Eric Gisler, a tech executive and small business owner, took the lead in the Athens-area district with 50.85% of the vote, according to unofficial results from the Secretary of State’s office. Republican candidate Mack “Dutch” Guest IV was nearly 200 votes behind, with 49.15% of the vote.

And in metro Atlanta, two candidates vying for an open House seat are headed to a runoff after no one managed to clear the 50% threshold required to win a seat outright in the six-way contest. Republican Bill Fincher and Democrat Scott Sanders advanced to a Jan. 6 runoff. 

The two races are the latest in a series of off-year special elections for state legislative seats in Georgia to replace lawmakers who have died, resigned, or been appointed to other political offices. 

Here are the results from Tuesday’s elections.

House District 121

Progressive voters had cause for celebration in the race for House District 121: Gisler gained a narrow lead over Guest, the Republican candidate, late Tuesday night. 

The conservative-leaning district, which covers parts of Clarke and Oconee counties, has been under Republican control since 2019. However, former state Rep. Marcus Wiedower, a Watkinsville Republican, abruptly resigned from his seat earlier this year to focus on his work as vice president of external affairs at the real estate firm Hillpointe. 

Gisler, who made affordability a key focus of this year’s campaign, previously challenged Wiedower in 2024, but received less than 40% of the vote. This year, he credited his campaign’s success to a strong ground game, as well as his focus on issues like health care access and the rising cost of living, which he said likely appealed to some Republican voters.

“We had the right message in this time,” Gisler said in a phone call, adding that his opponent “ran on tired MAGA talking points.”

Guest, an Oconee County resident who helps run a Watkinsville-based transportation business, centered his campaign around protecting conservative values, as well as improving transportation, strengthening education and keeping communities safe. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday night.

Ken Martin, who chairs the Democratic National Committee, celebrated Gisler’s win, drawing comparisons to the party’s historic November victory, in which Democrats flipped two seats on the state’s Public Service Commission – wins that Georgia Democrats had said earlier helped to lift their hopes in the legislative race.

“Fresh off the resounding victories in the Georgia Public Service Commissioner races and now this historic flip, the DNC will continue to invest, organize, and compete in every corner of Georgia,” he said in a statement.

House District 23

A second special election over a metro Atlanta seat was less decisive. Republican Bill Fincher and Democrat Scott Sanders will be advancing to a runoff election after each candidate received about a quarter of the vote during Tuesday’s election, according to unofficial results. Georgia law requires a runoff election when no candidate secures more than 50% of the vote.

Fincher, a Republican former district attorney who now owns an RV park, finished with the most votes at 1,373, good for 27.4% of the vote, while Scott Sanders, a business executive, got 1,340 votes, or about 26.7%. The remaining votes were divided among four other Republican candidates.

Republican state Rep. Mandi Ballinger of Canton died in October after a long battle with cancer, leaving her seat open. The district, which includes Canton, part of northern Holly Springs and the surrounding unincorporated areas, heavily favors a Republican.

In a phone call, Fincher said he chalked up his first-place finish to his team connecting directly with voters, and he thanked his opponents and asked for their support for the coming runoff.

“Our biggest strength was teamwork, communication directly with the voters, and with the quality of people that ran, all the candidates, top-notch people trying to do their best, all being positive, all dignified. And when you run a race like that, there’s mutual respect among every one of us,” Fincher said. 

Sanders said his second-place finish “shows there’s Democrats up here in Cherokee County.” 

“We went into this eyes wide open, knowing how red the district was,” he said. “It was a district that Trump won by 45 points, so we knew it was going to be an uphill battle, but we also intended to take this seriously and make it a hard-fought campaign, and we did.”

Sanders said he would not have made it to the runoff without his team of volunteers, who knocked on nearly 2,000 doors in three weeks in order to get out the vote.

With the runoff set for Jan. 6 – less than a month away, with most of that right in the middle of holiday season when people are more concerned with travel and celebrations than politics – both remaining candidates said they will work hard to keep up the momentum.

The runoff may receive more attention after Gisler’s upset win. 

“Georgia Republicans, we need to sound the alarm from now until November, starting with helping Bill Fincher win the runoff for HD 23,” Republican Insurance Commissioner John King, who is up for reelection next year, posted on social media. “Our donors aren’t motivated and our voters aren’t either.” 

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Judge Victoria M. Calvert’s decision, which was issued last week, means that the approximately 340 people with gender dysphoria diagnoses in the custody of the Georgia Department of Corrections can receive treatments like hormone therapy if their doctors deem it necessary. The case was brought by five transgender people in state custody.

Senate Bill 185, which was passed during the 2025 legislative session received Gov. Brian Kemp’s signature and went into effect in May after sparking controversy in both chambers during this year’s legislative session.

In the Senate, three Democrats crossed party lines to support the measure along with all Republicans, while four other Democratic senators did not vote.

Nearly all House Democrats took part in a walkout over the bill, characterizing it as a waste of time and part of what they called a fixation on a vulnerable minority. Three Democrats voted for the bill, while two others stayed in the chamber and voted against it.

Calvert’s ruling makes a temporary block on the bill she signed in September permanent.

The law called on doctors to monitor patients already receiving the treatments and taper the drugs gradually, and to provide counseling. Based on testimony, Calvert said that was “an inadequate blanket substitute for hormone therapy.” She said there is “no genuine dispute” that gender dysphoria is a serious medical need and that removing the option for doctors to treat it with hormone therapy without a medical reason violates the law.

“The Court does not hold that the Constitution requires all inmates receive hormone therapy if they want it,” she wrote. “Rather, the Court requires healthcare decisions for prisoners to be made dispassionately, by physicians, based on individual determinations of medical need, and for reasons beyond the fact that the prisoners are prisoners.”

Attorney General Chris Carr’s office appealed the ruling Monday. Carr said in a statement that his office is willing to fight the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Carr, a Republican, is running to be Georgia’s next governor.

The bill’s author, Cataula Republican Sen. Randy Robertson, said he’s not discouraged by the ruling.

“We planned this all along. We knew exactly how this was going to go, they were going to find a friendly judge, and Judge Calvert very much is that,” Robertson said of the Biden-nominated judge. ”

Robertson argued that Georgia taxpayers should not be on the hook for treatments he called not medically necessary, and he expressed confidence that his bill will be vindicated as it winds through the courts.

“I stand with Attorney General Carr in the belief that, at the end of the day, this will be in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, and it will quickly be upheld, the law will be established as constitutional and right, and we will be moving on to things that are more important in Georgia,” he added.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors, though that case deals with different aspects of the law than medical treatment for incarcerated people.

For now, transgender rights advocates are celebrating the ruling as a win.

Human Rights Campaign’s Georgia Director Bentley Hudgins said HRC and other groups mobilized thousands to oppose the bill as unconstitutional and a waste of money.

“It will bring more financial burdens to the State of Georgia and take valuable time away from solving actual issues,” Hudgins said. “Over $4.1 million has already been paid to settle cases like these. The House Democrats walked out on this bill because they saw it for what it was – undignified, expensive discrimination. It is my hope that when we return to the Gold Dome in January that our colleagues of all parties focus on bringing solutions to keep the hungry fed, expand access to health care and address the ever-rising cost of living.”

On the first day of his second term in office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order targeting federal recognition of transgender rights across various fields, including within prisons. The order prevents transgender women from being housed in women’s detention facilities and stops federal funds from being used for gender-affirming treatments.

Those rulings are being challenged in multiple court cases.

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Georgia is one of the only states that does not provide needs-based financial aid for would-be students who struggle to pay for college.

But some state lawmakers are making the case that Georgia should change that, though there are disagreements over how best to pay for such a program.

A state Senate study committee released a report Tuesday calling for a comprehensive needs-based aid program for college students just a month before lawmakers are due to return to Atlanta for the 2026 legislative session. But the divisions over funding could make a plan tough to pass, particularly in an election year.

“This is about affordability, and about opening doors,” said Sen. Nan Orrock, the Atlanta Democrat who chaired the state Senate Study Committee on Higher Education Affordability. “Swing wide the doors of higher education, post secondary programs, that will launch young people into successful lives and (they will) stay here in Georgia, and help to continue to build Georgia into the place that we know it can be, but affordability is absolutely the issue.”

The report calls on Georgia to establish a needs-based aid program modeled after those in states like North Carolina and Florida.

To be eligible, a student would need to have a high school diploma or equivalent and be enrolled in an eligible public university or technical college. They would also need to complete a FAFSA application, meet federal Pell Grant requirements with a high need for financial aid and satisfy minimum academic standards.

The awards would be based on the number of classes a student is enrolled in, and the aid would be administered by the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which also administers the merit-based HOPE Scholarship.

The committee’s report is also recommending that the new program be funded from the unrestricted reserves from the Georgia Lottery – a pool of money on top of the funds that are set aside for education funding and meeting shortfalls – which currently sit at $1.7 billion. The money could come either through direct appropriation each year, or through an endowment, in which a larger amount of money would be withdrawn and need-based scholarships would be funded by the interest earned on that money.

Georgia Budget and Policy Institute Senior Education Analyst Ashley Young said about $126 million in lottery funds could provide grants for just over 98,000 students in the 2026-2027 school year who would otherwise not be able to attend college or face massive debt.

“It can absolutely be transformative,” Young said.

Georgia student loan borrowers have the second-highest average student loan balance in the nation at $42,300, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Young said even though University System of Georgia enrollment is at an all-time high, the number of Pell Grant recipients in the system has decreased 5% over the last 10 years.

“It’s not as though they don’t want to go to college, it’s that they are finding it more difficult with increased cost of living to actually afford an option to go,” she said. “And so what we are seeing is that students are just choosing not to because they simply cannot afford it, not because they cannot be successful academically.”

Young said the lack of needs-based aid in Georgia also disproportionately affects Black students, who carry the highest student loan debt burden in the state’s university system.

But speaking after the meeting, state Sen. Max Burns, a Sylvania Republican and chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee, expressed reservations about the proposed funding mechanisms.

“I think the lottery has done a great job for Georgia, I think HOPE has been an excellent tool, and certainly Gov. (Zell) Miller had a strong foresight when he put that program in place, but I don’t think you take funds or resources away from a successful program to fund something that you need, but have not yet developed a comprehensive way to address that. So I’m not a fan of using lottery dollars for this program.”

Burns said that lawmakers agree that a new approach for needs-based aid is needed, but he wasn’t optimistic about progress during the coming session, which falls during an election year and could likely run at a faster than normal pace.

“I think timing is a challenge,” he said. “I think in this session, we’re going to have to begin the process of understanding the problem and educating our colleagues in the Senate and in the House, seeing if we can come to an agreement about how we might choose to proceed. Can we make something happen in the near term? It’ll be difficult, but we certainly want to give it a go and have the conversation, but we’ll get to where we want to be. I feel that it’s important that Georgians have the opportunity to complete their education in a timely manner, with minimal debt.”

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A massive data center project backed by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and his family could be coming to Butts County, but many of the project’s details are still unknown.

Jones, a Republican, is running to be Georgia’s next governor.

The Highway 16 Interstate Health Development near Interstate 75 owned by Jones’ father is set to include a 450,000 square-foot hospital, 1.2 million square feet of medical office space and 11 million square feet of data centers – making it one of the biggest data centers currently planned in Georgia and placing it among the largest ever built by today’s standard.

The estimated $10 billion project is expected to go through more than 4.5 million gallons of water per day, more than tripling Butts County’s current water usage, and generate nearly $92 million per year in annual tax revenues when it is completed by 2040.

That’s just about all the information publicly available on the project, and those details come from a two-page development of regional impact filing that was submitted to the Georgia Department of Community Affairs.

The lack of information is a problem for environmental advocates like Fletcher Sams, executive director of the Altamaha Riverkeeper.

“Here’s what I don’t know: I don’t know how many megawatts it is. I also don’t know the cooling technology that they will use to cool the chips,” he said. “Those things are very important for me to know because the concern that I have for the location of it is that it’s in the upper Ocmulgee basin, and I’ve got 24 other data centers projected to come into that basin. The issue that I have with that basin is that between now and 2060, that region is going to see approximately 740,000 new residents.”

Decision-making on data centers left to local officials

The Georgia Department of Community Affairs recently approved new rules to bring large-scale data center developments under official state review, but critics say the rules fail to fully account for the cumulative burden the facilities have on the state’s energy and water supplies.

The amendments to its “developments of regional impact” process, for the first time, explicitly list “technological facilities (including data centers).” This comes after a self-imposed pause in processing regional impact reviews for data centers that was meant to give the department time to clarify the rules, DCA Commissioner Christopher Nunn said during a legislative subcommittee meeting in August. Some local governments began applying previous rules for impact reviews not intended for data centers since the projects did not fit under any of the previously specified development types, leading to a lack of consistency across the state.

While other proposals for data centers moved forward without a state review during the months-long pause, the Butts County development includes a hospital and commercial areas, which was enough to trigger a regional review.

Yet, the main issue, according to environmental advocates and community organizers, is the limitations of the process itself: The state’s impact review process is designed to be a communication tool, not a regulatory one.

“This simply ensures that neighbors are talking to neighbors, that cities are talking to counties, that other stakeholders are engaged in a process,” Nunn said to the legislative subcommittee at the time, stressing that his state agency serves merely as a “repository” for data, and the final regional impact report is purely advisory. The local government “maintains the authority to make the final decision on whether a proposed development will or will not go forward.”

The reliance on local government autonomy and information sharing leaves the state’s natural resources vulnerable to depletion, environmental advocates say.

But for Butts County, proponents of the mega project say the tax revenue would allow the county to advance and compete with neighboring metro areas. Residents often have to travel out of the county for many amenities, which is “not conducive to a good community,” said county manager Brad Johnson. He said that the development – called River Park – would diversify the county’s tax base, which currently largely comes from residents.

“We’re looking forward for some commercial or industrial tax generation to help take the burden off of our citizens, so I think not just Butts County, I think the entire region will benefit by the proposed project,” Johnson said.

Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy at the Data Center Coalition, a national association for the data center industry, said in a letter submitted during the public comment period on the revised regional review process that any new rules should consider the economic benefits data centers may bring. Attempts to reach the coalition for a comment for this story were unsuccessful.

“These tax revenues support investments in community priorities like education, transportation, and public safety that help enhance the quality of life for Georgians,” Diorio said.

Butts County’s planning commission is set to hear the developer’s application to rezone the property to mixed-use development in December, Johnson said, and the county commission can consider the application beginning in January, starting with a public hearing. Once rezoned, developers can begin construction.

Concerns about water usage

If you’ve ever sat down to watch a movie with your laptop on your lap and felt your legs start to become uncomfortable from the warmth, you know that computer components heat up when they’re doing their jobs. Data centers contain a lot more hardware than your laptop and perform complex calculations, generating massive temperature increases.

Keeping everything cool enough to function requires a lot of water – hundreds of thousands or millions of gallons per day – and Sams said it’s just not clear whether Georgia’s rivers can provide for all the planned data centers plus population growth and the power needs that come with that.

“Of the 25 data centers that I am tracking in the Ocmulgee, only nine have DRI information available,” Sams said, referring to the state impact review. “Of those nine, they’re going to withdraw close to 10 million gallons on top of the other withdrawals.”

Sams said Georgia has seen concerns over water usage surrounding large projects in recent years, pointing to the Bryan County Hyundai plant that has sparked concerns over water use.

“I’m worried about us over issuing withdrawal permits in the Ocmulgee basin for these data centers and for the power generation for the data centers when there is no backup,” Sams said.

For years, Georgia allowed the data center boom to expand without clear, statewide metrics, leading to what advocates call a “data vacuum,” a term Kristen Stampfer, director of Coastal Communities United, a nonprofit working to preserve rural communities, used in a letter submitted to DCA during a recent public comment period.

“These projects, collectively, represent an immense and largely unaccounted-for draw on Georgia’s finite resources … The proposed Project Sail in Coweta County alone demonstrates the scale of the challenge: its daily water use could reach 9 million gallons and its energy demand of 900 MW rivals that of a small city, yet it falls outside a rigorous review,” Stampfer said.

‘It’s not sustainable’

It’s not just water that has advocates concerned about the spike in data centers. All that new digital number crunching needs a lot of electricity – Georgia Power has claimed that data centers will consume about 80% of the new power generated in Georgia through 2031.

But like the water draw numbers, projecting exactly how much of Georgia’s juice will be squeezed out by data centers is a tough job, says Amy Sharma, executive director of Science for Georgia, a science advocacy nonprofit.

“If all the planned ones that we have found – which by the way all of these numbers are estimates based on publicly available information like newspaper articles and like DRI reports and stuff like that. So who knows? We’re not getting exact numbers from the data center developers themselves – there’s about 40 plans for the state that would take up 14 gigawatts,” Sharma said.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 14 gigawatts is enough energy to power 1.4 billion LED lightbulbs.

“It’s just bonkers,” Sharma said. “There’s no other word for this besides bananas, right? Like it’s just off the rails. It’s not sustainable.”

Utility rates have been rising in Georgia and were a major issue for Democrats, who flipped two seats currently held by Republicans on the five-seat Georgia Public Service Commission running on energy affordability. The two incumbents had voted to approve six rate increases over the last two years, resulting in an estimated average annual increase of about $500 for the average household.

The politics

The Butts County property has been at the center of a political battle over hospital regulations and alleged self-dealing in the past.

Jones came under criticism in 2023 for a push to rewrite rules for new hospitals in a way critics said was catered to allow for a hospital to be built on property owned by Jones’ father.

That effort fell short, but Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill easing those hospital regulations last year.

Jones’ push toward loosening those restrictions has already become campaign fodder in the Republican gubernatorial primary.

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, who is also jockeying to be the Republican candidate for governor next year, accused Jones of using his office to line his family’s pockets.

“If you honor me by allowing me to be your next Governor, unlike the Lt. Governor, I will promise you this: I will not change the rules or rig the system to enrich myself or my family on your backs or the backs of our fellow Georgians,” Carr said on social media in October.

A billboard standing over the Butts County site reads “Burt Jones’ $10 billion family project, Rewritten laws. Family profits. That’s Burt Jones’ family payday.”

The billboard was paid for by Keep Georgia Strong Action Inc., an independent campaign group that supports Carr.

Jones’ spokesperson Kayla Lott dismissed the issue.

“This is a simple rezoning application by a private company,” she said. “It’s a nonstory.”

“As for Chris Carr, he’s not a serious candidate. He’s grasping at straws because he’s stuck in a distant third place, his fundraising has collapsed, and the only people paying attention to him at this point are the ones on his payroll,” she added.

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Judge Scott McAfee’s dismissal marks the end of the last criminal case facing Trump related to that year’s election. Peter J. Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, requested the dismissal after concluding the case belonged in federal court.

Skandalakis named himself prosecutor in the case this month after he said he could not find another attorney willing to take the case from embattled Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

A Fulton County grand jury indicted Trump and 18 co-defendants in 2023, but Willis was removed from the case in 2024 amid questions of a conflict of interest stemming from a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor she hired for the case.

Four of the alleged co-conspirators pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Trump and the other defendants.

Skandalakis did not express sympathy with the view, still espoused by Trump and allies, that the 2020 election had been stolen or rigged.

“Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, millions of citizens and hundreds of politicians continued to make unsubstantiated claims of election fraud,” he wrote. “In response, the Secretary of State undertook extensive audits to verify the vote count and demonstrate that no substantial voter fraud had occurred. Yet, despite these efforts and the evidence confirming a fair election, many individuals continue to believe—and may never be convinced otherwise—that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.”

Trump and the phone call

In a Wednesday motion asking McAfee to drop the charges, Skandalakis called the case unprecedented and noted that bringing a sitting president to trial in Georgia is unrealistic.

“The case is now nearly five years removed from President Trump’s phone call with the Secretary of State, and two years have passed since the Grand Jury returned charges against President Trump and the eighteen other defendants,” Skandalakis wrote.

A recording of a phone call with Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021 captured Trump pressing Georgia’s top election official to “find” enough votes to secure a Trump victory in Georgia.

“There is no realistic prospect that a sitting President will be compelled to appear in Georgia to stand trial on the allegations in this indictment,” Skandalakis continued. “Donald J. Trump’s current term as President of the United States of America does not expire until January 20, 2029; by that point, eight years will have elapsed since the phone call at issue.”

Skandalakis said that even if Trump were to face trial immediately after leaving office, arguments over presidential immunity alone would tie the case up for months or years, with no guarantee the state would ultimately prevail.

Skandalakis called the phone call “concerning,” but he said it is not a smoking gun, arguing that reasonable minds could disagree on whether Trump was calling on Raffensperger to create fictitious votes or investigate fraud that Trump sincerely but incorrectly believed was real.

“When multiple interpretations are equally plausible, the accused is entitled to the benefit of the doubt and should not be presumed to have acted criminally,” Skandalakis found.

Skandalakis did not state whether or not he believes Trump committed crimes in his efforts to overturn the election, but he said Georgia was not the best venue to determine that.

“Elections, particularly presidential elections, are intensely contested events,” Skandalakis wrote. “All too frequently, some campaign staffers, attorneys, and supporters genuinely believe that the nation’s future is at stake if the opposing candidate prevails. Political rhetoric to mobilize voters serves a purpose, but the efforts by President Trump and his legal advisors to obstruct the counting of electoral votes on January 6th lie at the core of this case. This is also why Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal investigation and prosecution would have been the most appropriate avenue to determine whether the actions of those involved were crimes that could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

U.S. Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith dropped that federal election interference case as well as a case alleging Trump mishandled classified documents after the president’s 2024 re-election because he concluded it would be illegal to continue prosecuting him after taking office.

Trump’s attorney, Steve Sadow, celebrated the decision to dismiss Fulton County’s case Wednesday.

“The political persecution of President Trump by disqualified DA Fani Willis is finally over. This case should never have been brought. A fair and impartial prosecutor has put an end to this lawfare,” Sadow said.

The Fulton County District Attorney’s office did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday.

The other defendants

Skandalakis said he considered severing the other defendants from the case and prosecuting them separately from Trump, but concluded that would be “both illogical and unduly burdensome and costly for the State and for Fulton County.”

The alleged conspiracy included a wide range of acts, from a meeting of “alternate” electors who met at the state Capitol with plans to certify a false Trump victory, a harassment campaign against Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman and the breach of elections systems in Coffee County.

Skandalakis said his examination of the case suggested the alternate GOP electors did not have criminal intent to overturn the election. He had already come to a similar conclusion last year about then-state Sen. Burt Jones, who is now lieutenant governor, after his case was splintered off.

“They genuinely and sincerely believed that their actions were a lawful component of the election contest process. Thus, I find no criminal intent concerning the meeting of the Republican Electors and their plan to preserve an election challenge by casting their ballots for President Trump,” Skandalakis wrote.

With regards to the Coffee County breach, Skandalakis noted that attorney Sidney Powell and bail bondsman Scott Hall, who he called “the primary architect of the scheme” and “a principal accomplice” were among the defendants who pleaded guilty, and Skandalakis argued that pursuing charges against small-fry defendants like former election supervisor Misty Hampton and Coffee County GOP Cathy Latham chair would not be in the state’s interest.

Skandalakis called Freeman, the Fulton County poll worker who faced harassment and intimidation, “a genuinely sympathetic figure in this matter.” But he said the defendants accused of harming her did not do so in Fulton County and that the alleged crimes against her should be prosecuted in neighboring Cobb County, where Freeman lived at the time.

Because of a measure passed this year, the defendants in the case may be able to force Fulton County to cover their legal costs. The new law allows criminal defendants to recoup their legal costs if the prosecuting attorney in their case is disqualified for personal or professional misconduct.

Reaction

The dismissal could prove a divisive conversation topic across Georgia Thanksgiving tables. Reaction to the news was split along party lines, with Republicans expressing gratitude for the decision and Democrats calling it an outrage.

“Today, as Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, my heart swells with profound relief, unyielding gratitude, and a fierce sense of vindication for our brave patriots who have endured this dark chapter far too long,” said Georgia GOP chair Josh McKoon in a statement. “Pete Skandalakis, Executive Director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, has done what justice demanded: dismissing this sham, politically weaponized criminal case against President Donald J. Trump, (former) Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer, and our steadfast contingent of 2020 Presidential Electors.”

Georgia Democratic chair Charlie Bailey had the polar opposite view.

“The dismissal of this case is a travesty and a slap in the face to Georgia voters,” Bailey wrote in a statement. “Donald Trump and eighteen others, including sitting State Senator Shawn Still, were indicted by a grand jury for attempting to illegally overturn our state’s election. Multiple of their co-defendants pled guilty. This misguided decision denies the people of Georgia the accountability they deserve for Trump and his cronies’ attempt to subvert their votes and silence their voices.”

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