A lawsuit in Fulton County, Georgia, seeking a review of absentee ballots from the 2020 election in search of fraud is still alive and kicking.
The case, which was dismissed by a judge in October 2021 and had been working its way through the justice system, is now being sent back to the appeals court due to an order Tuesday from the Georgia Supreme Court, according to 11Alive, an NBC affiliate based in Atlanta.
Central to the decision is the issue of “standing,” a doctrine that determines the capacity of a party to sue in court, and a new precedent set in a separate case.
When Henry County Superior Court Chief Judge Brian Amero tossed the case last year, he found the Georgia voters who brought the lawsuit “failed to allege a particularized injury” and lacked standing. The fresh order from Georgia Supreme Court says the Fulton County case is “remanded to the Court of Appeals for reconsideration in light of Sons of Confederate Veterans v. Henry County Board of Commissioners.”
The Georgia Supreme Court determined in October that the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group that sued to prevent the removal of Confederate monuments, did not qualify as a “community stakeholder” and therefore lacked standing in their suits against Henry and Newton counties. But the high court did reverse a lower court dismissal for a complaint lodged by an individual plaintiff in Newton County, T. Davis Humphries, a resident of that county, according to Capitol Beat News Service.
The 2020 election lawsuit in Fulton County was brought by nine Georgia voters, including Garland Favorito, the co-founder of the group VoterGA, seeking an inspection of roughly 147,000 absentee ballots. In an interview with RealClearInvestigations in the summer of 2021, Favorito said there could be “major absentee-ballot fraud in Fulton County involving 10,000 to 20,000 probably false ballots.”
But investigators in Georgia were unable to find evidence showing fraudulent or counterfeit ballots in Fulton County, per a court filing reported by the Associated Press. And as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted last year, the review sought by the plaintiffs cannot change the results of the 2020 election, which were long ago certified and affirmed with recounts.
Still, the lawsuit attracted the attention of high-profile politicians, including former President Donald Trump, who lost to President Joe Biden in Georgia by about 12,000 votes. He called the dismissal in October 2021 “a disgrace.”