A judge found that a Georgia GOP official and conservative talk show host who claimed that the 2020 election was “stolen” repeatedly committed voter fraud himself.
Georgia Administrative Law Judge Lisa Boggs ruled Wednesday that Brian Pritchard, the first vice chairman of Georgia’s Republican Party, violated state election law after voting unlawfully nine times from 2008 to 2010 while on probation for a felony sentence.
Boggs fined him $5,000 — $500 for each illegal vote and an additional $500 for unlawful voter registration — and said he must receive a public reprimand from the Georgia election board.
Pritchard was sentenced to three years of probation on felony forgery charges in Pennsylvania in 1996. His probation was revoked in 1999, after he moved to Georgia, then in 2002 and 2004, but it was ultimately extended through 2011, The Washington Post reported.
People on probation for felony convictions can vote in Pennsylvania but not in Georgia.
Pritchard testified in February that he thought his probation ended in 1999 and thus did not realize that he was voting illegally. “I felt it ended,” he said after a hearing, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Do you think the first time I voted I said, ‘Oh, I got away with it. Let’s do it eight more times?’”
However, state attorneys disputed that he did not know what he was doing, citing records of his court appearances for probation revocation hearings.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., an avid 2020 election denier herself, on Thursday called for Pritchard’s resignation from his state GOP position. In a post on X, she wrote that it is “unacceptable for our party to have a man in leadership who has repeatedly committed voter fraud himself.”
Pritchard has railed against the 2020 election results on his talk show and repeatedly alleged that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. He had also expressed his dismay at the case against him “when there’s real voter fraud out there, and real things that need to be investigated,” AJC reported.
Allegations about him voting illegally emerged in late 2022 when he was running for a Georgia state House seat. At the time, he accused media outlets reporting on the case of attempting to manipulate the race, writing on his conservative news site:
Yes something happened in Pennsylvania that is of public record. But the Georgia Secretary of States wants you to believe that I knowingly voted while serving a felony sentence. Never happened! I did vote every time they said, but never illegally.
Pritchard inadvertently made an essential point there about voting rights for people convicted of felonies. Whether or not he knowingly voted while serving probation, it is still against Georgia law for him to do so.
Georgia is one of several states that only allows people with felony convictions to vote after completing their prison sentence, probation or parole. Voting rights advocates have said that such restrictive laws disenfranchise millions of people; meanwhile, Pritchard’s fellow Republicans have largely opposed restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions.
