Amid GOP focus on elections, Georgia Republicans remove officer found to have voted illegally
ATLANTA– The Republican Party of Georgia has fired one of its officials after an administrative law judge found he voted illegally nine times after moving to the state.
The Republican State Committee voted 146-24 on Friday to oust first vice chairman Brian K. Pritchard, state Chairman Josh McKoon said after the closed-door meeting.
Georgia is among a number of Republican state parties that have experienced unrest as supporters of Donald Trump have seized power at the grassroots level, ousting previous leaders and demanding that the party prioritize Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
Many establishment Republicans in Georgia, including Governor Brian Kemp, have left the state party organization. Kemp, for example, does not plan to appear at the state Republican Convention in Columbus next week.
But the fervor is having an impact, and demands for “election integrity” have translated into multiple changes to Georgia’s election law. Earlier this week, Kemp signed a law that could facilitate the removal of people from voting rolls by questioning voter eligibility.
Under pressure from Republican activists, Republicans rammed through a sweeping bill in 2021 that shortened the time to request a mail-in ballot, allowed limited use of ballot drop boxes and made it illegal to give food or water to voters waiting in line a ballot box were waiting. place.
It’s that focus that made the findings against Pritchard acutely embarrassing for many Republican activists. In March, Administrative Judge Lisa Boggs found that Pritchard was still on probation when he moved to Gilmer County in northern Georgia after pleading guilty in 1996 in his home state of Pennsylvania to forging signatures on two checks worth $38,000.
She ruled that Pritchard lied when he registered to vote in 2008 by swearing he was not serving a sentence for a crime. Boggs found that Pritchard had voted illegally in nine elections in 2008 and 2010, fined him $5,000, ordered that he receive a public reprimand and ordered him to repay the $375 the State Election Board charged the investigated the case.
Pritchard, an online conservative talk show host, has long denied wrongdoing and said he did not believe he was still on probation in 2008. After McKoon asked him to resign, Pritchard claimed that McKoon and others were out to get him for fighting so-called RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only.
“My mission was clear: to get our party back on track and ensure that Donald J. Trump would rightfully regain his position as leader of our country in 2024,” Pritchard wrote on Facebook in April. “But when I started asking tough questions, challenging the status quo, I faced a barrage of resistance from within. You see, in the eyes of the entrenched RINO establishment, questioning their authority is akin to heresy. They would rather maintain their grip on power than uphold the values we hold dear.”
McKoon said after the vote on Friday that Pritchard’s removal was necessary after he refused to resign.
“Today’s vote shows how seriously we take election integrity,” McKoon said in a statement.
Other party activists agreed.
“It was the right thing to do,” Debbie Dooley, an outspoken Trump supporter, posted on the social platform X. “The focus should be on electing Donald Trump and fighting for election integrity and combating election fraud.”
Pritchard’s ouster could lead to a growing fight over who should represent Georgia on the Republican National Committee. In addition to McKoon, who is a member of the committee by virtue of his position, delegates will elect two other members – last time they were committee member Ginger Howard and committee member Jason Thompson.
Those two now face challengers driven in part by the same forces that elected Pritchard last year.
They include the party’s second vice chairman, David Cross, one of Pritchard’s most outspoken defenders, and his wife Shawn Cross. David Cross declined to comment to The Associated Press on Friday as he criticized the news agency’s past reporting on the State Election Board.
Other challengers are expected to include Jason Frazier, who has been active in challenging voters, and Amy Kremer, who got her start in Republican politics as a Tea Party activist and later became a staunch Trump supporter. A group Kremer led obtained permits for the January 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington. Some attendees at that rally later attacked the U.S. Capitol.