Georgia Republican Party Chairman Josh McKoon boasted at the state convention in late May that he had “very good news.”
Georgia Republicans had just taken over the state Board of Elections, the elected body that sets voting rules. With this new majority, Republicans could implement an agenda that would help former President Donald Trump win in November, McKoon said.
“I think when we look back on November 5, 2024, we’re going to say that getting a 3-2 electoral integrity-minded majority on the state board of elections ensured that we had a level playing field to win this election,” he said.
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Since the takeover, the Georgia State Board of Elections has adopted a series of certification and investigation rules backed by right-wing election activists who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The moves highlight a sharp turn to the right for the apolitical body and have alarmed Democrats, election officials and even some Republicans.
“Clearly Trump’s allies have learned their lesson from the failure of the 2020 coup attempt and are starting earlier and trying to dig deeper into the most vulnerable parts of the electoral system,” said Norm Eisen, a longtime Washington insider. attorney and president of the State Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonpartisan election watchdog group.
If there is another chaotic challenge to November’s election results, Georgia is shaping up to be a hot seat, just as it was in 2020. Polls show a tight race in the state. Trump supporters election activists are well organized there. Republican county officials have already shown a willingness to embrace the practices of the party’s no-choice wing. And the state Board of Elections will almost certainly be at the center of the controversy.
Like similar bodies in other states, the Georgia Board of Elections was established as an independent agency that sets voting rules and provides instructions to election workers to maintain order and integrity in elections, regardless of the political impact of the election.
But the government’s new right-wing majority has instead aligned itself with the goals of conservative activists, drawing reprimands even from the Republican secretary of state. For example, the government released a new rule this month that could give local officials the power to refuse or delay certifying county election results they deem questionable.
The majority also called for a new investigation by the state attorney general into improprieties in Fulton County’s 2020 election, which has already been investigated several times.
Watchdog groups and Democrats have accused the three cabinet members who voted to approve those rules of working with Trump supporters in preparation to reject the results of the presidential election if Trump loses.
However, the board members see it differently.
“I’m not looking at this because I’m trying to do something that benefits the Republicans, because that would be a very idiotic approach,” Janelle King, a Republican member of the board who was appointed in May, said. to interview. “I see that when a petition is presented in front of me, I listen to why. I listen to previous shows, what the problems might have been.”
The right-wing takeover of the Georgia State Board of Elections is a major victory for conservative election activists, who have spent the past four years looking for ways to influence the election infrastructure by focusing on local institutions.
Three members of the Republican majority — Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and King — earned praise from Trump at a rally two weeks ago, calling them by name “pit bulls who fight for honesty, transparency and victory.”
“They’re on fire,” Trump told the crowd.
Hostile takeover
It took just under a year for the state board of elections to get far-right election officials under control.
Throughout the past year, Johnston was the only member aligned with conservative activists. But in January of this year, Jeffares, a longtime friend of Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is under investigation for his role in subverting the 2020 election, was appointed to the board and started on Johnston’s side.
Jeffares, who declined to comment for this article, recently told The Guardian that “it makes me angry that we’ve been labeled” as election deniers.
In February, Johnston proposed a rule that would end the state’s popular non-custodial vote, and Jeffares joined him, but outnumbered. Democratic board member Sara Tindall Ghazal, Republican Governor-appointed Chairman John Fervier and fellow Republican board member Edward Lindsey voted against the proposal.
Two weeks after the vote, the Georgia Republican Party passed a resolution banning lobbyists from serving on the state board of elections. (As a former representative and attorney, Lindsey was a registered lobbyist for several counties in the state.)
Amy Kremer, an RNC committee member who helped organize the January 6, 2021 protest, publicly called for her removal on Twitter. Marci McCarthy, chairman of the DeKalb County Republican Party, also called for his resignation, along with other Trump supporters across the country. And the Republican Party of Georgia raised the question of whether registered lobbyists should be barred from serving on the state board of elections.
After a pressure campaign, the dam broke – Lindsey resigned in May and Speaker Jon Burns appointed King.
The new majority starts working
With an effective majority, outside groups began to take their agenda to the government.
In April, the Election Research Institute, a right-wing group led by Heather Honey, a Pennsylvania activist known for spreading election-related conspiracy theories, introduced a proposal to weaken certification requirements and allow counties to exclude individual precinct results if there is evidence. of contradictions or abuses. Although the rule did not pass, it received support from Johnston.
Johnston has also proposed a team led by Honey to monitor the Fulton County election.
In July, McKoon sent Jeffares two new proposed rules — one on poll watchers and one on results reporting requirements — along with one-page talking points for each rule, according to email records obtained by the New York Times. McKoon included Josh Helton, the Republican National Committee’s election integrity adviser, and Alex Kaufman, a Republican attorney in Georgia, in the emails. The Atlanta-Journal Constitution was the first to report on the emails.
McKoon said in an interview that the state party regularly reaches out to the board for ways to improve elections. “Of course, I’m going to interact with and reach out to the board members to defend this position,” McKoon said. “I don’t think I would be doing this volunteering right if I didn’t.”
The board members themselves have been active in the meetings of the right-wing election activist network. Johnston has attended at least three virtual meetings of the Election Integrity Network, a broad activist coalition led by Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell, according to tapes of the meetings obtained by the Times.
At the May meeting, Johnston said in a message that he had spent “two hours at a DMV board meeting” and was “invited to meet with the commissioner and the secretary of state” to discuss helping election officials access the Department of Motor Vehicles. Vehicle databases.
During a presentation by the leader of United Sovereign Americans, a right-wing group focused on election disputes, at another meeting in May, Johnston echoed his comments.
“Come to Georgia,” he wrote.
The Trump Effect
The former president has taken a keen interest in the Georgia State Board of Elections, a murky entity that is unusual for such intense concentration of presidential candidates.
In several posts on Truth Social, Trump has weighed in on the details of state board caucuses, including sharing raw footage of a discussion among board members at a public meeting.
Attention has focused on voting rights groups in Georgia.
“It’s unusual for Trump to delve into specifics, so his specific praise for unelected members of the Georgia State Board of Elections is strange and should raise alarms,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight, a left-wing voting rights group. “Trump continues to meddle in our state’s elections, which is deeply troubling.”
But Trump is fooling the board members.
Jeffares has told multiple people in the Georgia government that he had a job in the incoming Trump administration, according to three people familiar with the discussions. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Jeffares clarified that he had presented himself as a possible candidate for the EPA regional director in a conversation with Brian Jack, a former White House policy director in the Trump administration. But when Trump held a rally in Atlanta, only Johnston attended, sitting just a few rows from the podium.
When Trump called her name, she stood up and waved to the crowd. They responded with a long round of applause.
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