A Georgia Republican Party official who baselessly claimed there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election voted illegally nine times, a judge determined Wednesday.
Brian Pritchard, first vice chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, received a public reprimand for voting in multiple elections in 2008 and 2010, even though the terms of his probation forbade it until 2011. He was also ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and cover investigative costs.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was the first to report on his punishment Thursday.
Pritchard, who was convicted of felony check forgery in Pennsylvania in 1996, testified that he thought his probation had ended in 1999. Lisa Boggs, the administrative law judge overseeing Pritchard’s case, didn’t buy that argument.
“To accept that [his] grasp of legal proceedings was so unsophisticated that he did not understand the basic terms of his probation in 1996 or his probation revocation in 1999, this Court would need to disregard [his] self-described experience as a businessman handling complex projects as well as million-dollar contracts and budgets,” Boggs wrote in her decision.
She also noted that he’d appeared in court several times for probation hearings before and after 1999.
Pritchard, a conservative talk show host, denied any wrongdoing when Georgia officials first began exploring the possibility that he had voted illegally.
“Yes something happened in Pennsylvania that is of public record,” he wrote on his website, fetchyournews.com, in 2022. “But the Georgia Secretary of [State] 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.”
On his talk show and website, Pritchard has propped up former President Donald Trump’s false claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
“I do not believe 81 million people voted for this guy,” Pritchard said in reference to President Joe Biden, during a 2022 episode of his show.
Among those calling for Pritchard’s resignation is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), who is also an election conspiracy theorist.
“At a time when the Georgia Republican Party is successfully building its effort to protect our state from a total Democrat takeover, it is unacceptable for our party to have a man in leadership who has repeatedly committed voter fraud himself,” she wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Brian Pritchard must resign immediately or be removed from office.”
When reached for comment about the Wednesday’s ruling, Pritchard called it “politically motivated” and “purely a political stunt.”
“I have not been found guilty of anything,” he said in an email. “I will continue my grassroots work every day and will not buckle to false attacks!”
Other defendants, in particular people of color, have been given much heftier punishments for voting infringements in recent years. In 2022, a Black woman in Memphis was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote after probation officers incorrectly told her she was eligible. Another judge threw out her sentence. That same year, a Black woman in Texas was sentenced to five years behind bars for illegally trying to cast a provisional ballot ― something she says no probation officer ever told her she couldn’t do. An appeal in her case is pending.