What happened on Jan. 6, 2021, was terrible without a doubt. It was a dark day that demonstrated to the country what stolen election claims could do.
A year and a half earlier, Stacey Abrams, Fair Fight Action, and election conspiracy activist group Coalition for Good Governance joined together in what could have become their own mini-Jan. 6. Abrams, the Left’s current superhero, attempted to organize a demonstration at a federal courthouse to advance her stolen election claims.
Abrams’s effort in July 2019 was a call to “pack” the Richard B. Russell Federal Building in Atlanta with supporters of “hand-marked paper ballots.” The event called on supporters to “pack the courthouse as the Curling v. Kemp case moves forward and the fight for hand-marked paper ballots continues.” On Twitter, Fair Fight said it “need[ed] folks to show up” in support of a “unique and historic suit” that was “challenging hackable machines.”
The assistance provided by Abrams and Fair Fight wasn’t purely organizational. Abrams’s network exhorted its followers to donate to the “pack the courthouse” effort. Highlighting how closely Fair Fight was involved in the plan, the Coalition for Good Governance used a donate link that featured Fair Fight’s name and logo. Donations for the effort would go to Fair Fight.
Though there are no reports that anyone turned up in person, Abrams and her partner organizations gained some support on social media. One user shared a flier for the event and called on Georgians to “pack the courtroom till it spills out into the streets and beyond.”
Abrams is well-known for refusing to concede her 2018 gubernatorial election loss, but the Coalition for Good Governance’s effort to undermine the integrity of Georgia’s elections started long before that. In January 2019, the coalition reported that it was “proud that Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight Action organization has been a generous donor” for work “that benefits voters and Fair Fight’s far-reaching voting rights lawsuit.” A week earlier, the coalition’s executive director noted on Twitter that Fair Fight was the “single largest contributor” to date. In July 2019, as the two organizations worked together to flood a federal building with supporters, the coalition gleefully tweeted that Fair Fight was hosting a fundraiser for the coalition’s hand-marked paper ballot efforts.
Like in January 2021, stolen election claims drove this plan to fill the court until “it spills out into the streets.” The coalition has long been a source of stolen election claims, many of which were used by Trump and his allies to bolster their claims against Georgia’s 2020 election results. The coalition’s executive director alleged that audits of Georgia’s new election system were a “sham” and that voting machines “cannot be audited,” even before the new system was chosen. In the days after the November 2020 elections, she again called Georgia’s election system “unauditable” and tried to raise money off that claim. According to recent testimony, the coalition believes the results of no election in Georgia can be trusted, even November 2020.
Work by coalition experts to undermine confidence in Georgia’s election systems was used in Sidney Powell’s November 2020 “Kraken” lawsuit, which attempted to overturn Georgia’s presidential election. (Fair Fight’s comment that Georgia’s election system was “corruption at its worst” also featured in Powell’s suit.) Reports from the coalition have been used by some of Georgia’s most prominent election conspiracy theorists to bolster their case that the 2020 election was stolen.
The coalition even went as far as blaming the Jan. 6 riots on Georgia’s election system. They tried to fundraise off that wild claim, too.
As congressional Democrats push ahead with prime-time hearings about the events of Jan. 6, they should note how close Abrams was to orchestrating her own riot at a federal building. Her refusal to concede her 2018 gubernatorial election loss resulted in threats to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, much as Trump’s claims did. Her organizing effort, in partnership with stolen election conspiracy theorists, may seem like a call for peaceful demonstration, but Trump, too, told his supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” just minutes before the protest became a riot. Abrams’s attempt to rile the passions of Georgia voters with baseless stolen election claims and to direct that anger toward America’s democratic institutions should not be forgotten.
Ari Schaffer was formerly the chief of staff and communications director for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Before that, he worked in the U.S. Department of Commerce and the White House.
