Election denial activists force rules upon Georgia voters with impunity

A small group of hardcore election deniers have successfully taken over a rule-making process that affects millions of Georgia voters.

I spent almost all of Tuesday watching a meeting of the Georgia State Election Board. Unlike last week, they didn’t pass any controversial rules that could cause chaos following Election Day. But the board did open investigations into eight counties for not being aggressive enough in removing voters from voter rolls. 

As the hours ticked away and election denial conspiracy theorists continued to take to the rostrum to argue that the board should implement rules that benefit Donald Trump and his plans to call November into question, I was again taken aback by how insane all of this is. For the entire day, I listened to people like Salleigh Grubbs, Lucia Frazier, and Garland Favorito argue with the board on everything from basic Georgia law to complex election matters. None of these people — including three of the board’s own members — has any business coming up with rules for any election, let alone one in which millions of Georgia voters will head to the polls.

Grubbs, chair of the Cobb County GOP who once chased a garbage truck she incorrectly thought was carrying shredded paper ballots demonstrated a basic lack of understanding of how Georgia open records law works — she thought the law’s three-day requirement for response time means that agencies must provide records within three days. Anyone who has filed more than a handful of FOIA requests will tell you that the three-day response time only requires agencies to provide an initial response to your request. Still, Grubbs is the mastermind behind a rule that allows county election officials to request a virtually unlimited number of documents before certifying election results. 

Dive in on the SEB

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So that’s one example of the type of people who are implementing rules on millions of Georgians who didn’t ask for them. 

Another is Lucia Frazier, who failed to understand — over and again as even the pro-Trump members of the board pleaded with her to try to comprehend — that she is not allowed to simply change the rules she has proposed while standing in front of the board. That’s because Georgia law requires that rules proposed by petitioners like Frazier be made available to the public for inspection before they’re passed. Frazier simply could not understand this. She wanted her rules passed as soon as possible because she is a hardcore election denier who believes her rules will prevent widespread fraud from occurring (they won’t). Frazier is the wife of Jason Frazier, also a hardcore election denier, who is suing Fulton County for not being sufficiently aggressive in removing voters from voter rolls. 

Garland Favorito is Garland Favorito — a wildly unhinged conspiracy theorist who’s into all the classics like the JFK assassination, chemtrails, the supposed murder of Clinton-world figure Vince Foster, ties between 9/11 and the CIA, among other madness that even Rush Limbaugh once deemed to nutty to hear out.

These three people have introduced nine rules to the State Election Board since May. That may not sound like much, but consider this: between September 2022 and this May, no new rules were introduced. And, prior to last month, the board had not implemented a new rule since 2021. Since May, a small but vocal — and apparently powerful — group of election denial activists like Frazier, Grubbs and Favorito, have introduced 31 of the 32 rules brought to the board. 

Of those, they’ve successfully convinced the board to pass a handful of those rules, including two rules on certification and last week’s rule requiring hand counts of all ballots at polling locations that have garnered so much controversy. 

The person behind that rule is a woman named Sharlene Alexander, who I’ve discovered is a hardcore election denier whose Facebook page includes tones of Christian nationalism among outright zeal for Donald Trump. Alexander has introduced two rules to the board in recent months.

You can read my Guardian report here and check out some more details about Alexander below. Many of my posts here are free but this one is behind a paywall because it’s exclusive information that has taken me many hours to compile. Just a reminder that I’m an independent journalist and your support is integral to me continuing this work. If you’d like to help me expose election deniers and other threats to democracy, you can choose a paid subscription for as little as $5 a month or buy me a cup of coffee. Now, on to the latest election madness.