AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, Pool
The first vice chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, Brian Pritchard, was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine, as well as investigative costs, on Thursday for having illegally voted nine times.
Pritchard, who has long pushed former President Donald Trump’s so-called “big lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, had previously been sentenced to probation for felony check forgery charges in 1996. As a result of his probation, Pritchard was not allowed to vote in Georgia. The Washington Post explained:
His probation was revoked three times — once in 1999, after he moved to Georgia, and again in 2002 and 2004. In 2004, a judge imposed a new seven-year probationary sentence on Pritchard, thus making him ineligible to vote until at least 2011 in Georgia, where state law prohibits felons from voting.
However, in 2008 Pritchard signed voter registration documents declaring he was “not serving a sentence for having been convicted of a felony involving moral turpitude.” Pritchard then voted a total of 9 times between 2008 and 2010. He told the court it was simply an error, “Do you think the first time I voted, I said, ‘Oh, I got away with it. Let’s do it eight more times?’ ” Pritchard told the court, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Pritchard works as a right-wing talk radio host and runs a website devoted to pro-Trump political news, he ran and lost in a bid for the Georgia state House last year.
2020 election denial remains a hot topic in right-wing politics as Trump continues to claim he did not lose the election to Joe Biden. Controversial Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told MAGA influencer Steve Bannon on Thursday that she has “proof” that votes for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia were “lost in the mail.” Greene vowed to reveal her evidence “soon.”
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