Let’s go back in time for a moment.

After the 2018 elections, I founded Fair Fight — an organization dedicated to combating voter suppression and protecting voting rights. 

And Georgia’s 2021 runoff elections for the U.S. Senate showed exactly why this work is so critical.

We saw an insidious attempt to intimidate voters — particularly Black, Brown, or first-time voters.

A Texas-based right-wing organization called True the Vote orchestrated the largest known mass voter eligibility challenge in Georgia’s history. They provided volunteers with lists of voters from the United States Postal Service’s national change-of-address database — folks they flagged as ineligible to vote.

Now, if you’ve ever moved, lived in college campus housing, or changed apartments, you know how the system works. Well, these anti-voter advocates used this database as evidence of ineligibility — even though the database can be outdated, and despite the fact that people who file to change their mailing address can still be properly registered to vote. Plus, the base of their challenges used unreliable postal data, as the United States Postal Service had already determined there was no guarantee on the quality of the data. 

True the Vote used this sleazy, shady practice to help facilitate more than 250,000 formal challenges. Voters received notifications questioning their right to vote simply because they used a convenience system designed to forward their mail.

Imagine trying to cast a ballot and being singled out — pulled out of line — because your right to vote has been challenged. Or seeing your name posted publicly online with the accusation that you are ineligible to vote. And just in case the humiliation didn’t do the trick, True the Vote also discussed recruiting former Navy SEALs to monitor polling places. They even offered a $1 million bounty for reports of voter fraud. 

The sheer scale of these baseless challenges disrupted local election offices, burdened under-funded officials, created rampant confusion, and intimidated voters who had done nothing wrong. 

Fair Fight has returned to federal court to take on True the Vote, oppose coordinated mass voter challenges, and end the ability of bad, cowardly actors to use this tactic to intimidate and overwhelm voters. 

When necessary, Fair Fight takes its work to the courts. But they also work across communities and on campuses to slow or stop voter suppression efforts like mass challenges.

And they invest in electing voting rights champions — such as Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in those 2021 elections — at the federal level as well as the state and local level, where key officials shape how elections are run.

The right to vote remains under constant attack, and the team at Fair Fight must be fully equipped to tackle new threats while pushing forward for free and fair elections. Will you make a donation of any amount to help fuel this work today?

Every eligible American should have the right to vote and have that vote counted.

With that simple mission, Fair Fight has worked to stop the steady, methodical, cynical right-wing assaults on the bedrock of our shared values. 

And over the years, this work has only become more urgent.

In March 2021, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a man with a reputation for being one of the nation’s most effective architects of voter suppression, opened the floodgates to even more mass voter challenges by signing SB 202 into law. That legislation allows unlimited voter challenges, which means that any person’s voter registration can be challenged as ineligible. 

Look: voter suppression isn’t new to America — or, sadly, to Georgia. And while both political parties have, at various times in history, treated those they considered undesirable voters as somehow criminal for exercising this fundamental constitutional right, in this century, voter suppression is the strategy of choice for Republicans.

True the Vote and GOP governors like Brian Kemp, Greg Abbott, and Ron DeSantis are the ideological descendants of those who have long opposed equal access to the ballot for all citizens, regardless of race or gender.

Across the country and now in the halls of Congress, Republicans are passing laws that make it harder for people to vote precisely because an engaged citizenry threatens their power.

In the fight against tyranny and autocracy, we must defend the freedom to choose our leaders and vote our values. Fairness demands it. Make a donation now to fund and sustain that fight for our bedrock, pro-democracy ideals.

Thank you,

Stacey Abrams