True the Vote, an organization that has advocated for restrictive voting laws, is the subject of a Federal Election Commission complaint filed by Campaign Legal Center Action and Common Cause Georgia. “True the Vote illegally made, and the Georgia Republican Party illegally accepted, in-kind contributions,” according to a March 31 press release from the two groups. True the Vote had bragged about its partnership with the state GOP in December for what it called “the most comprehensive ballot security initiative in Georgia history.”
Between the November election and the Jan. 5 Senate runoffs in Georgia, True the Vote partnered with Republicans to challenge the eligibility of more than 364,000 voters in dozens of counties, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported. True the Vote backed restrictive voting legislation recently signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp.
True the Vote and its leader Catherine Engelbrecht have been pushing voter fraud conspiracies and restrictive voting laws for years. Last May, when then-President Donald Trump’s political team was fighting efforts to expand voting by mail, Engelbrecht told a group of religious-right activists that the political battle over mail-in voting was a “spiritual struggle” for “control of the free world.”
In November, True the Vote filed a lawsuit against Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathryn Boockvar contesting “illegal ballots” that it said were counted in the 2020 election. It also announced that it was raising a million-dollar "whistleblower compensation fund" to “incentivize election malfeasance reporting”—to "support" people who make allegations of voter fraud.
As Right Wing Watch noted in November:
In 2016, Engelbrecht told Breitbart that the Obama administration was intentionally registering noncitizens to vote, and True the Vote claimed that Hillary Clinton would try to steal the presidential election through voter fraud. After the 2016 election, True the Vote defended and set out to prove Trump’s debunked claims that he would have won a popular vote majority that year if not for millions of people who voted illegally.
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Back in 2014, Dallas Morning News reporter James Drew exposed how a racially charged speech by Engelbrecht led then-Attorney General Greg Abbott to investigate a voter registration effort called Houston Votes. No charges were filed against the group, but under pressure from the investigation, the group and its efforts to register low-income voters shut down.
