President Donald Trump lost a major ruling Friday when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit filed by Texas challenging the Nov 3 election results in Georgia. and three other states. (White House video)
ATLANTA – The U.S. Supreme Court early Friday evening rejected a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas seeking to invalidate the presidential election results in Georgia and three other states.
In an unsigned order, the justices ruled that Texas lacks the legal standing to challenge the outcome of the Nov. 3 voting in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, handing President Donald Trump a major defeat.
“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the matter in which another state conducts its elections,” the court ruled.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican and Trump ally, filed the suit earlier this week seeking to block the Electoral College from electing the next president on Monday. It claimed irregularities during the Nov. 3 election in all four states made it impossible to determine which candidate won.
President-elect Joe Biden has been certified the victor in the four states. The Democrat was determined to have carried Georgia by 11,779 votes following two recounts.
Seventeen GOP attorneys general declared their support for the lawsuit earlier this week. They were joined by Georgia’s two Republican U.S. senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, and by six of Georgia’s GOP House members: U.S. Reps Buddy Carter, Drew Ferguson, Austin Scott, Jody Hice, Rick Allen and Barry Loudermilk.
“This isn’t hard and it isn’t partisan. It’s American,” Perdue and Loeffler said in a joint statement on Tuesday. “No one should ever have to question the integrity of our elections system and the credibility of its outcomes.”
But Georgia’s Republican Attorney General, Chris Carr, dismissed the lawsuit earlier this week as “constitutionally, legally and factually wrong.”
Appearing on CNN Friday shortly before the ruling was announced, Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan said the lawsuit went against Republican philosophy.
“As a Republican, one of our standards is states rights,” he said. “To watch another state try to reach into our state and three other states is concerning and, long term, would have even bigger ramifications if carried through.”
Friday’s ruling opens the way for Georgia’s 16 presidential electors, all Democrats, to cast their ballots for Biden. The group will meet at noon Monday at the state Capitol.
ATLANTA – The Georgia Public Service Commission is scheduled to vote Tuesday to set parameters on legislation the General Assembly passed this year aimed at expanding broadband service in rural Georgia.
But electric membership cooperatives (EMCs) and telecom providers aren’t waiting. From the North Georgia mountains to the Florida line, they’re already making progress on rural broadband projects across the state.
“Internet access is one of the most important things that impacts us in rural Georgia,” state Sen. Steve Gooch, R-Dahlonega, said Dec. 2 at the joint announcement of a partnership between Amicalola EMC and Ellijay Telephone Co. to extend broadband service to customers in four North Georgia counties.
“If you don’t have internet access, you can’t reach out across the world as a small business and do the kind of things that other people do who are in bigger cities,” he said.
The Amicalola EMC-Ellijay Telephone partnership isn’t the only rural Georgia broadband project to move forward this month. On Dec. 3, Comcast announced it had completed an expansion of broadband to more than 2,500 homes and businesses in Haralson County.
For the EMCs, the green light came last year when the General Assembly passed legislation sponsored by Gooch that for the first time authorized EMCs to provide broadband service to their customers.
Since then, besides the Amicalola EMC project, Carroll EMC and Colquitt EMC have announced broadband projects in their areas of the state.
LaGrange-based Diverse Power became the first EMC after the passage of Gooch’s Senate Bill 2 to delve into broadband last March when it announced plans to run 150 miles of fiber-optic cable to serve 600 customers in five rural counties in Southwest Georgia.
Those three will join Blue Ridge EMC and Habersham EMC, which started offering broadband several years ago, even though the legal authority to do so prior to Senate Bill 2 was unclear.
Historically, bringing broadband service to rural Georgia has been a difficult proposition for the EMCs.
“When you get down into these rural areas, there’s just not many people, maybe five to six people per mile or, in our case, meters,” said Dennis Chastain, president and CEO of Georgia EMC, the trade association for local EMCs representing about 4.4 million Georgians. “If there’s not that many people there, it’s hard to cover the cost of building the line.”
That was certainly the case when Moultrie-based Colquitt EMC began considering providing broadband to customers in its largely rural seven-county service territory, said Danny Nichols, the EMC’s president and CEO.
“We recognized early on we couldn’t go into the broadband business on our own. The math doesn’t work,” he said. “But we couldn’t play ostrich and put our heads in the sand.”
What changed this year was the coronavirus pandemic, which made getting high-speed internet connectivity into rural communities even more critical. Suddenly, companies were forced to rely on virtual meetings to conduct business and schools had to resort to distance learning.
“A lot of our children today are having to do online classes,” Gooch said. “They’re not allowed to go back to the classrooms because of the pandemic.”
With broadband service more vital than ever, Colquitt EMC began looking for a partner that could make broadband doable. It found one in Windstream, a telecom provider serving mostly rural areas in 18 states.
Working together, Colquitt EMC and Windstream have completed their first project, bringing broadband service to 320 customers, and are about to launch a second.
Rather than making funding investments, the partners have cut a deal that doesn’t involve money, Nichols said.
“We make the pole line ready at no cost, let [Windstream] attach to the poles at no cost and use our in-house labor to install the cable on our poles,” he said.
But most broadband projects do require sources of funding. In the case of the Amicalola EMC-Ellijay Telephone agreement, the EMC is investing $6.5 million to $7 million initially for 220 miles of new fiber and up to $25 million when the project is fully built out, said Todd Payne, Amicalola’s president and CEO.
The phone company’s ultimate investment could top $15 million, said Jason Smith, Ellijay Telephone’s chief operating officer.
“This is a partnership that should be replicated across the state,” he said.
Over in West Georgia, Comcast’s completion of service to Haralson County announced this month will be followed in January by an extension of broadband to an additional 5,000 customers in Carroll County. The telecom provider’s total investment in the two counties is nearly $9 million.
Fortunately for other EMCs and telecom companies interested in pursuing broadband projects, a new source of federal funding was announced last Monday.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is allocating $9.2 billion during the next 10 years through the first phase of its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which will bring broadband to unserved rural communities in 49 states. Georgia’s share of the money – $326.5 million – will serve 179,455 homes and businesses, according to the FCC.
Chastain said the federal funds will certainly help, but removing the “digital divide” that separates rural Georgia communities from their urban and suburban counterparts will continue to be a challenge that no one model will solve going forward.
“There’s not one size that fits all. There’s no silver bullet,” he said. “Great partnerships are the type of thing that’s going to move the needle.”
Early voting starts on Dec. 14 for upcoming U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Nearly 200,000 Georgia voters may have been improperly purged from the state’s voter rolls and should be restored by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office before the Jan. 5 runoff elections, a lawsuit filed in federal court alleges.
The suit filed by four voting-rights groups comes as Raffensperger’s office fends off separate litigation from President Donald Trump’s allies seeking to overturn Georgia’s presidential election, after certified results show President-elect Joe Biden won by 11,779 votes.
Judge Steve Jones of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia heard arguments Thursday from the suing groups and Raffensperger’s office, which has argued the purge claims lack proof and that the lawsuit was filed too late.
The purge suit argues more than 68,000 voters had their registrations canceled in 2019 despite still residing in Georgia, while another roughly 130,000 voters were removed from the rolls as part of a faulty process for verifying address changes.
It asks the court to restore registrations for “wrongfully removed” voters in time to cast ballots in Georgia’s two hotly anticipated U.S. Senate runoff elections on Jan. 5. If restored, those potential voters could have a huge impact on turnout for the runoffs as Republicans push to keep control of the Senate.
“It could have a substantial effect on the upcoming runoff,” said Gerald Griggs, an Atlanta attorney representing the suing groups. “That’s why it’s important that people understand that voting rights are at stake here in Georgia.”
In particular, the lawsuit faults Raffensperger’s office for not hiring a third-party vendor licensed with the U.S. Postal Service to verify address changes via a national database, a charge that election officials say is baseless since they argue roll-cleaning vendors do not need to be licensed under federal law.
Raffensperger’s office has repeatedly dismissed claims of improper roll purges, noting state law requires officials to remove voters from registration lists if they have not voted in general elections or responded to warning notices for several years.
At a news conference Thursday, Georgia’s election system manager, Gabriel Sterling, said state officials gave the roughly 198,000 voters at risk of being canceled ample notice to restore their registrations – even going so far as to release a list of those voters publicly.
“They’re basically misunderstanding how this process works,” Sterling said of the suing groups. “That’s the underlying part of it.”
The four suing groups are the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter Fund, the Washington, D.C.-based Transformative Justice Coalition, the Chicago-based Rainbow PUSH Coalition and the Texas-based Southwest Voter Education Project.
Their lawsuit follows previous litigation brought by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ group Fair Fight Action last December, which prompted Raffensperger’s office to restore around 22,000 Georgia voters back to inactive status rather than remove them from the rolls.
The current purge lawsuit’s claims stem from findings by a group run by investigative journalist Greg Palast, who previously found registration cancellations for hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters by Gov. Brian Kemp while he was secretary of state ahead of his win in the 2018 gubernatorial election.
A top Raffensperger deputy also recently called Palast a “shill for Stacey Abrams,” according to the lawsuit. Abrams lost the governor’s race to Kemp in 2018 and has since played a leading role in the push to boost voter registration and Democratic turnout in Georgia.
Amid fierce competition in the Jan. 5 runoffs, the latest purge lawsuit marks a remarkable alliance between Raffensperger’s office and the Georgia Republican Party, which intervened in the case despite excoriating the secretary of state over his handling of fraud claims stemming from the Nov. 3 election.
GOP Chairman David Shafer, who is a former state lawmaker, has joined the Trump campaign in a lawsuit currently pending in Fulton County Superior Court to overturn the presidential election results and order a redo of the election. Trump has called Raffensperger an “enemy of the people.”
Other Trump-backed suits aim for the Republican-controlled General Assembly to pick Georgia’s 16 Electoral College members, which would likely hand those votes to Trump. Kemp, the state’s top Republican, has repeatedly said the legislature does not have authority to do so under Georgia law.
As of Friday afternoon, no court in Georgia has found any fraud claims from the Nov. 3 election to be valid. Several cases have been dismissed, with appeals still pending.
Raffensperger and Sterling – who are both Republicans – have repeatedly said there has been no evidence of widespread fraud in the Nov. 3 elections.
The Jan. 5 runoff elections pit Republican U.S. Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler against Democrats Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock. Wins by both Ossoff and Warnock would give Democrats control of the White House and both houses of Congress for at least the next two years.
Early voting for the runoffs starts on Monday, Dec. 14.
ATLANTA – A state Senate study committee created to examine Georgia’s coin-operated amusement machines (COAM) business has wrapped up its work with some recommendations but no specific legislative proposals.
In a final report released this week, the senators endorsed the possibility of awarding gift cards to game winners as a way to discourage cash prizes, which are illegal under state law.
The Georgia Lottery Corp., which oversees the COAM industry, has launched a pilot project that will test the gift cards concept at 100 to 300 locations across the state, primarily convenience stores and restaurants.
Lottery officials like the idea but haven’t committed to it yet because the four-to-six month pilot project hasn’t been completed, Gretchen Corbin, the lottery’s president and CEO, told members of the study committee Thursday.
“Everyone we speak to hopes that it works,” she said.
The report also suggested increasing the revenue the state derives from COAM proceeds but doesn’t recommend how to accomplish that goal.
Options include either increasing the state’s share of the revenue pie from the current 10% or growing the revenue itself by increasing the number of locations with COAM games.
The COAM industry has taken off since the lottery corporation assumed jurisdiction over the machines in 2013.
Georgians spent more than $3 billion during the last fiscal year playing COAM games. After players redeemed prizes valued at $2.1 billion, that left more than $900 million in net revenue for COAM license holders, the businesses housing the games and the state to divide.
ATLANTA – A Polk County grand jury has indicted state Rep. Trey Kelley for reckless conduct for his alleged involvement in the aftermath of a fatal hit-and-run traffic accident last year, Polk Today reported Thursday.
The driver of the vehicle, Ryan Dover, was charged with felony hit and run and reckless conduct in the September 2019 crash in Cedartown that killed Eric Keais.
Keais was riding a bicycle along North Main Street in Cedartown when he was stuck by Dover’s vehicle, according to Polk District Attorney Jack Browning.
Dover did not immediately stop and contact law enforcement and emergency medical services, as required by law, but instead contacted Kelley, R-Cedartown, who then sought help from Cedartown Police Chief Jamie Newsome.
As Keais lay in a ditch on the side of the road in need of emergency medical attention, law enforcement and emergency medical services were not contacted until about 45 minutes after the incident, according to the district attorney. Keais later died of his injuries.
The case was brought before the grand jury because the Georgia State Patrol, which investigated the crash, did not make any arrests, Browning said.
“Over the course of two days, the grand jurors heard a substantial amount of testimonial and video evidence from law enforcement officers and the GBI medical examiner, as well as several witness interview recordings from those involved in, and with direct knowledge of, the incident,” Browning said.
Lester Tate, Kelley’s lawyer, said he plans to present facts that will show his client’s innocence.
“I have not yet had an opportunity to review the actual charges, but I am well aware of facts surrounding the case,” Tate said. “I believe strongly once those facts come to light that they will show that Mr. Kelley did nothing wrong in the situation.”
Kelley was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2012 and serves as majority whip. He was re-elected to the post last month, winning 78.1% of the vote.
