The Federal Election Commission has fined the Georgia Republican Party $14,500 for failing to report a contribution from a conservative nonprofit.
In December 2020, the nonprofit group True the Vote announced a “partnership” to assist the Georgia GOP in the runoff election that saw Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win seats in the U.S. Senate. The announcement included a statement from then-GOP Chairman David Shafer thanking True the Vote for its help “in the fight for election integrity.”
A few days later, True the Vote challenged the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of registered Georgia voters. The challenges were carried out with the assistance of dozens of Republicans across the state. Local election officials rejected almost all of those challenges because True the Vote presented insufficient documentation to justify revoking the voters’ registrations.
The group Common Cause Georgia filed a complaint, saying the GOP had coordinated its spending with True the Vote and failed to report what amounted to a contribution in violation of federal election laws.
The FEC initially dismissed the complaint, but a federal judge later reinstated it. On Monday the FEC reached an agreement with the Georgia Republican Party to resolve the issue.
Under the agreement, the party will pay a $14,500 fine. The agreement states that the nonprofit’s actions “accrued to the benefit of GA GOP” and amounted to an “in-kind” — or noncash — contribution. Though the party says True the Vote has not provided information on the cost of its work in Georgia, the GOP plans to report it as a $500,000 in-kind contribution.
Nonetheless, the party denies that it has done anything wrong. GOP Chairman Josh McKoon said the party settled merely to avoid spending “10 times as much” to ultimately be proved right through litigation.
“It’s part of the strategy of folks on the left,” McKoon said. “They can’t really win a contested election where we talk about the issues. They have these strategies to deprive us of the resources to fight them.”
The state GOP has spent more than $1.7 million on legal fees since 2022 after promising to help cover the tab for the party’s former chairman — Shafer — and other officials targeted in Fulton County’s election interference case filed against former President Donald Trump and more than a dozen others.
Jay Young, senior director of voting rights and democracy, Common Cause, said it’s important for the FEC to hold groups accountable for violations of campaign finance law.
“If groups like True the Vote can spread disinformation, air unsubstantiated claims of malfeasance about our election systems and improperly coordinate with political parties to disenfranchise voters without facing consequences, we can expect to see more of these voter intimidation attempts in the future,” Young said.
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