Citing High Court Ruling, Ga. Court of Appeals Revives Fulton Election Fraud | Daily Report
“This decision ... is a landmark victory for transparency and accountability in government,” Bob Cheeley of the Cheeley Law Group in Alpharetta, Caroline Jeffords’ attorney, said in a news release. “It represents common sense and is the first time in our country’s history that an appeals court...
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“This decision ... is a landmark victory for transparency and accountability in government,” Bob Cheeley of the Cheeley Law Group in Alpharetta, Caroline Jeffords’ attorney, said in a news release. “It represents common sense and is the first time in our country’s history that an appeals court has recognized that citizens of a state have standing to question important governmental functions such as the manner in which votes are processed and tabulated.”
The Georgia Court of Appeals on Wednesday ruled that Fulton County voters have standing to sue their local government regarding a lawsuit requesting to unseal ballots from the 2020 presidential election.
The decision gives new life to the suit, the combination of two enjoined suits, after a Henry County Superior Court judge in October 2021 dismissed Favorito v. Wan, one of two suits that was enjoined in an appeal by Fulton voters.
In that case and the other enjoined one, Jeffords v. Fulton County, several Fulton voters asked a court to unseal ballots in an effort to prove the county committed fraud in how it tallied votes in that election. The ruling is critical in determining who has standing when a plaintiff files a lawsuit against a government official.
In Jeffords, Caroline Jeffords, an active Republican Party volunteer in Georgia, sued the county over its election results, and in Favorito, Garland Favorito, who owns the VoterGA website devoted to election integrity, sued then-Fulton Board of Elections chair Alex Wan for the same reason.
In its opinion, the Court of Appeals cited the Georgia Supreme Court’s recent opinion regarding three lawsuits filed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a Civil War organization that sued officials in Henry and Newton counties regarding the removal of Confederate monuments in each county. In October, the Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of two suits (one against each county) but reinstated a Newton resident’s similar suit against that county because that suit, unlike the other two, was filed by a resident of the county being sued and not the Sons group in general. The Supreme Court helped open the door for the Fulton election suit to be resurrected.
“Now, however, our Supreme Court has held that under Georgia law an ‘injury need not always be individualized; sometimes it can be a generalized grievance shared by community members, especially other residents, taxpayers, voters, or citizens,’” Presiding Judge Christopher McFadden said in his opinion. He presided over the case with Judges Elizabeth Gobeil and Benjamin Land.
“The [Supreme] Court described the persons authorized to assert such standing as ‘community stakeholders,’ explaining: “Georgia has long recognized that members of a community, whether as citizens, residents, taxpayers, or voters, may be injured when their local government fails to follow the law. Government at all levels has a legal duty to follow the law; a local government owes that legal duty to its citizens, residents, taxpayers, or voters (i.e., community stakeholders), and the violation of that legal duty constitutes an injury that our case law has recognized as conferring standing to those community stakeholders, even if the plaintiff suffered no individualized injury,” McFadden said.
According to a news release, Henry County Superior Court Judge Brian Amero ordered about 147,000 absentee ballots from the Fulton case to be reviewed, but Jeffords’ case could not previously move forward until the standing issue was settled. Amero was presented evidence by Jeffords of numerous violations of the law, including multiple counting of votes and other inconsistent vote counting and reporting.
“This decision by a three-judge panel of the Georgia Court of Appeals is a landmark victory for transparency and accountability in government,” Bob Cheeley of the Cheeley Law Group in Alpharetta, Jeffords’ attorney, said in the release. “It represents common sense and is the first time in our country’s history that an appeals court has recognized that citizens of a state have standing to question important governmental functions such as the manner in which votes are processed and tabulated.”
Cheeley did not return a phone message seeking further comment on the court’s decision, but in the release he added, “In this case, on May 21, 2021, the trial judge ordered that the plaintiff had established prima facia proof of irregularities by Fulton County elections staff which warranted unsealing of ballots in connection with the November 2020 election. Before that examination of ballots could occur, however, Judge Amero granted Fulton’s motion to dismiss which urged that plaintiff did not have standing which led to this appeal by Caroline Jeffords to the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals.”
When reached by phone to request his attorney’s name, Favorito said his lawyer, Todd Harding of the Harding Law Firm in Griffin, does not speak to the media but he does. He also referred the Daily Report to a news release VoterGA posted to its website Thursday.
In it, Favorito said, “The citizens of Georgia have been victimized for well over two years by false claims that there is no evidence of election fraud. This inordinate delay is attributable to lower court rulings that falsely claimed we had no standing. The secretary of state and attorney general should have helped us all this time instead of fighting against us. It is critical that Georgians quickly know how many counterfeit ballots were included in the 2020 Fulton election results so we can implement more fraud protection measures prior to the next election.”
He added that VoterGA expects “the lower court to move expeditiously since it had already ordered a ballot inspection before Fulton County hired criminal defense attorneys to prevent us from looking at the ballots. If there is nothing to hide, all involved should be willing to show us the ballots.”
Fulton spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt said the county had no comment on the court’s decision.
