Laying the groundwork for another big lie in Georgia

Why recent developments at the Georgia State Election Board signal election fraud claims to come.

Note: Many thanks to our longtime subscribers and those of you who are new here as a result of my appearance on Brian Tyler Cohen’s show, published Wednesday. If you’re a free subscriber (new or old!), I encourage you to sign up for a paid subscription for as little as $5 a month or buy me a cup of coffee. Your support will help me pay government agencies in Georgia for some of the hundreds of dollars of fees I’m being asked to pay to obtain communications between election officials and members of the election denial movement, as well as occasional travel — I will probably have to be in Washington D.C. on January 6 for Insurrection, the Redux, right? Anyway, here’s what I’ve got for you today. 

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Let me first say that the many controversial actions taken by the Georgia State Election Board in recent weeks will not directly affect the ability of people to vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in a little less than a month. 

What these recent developments may impact, however, is how those votes are scrutinized and — almost surely — contested following the November election. 

When the SEB met Tuesday it again reopened an investigation into double-counted ballots in Fulton County in 2020. This time, they voted 3-2 thanks to the board’s MAGA majority to subpoena basically everything under the sun from Fulton County over a screw-up that has been litigated several times, never showing anything that could remotely be considered fraud. (As a reminder, the matter of the approximately 3,000 ballots that were double scanned four years ago in Fulton has been investigated thoroughly and found not to have had any effect on the outcome of the election.) In fact, the investigations have reinforced the fact that Trump lost in Fulton County by 12,000 votes. 

But the trio of Dr. Janice Johnston, Janelle King and Rick Jeffares — Trump-supporting election deniers, all — voted Tuesday to subpoena Fulton County as punishment for the county not submitting to the trio’s demand that elections there be overseen by a “monitoring team” composed of hardcore election deniers. 

More on that monitoring team below, but first, what this means: Fulton County will undoubtedly be an epicenter of claims that the coming election was stolen from Trump. The SEB’s vote to subpoena the county yesterday is further evidence that the MAGA trio on the board stands ready and able to assist Trump and Republicans’ forthcoming claims of election fraud. 

Dive in on the SEB

• Georgia state Democrats add to lawsuit against pro-Trump State Election Board

• 'Smears,' facts, and fallout at the Georgia State Election Board

• In Atlanta, Trump confirms that Georgia's state election board is in his pocket

• MAGA hijacks Georgia election authority

• Pro-Trump election officials in Georgia coordinate to deny results, purge voters

The future includes a scenario in which the trio will claim that Fulton County’s refusal to accept a monitoring team composed of election deniers facilitated fraud in the November election. This claim will be picked up and amplified by the Trump campaign, probably Trump himself, all manner of local, regional, and national Republican Party figures, and the robust ecosystem of right-wing media. The SEB — in its official capacity but only made possible thanks to the MAGA majority — will then open investigations into unfounded fraud claims, further fueling Trump’s narrative of a stolen election. 

The trio of Johnston, King and Jeffares could be stopped, in a way — although any remaining hope of that was likely killed on Wednesday when a judge in Fulton County dismissed a lawsuit brought by Democrats that sought to force Gov. Brian Kemp to investigate the MAGA trio for various improprieties. 

In arguing last week that the lawsuit should be dismissed, Kemp — through the office of Attorney General Chris Carr — argued that only Carr himself, the office of Inspector General Nigel Lange, or the SEB has the authority to implement administrative hearings that could result in removal of Johnston, King and Jeffares. So, will Carr or Lange exercise this right? Neither responded to that question by publication time today. Will the SEB? I’m guessing not, considering the very people who Democrats say should be investigated for various ethics violations hold a majority of the board.

A left-leaning voting rights advocate tells American Doom that Kemp’s motion to dismiss was part of a “stalling game.” Clearly, Kemp and Carr think they can ride out the controversy swirling around the SEB — making it appear they’re willing to hold the board’s pro-Trump activists accountable but simply can’t because of state law — in the hopes that they’re at the vanguard of a post-Trump GOP. 

Problem is, Johnston, King and Jeffares aren’t slowing down — and they damn sure aren’t simply going to put down their weapons when the smoke clears after November 5. In fact, they’ll engage in a surge after the election, deploying the power of the SEB to every corner of the state where insane claims of fraud emerge thanks to a sprawling network of election denial activists in every single one of Georgia’s 159 counties. 

Similar to the contradictory motion to dismiss the Democrat lawsuit against the SEB trio, Carr is caught in an odd bind over a rule passed by the SEB that requires poll workers to engage in the time-consuming and error-prone process of “reconciling” the number of ballots with the number of voters who check in at individual polling locations. This is the “hand count” rule passed a few weeks back, and Democrats are suing over it, too. Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, a Republican, said the rule would cause delays in the counting of votes on election night. (These delays will be another item seized upon by election deniers on the board and throughout Georgia to claim fraud is rampant.) And prior to passing the rule, Carr said that doing so would be outside the SEB’s authority — and in direct contrast with Georgia election law. Now, his office is defending the rule in court in the lawsuit brought by Democrats. 

So, is Chris Carr really able, let alone willing, to hold the SEB’s activist majority accountable? Doesn’t look like it. (My understanding is that Carr could tell the SEB to kick rocks and get their own attorney to defend them in the Democratic lawsuit; this has happened in other states where attorneys general have been unwilling to defend the actions of election officials, like this story from Arkansas that I wrote in July, for instance.) To sum up, Carr is both defending the SEB’s “activist rule-making” (Raffensberger’s words, not mine) in court and apparently shielding them from the ethics complaint that could result in their removal from the board. 

Doesn’t exactly sound like a person who will act as a backstop to claims of election fraud and attempts to overturn the results of November’s election, does it? 

Now, on to who this election denier monitoring board chosen by Johnston, King and Jeffares actually includes. First, the monitoring board chosen by Fulton County is staffed by people you might expect — people with experience in administering elections. They include Ryan Germany, a former Raffensberger staffer now with an Atlanta law firm and a member of the American Bar Association’s election task force. That’s to say that, in choosing a monitoring board staffed by competent professionals with expertise in elections, Fulton County did the exact opposite of what election denial activists want — and the opposite of what the SEB’s MAGA majority was pushing for. 

Meanwhile, the board proposed by Johnston, King and Jeffares includes the following individuals: 

• Heather Honey, who was involved with the failed and insane Cyber Ninjas audit of election results in Arizona in 2020

• Erik Christenson, an election denial activist and Trump donor with no experience administering elections who runs a moving company

• Lawrence “Larry” Duckworth, a tech company CEO who has donated to Trump

• Frank Ryan, a former Pennsylvania state representative who supported the fake elector scheme in 2020 as well as general lies about elections in his home state and elsewhere

• Robert Barker, a Georgia lawyer who represents a defendant in the RICO election interference case against Trump

• Elizabeth Ann Delmas, a member of the prominent (and unhinged) denial organization, VoterGA

• Salleigh Grubbs, who is chair of the Cobb County GOP, the “author” of the “examination” certification rule that allows county election officials to demand a virtually unlimited number of election materials before certifying results, and who is just a generally out-there denial activist who pals around with Kandiss Taylor. Taylor is a Georgia GOP district chair who has been credibly accused of anti-semitism for her ties to the far-right media personality Stew Peters. In 2020, Grubbs chased a truck she thought contained shredded ballots. It did not. 

• Christine Probst, who has managed GOP poll watchers and has challenged voter registrations in Fulton County

• Mark Davis, an election denial activist who writes for the far-right publication, the Federalist, and has challenged the registration of 10,000 voters in Georgia

• Dave Baker, a director with the Faith and Freedom Coalition who has worked on voter registration challenges

• Aileen Nakamura, an “election observer” who has advocated for the use of only paper ballots based on her belief in conspiracies about voting machines

• George Balbona, who described himself to me as an “election integrity advocate before I had ever heard of the term,” and in a brief exchange actually sounds like a normal guy who has a deep interest in securing elections. Kind of an outlier here, it seems.

• Garland Favorito, head of VoterGA and perhaps the state’s most prominent election denier. Favorito is a decades-long conspiracy theorist who wrote a book that sought to expose everything from the JFK assassination to chemtrails. Really out-there stuff. Favorito is heavily featured in a new segment and story from CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan.

So, that’s who Janice Johnston, Janelle King and Rick Jeffares think should be overseeing elections in Fulton County — with the exception of Balbona, a murderer’s row of some of the most extreme and unhinged election deniers Georgia has to offer. They’re probably not going to get what they want. Fulton County has already signed a contract with the alternative monitoring team that includes Ryan Germany, but this won’t stop the SEB’s MAGA activists from continuing to bring up the issue. And it certainly won’t stop them from making unfounded fraud claims come November. It’s all out there in the open if you look with the right pair of eyes.

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P.S. Again, many thanks to all our subscribers. We’re in the home stretch now — or at least what the national political press is calling the home stretch, even though it’s really not. Election Day is a beginning. The real battle — essentially for the future of American democracy, no joke — begins after November 5 and will continue apace until January 6. That’s the real D-Day, so I hope you’re ready for a long and very newsy few months. Godspeed.