In direct response to election changes related to the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 United States presidential election in Georgia; the Donald Trump 2020 presidential campaign launched numerous lawsuits contesting the election processes of Georgia. All of these were either dismissed or dropped.
Summary of lawsuits
In re: Enforcement of Election Laws and Securing Ballots Cast or Received after 7:00pm on November 3, 2020 The lawsuit, regarding 53 ballots, was filed by the Trump campaign and the Georgia Republican Party on November 4 in the Chatham County Superior Court of the Eastern Judicial Circuit of Georgia. The campaign claimed that two witnesses had seen late ballots being improperly mixed with on-time ballots. Superior Court Judge James F. Bass Jr. denied the request and dismissed the suit on November 5, after hearing testimony from the chairman of the Chatham County Board of Registrars. The judge ruled that no evidence had been produced that the ballots were late.
Brooks v. Mahoney
On November 11, 2020, four voters in Georgia sued Thomas Mahoney, Chairman of the Chatham County Board of Elections, in federal district court. The voters claimed a software glitch caused a miscounting of votes, and asked the court to stop certain counties from certifying their presidential election results. On November 16, the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed the case.
Wood v. Raffensperger
The lawsuit was filed by L. Lin Wood Jr. on November 13 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. The plaintiff claimed that the balloting result in Georgia was defective and should be either invalidated or modified (i.e. having cured absentee ballots removed) because Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other government officials had no statutory authority to change election law to relax signature match requirement or to allow curing of absentee ballots. These changes to the voting process were introduced as the result of a settlement of an earlier lawsuit with the Democratic Party of Georgia on March 6, 2020. An amended complaint was filed on November 16, 2020, to include additional complaints about the automatic recount process.
On November 19, Judge Steven Grimberg ruled that Wood lacked legal standing to bring the case, had brought it too late, and had not advanced arguments that were likely to win the case. The judge stated that Wood failed to show that he had been harmed, while his proposal would "harm the public in countless ways". The Trump-appointed judge concluded that there was "no basis in fact or in law" to stop Georgia's certification of its election results (in which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump) at such a late stage, as this would "breed confusion and potential disenfranchisement".
On December 5, a three-judge panel on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit unanimously affirmed the district court's decision, because Wood "fails to allege a particularized injury", and in any case, his request to delay certification was moot because Georgia had by then already certified its election results.
On December 11, Wood filed the case with the Supreme Court, which denied the petition on February 22, 2021.
Pearson v. Kemp
On November 25, 2020, a group of voters led by teenage conservative activist CJ Pearson sued Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia, and other state officials. The plaintiffs claimed that the use of Dominion Voting Systems, a company that provides voting software and hardware across the U.S., violated state and federal law, and that Dominion was "founded by foreign oligarchs and dictators to ensure computerized ballot-stuffing and vote manipulation to whatever level was needed to make certain Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez never lost another election." The plaintiffs alleged that Dominion was used to rig votes for Joe Biden, and asked the court to stop the certification of elections results and order Governor Kemp to certify President Donald Trump as the winner in Georgia. This so-called "Kraken" lawsuit, along with King v. Whitmer, was filed in federal court by conservative lawyer Sidney Powell. The evidence included an affidavit from QAnon activist Ron Watkins, who stated, based his reading of an online user guide for Dominion Voting Systems software, that election fraud might be "within the realm of possibility".
Dominion responded publicly with a point-by-point rebuttal of the claims, calling them "baseless, senseless, [and] physically impossible."