The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), most notorious for smearing conservative and Christian nonprofits as “hate groups” to raise millions and to cut its ideological opponents off from polite society, also donated money to run ballot drop boxes during the 2020 presidential race in Georgia. Those drop boxes, also funded by Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), weakened crucial ballot safeguards, opening the door for fraud. The Republican National Committee (RNC) filed a lawsuit to restore ballot protections but the SPLC joined a legal effort to preserve the drop boxes for the January 5 Senate runoff election.
“Drop boxes decentralize election oversight to an absurd level,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, warned in a statement to PJ Media. “Centralized elections with official oversight are the gold standard. SPLC should stick to smearing people and stay out of election administration litigation.”
Yet on Thursday, the SPLC joined the ACLU of Georgia in representing the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in filing an amicus curiae brief opposing the RNC effort to safeguard the election.
On December 9, the RNC and the Georgia Republican Party sued Fulton County, requesting that drop boxes only be accessible during business hours and asking county registrars to host a livestream video of the drop boxes’ surveillance videos on the internet. The SPLC’s brief urges Fulton County to allow access to the drop boxes after business hours and warns that a drop box livestream “poses a significant risk of increasing voter intimidation for the runoff elections.”
Poy Winichakul, an SPLC staff attorney, condemned the RNC’s lawsuit as “another last-minute attempt to impose two extremely anti-voter election changes just three weeks before the January 5 runoff. Our brief asks the court to safeguard the voting rights of all Georgians by rejecting the plaintiffs’ outrageous requests.”
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