, and its “exact match” policy for voter-registration applications. That policy required that information in registration applications line up with other information with the state, and required voters to verify their ID before casting a ballot. Abrams argued that the “exact match” policy was discriminatory because most of the affected voters were black.
The 21-day trial included testimony from more than 50 witnesses. Fair Fight also collected testimony from more than 3,000 voters, but very few were unable to cast a ballot. None of the voters said they were unable to cast a ballot in 2020.
In his 288-page ruling in September, U.S. District Judge Steve Jones wrote that, “although Georgia’s election system is not perfect, the challenged practices violate neither the Constitution nor the [Voting Rights Act].” He found that the “burden on voters is relatively low,” and that Fair Fight hadn’t provided any “evidence of a voter who was unable to vote, experienced longer wait times, was confused about voter registration status.”
Kemp said in a tweet that “Abrams has used this lawsuit to line her pockets, sow distrust in our democratic institutions, and build her own celebrity.” He added that the ruling “exposes this legal effort for what it really is: a tool wielded by a politician hoping to wrongfully weaponize the legal system to further her own political goals.”
In her own statement after the ruling, Abrams said: “While the Court’s actions are not the preferred outcome, the conduct of this trial and preceding cases and legislative actions represent a hard-won victory for voters who endured long lines, burdensome date of birth requirements and exact match laws that disproportionately impact Black and Brown voters.”
Raffensperger said on Tuesday that Georgia’s election laws strike a balance between election security and voter convenience. “We saw record voter turnout in 2022, extremely high voter turnout for a midterm election, at levels that prove claims of voter suppression are just as trumped up as claims of stolen elections,” he said.
The costly ruling is the latest in a series of setbacks for the Democratic media darling: Despite raising more than $100 million for her 2022 gubernatorial bid, Abrams’s failed campaign wound up more than $1 million in debt to vendors, an outcome several former staffers blamed on reckless spending, such as the rental of an upscale Atlanta house intended to serve as a home base for the filming of TikTok videos.