OAN Staff Blake Wolf
5:57 PM – Thursday, January 16, 2025
The New Georgia Project, a nonprofit voting advocacy group founded by failed Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, has been hit with the largest fine for campaign finance violations in the state’s history.
The New Georgia Project was founded in 2013 by Abrams before being taken over by Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) in 2017, operating as a charity accepting tax-deductible donations.
It is unclear why she left the group in 2017.
The group was originally organized in order to register more progressive young voters and minority voters.
The organization, along with The New Georgia Project Action Fund, which served as the organization’s fundraising counterpart, both recently agreed to pay a $300,000 fine after admitting that $3.2 million was spent on Abrams’s campaign efforts in 2018.
“Today the State Ethics Commission entered into a consent agreement with the New Georgia Project and the New Georgia Project Action Fund for a total of $300,000,” the Georgia State Ethics Commission stated on Wednesday.
“This certainly represents the largest fine imposed in the history of Georgia’s Ethics Commission, but it also appears to be the largest ethics fine ever imposed by any state ethics commission in the country related to an election and campaign finance case,” the announcement continued.
“This represents the largest and most significant instance of an organization illegally influencing our statewide elections in Georgia that we have ever discovered, and I believe this sends a clear message to both the public and potential bad actors moving forward that we will hold you accountable,” the State Ethics Commission added.
The commissioners unanimously voted to accept the resolution on Wednesday, putting an end to a six-year long legal battle.
The nonprofit was in violation of federal laws after paying for fliers and door-to-door marketing for Abrams and other Democrats without registering as a political action committee.
The group spent $3.2 million in total, the “most amount of money that we’ve ever caught a group dumping to illegally influence our elections,” according to David Emadi, the executive director of the ethics commission.
The New Georgia Project also revealed that they are “glad to finally put this matter behind us,” in order to “fully devote its time and attention to its efforts to civically engage and register black, brown, and young voters in Georgia.”
“While we remain disappointed that the federal court ruling on the constitutionality of the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Act was overturned on entirely procedural grounds, we accept this outcome and are eager to turn the page on activities that took place more than five years ago,” the group added.
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