On October 8, about two dozen conservative activists gathered in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol, where a meeting of the state election board was taking place. A US Army veteran named Richard Schroeder, from Hall County, in the northeastern part of the state, led the group in prayer. Schroeder, who testified that day, was a regular presence at the board meetings, where he has spread debunked claims about election security and once identified himself as a poll worker in charge of tabulating votes.
Schroeder first asked God for forgiveness for allowing the “evil” of migrants and transgender people to permeate the country. Then he turned to voting machines.
“Nobody’s got more votes than President [Donald] Trump ever in the world,” Schroeder said. He and other members of the prayer circle wore shirts that read “IYKYK dvscorp08!,” referring to an alleged password to Georgia’s voting machines that was obtained by right-wing election deniers and spread online.
“Our votes have been stolen,” he continued in prayer. “The Dominion voting machines have taken our God-given dominion and have been selecting winners—not electing winners.”
“Amen,” said Salleigh Grubbs, chair of the Cobb County GOP.
“Amen,” said David Hancock, a member of the Gwinnett County board of elections.
The activists were part of a small but influential network of election deniers who had successfully convinced the board’s pro-Trump majority to launch probes into unfounded claims of election fraud. They also persuaded the board, which issues guidance to county election officials and investigates problems with the voting process, to pass a series of controversial rules in the runup to the November election that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox recently deemed “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” In August, Trump had touted the trio of sympathetic board members by name at a campaign rally, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”
The rules would have led to the spread of misinformation and could have been used as a justification not to certify results, Democrats and voting rights advocates warned. The changes also would have slowed the counting of votes, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “Everything we’ve been fighting for since 2020 has been to give the voter quicker response, quicker results,” Raffensperger said on October 14, noting that one of the board’s rules, requiring a hand count of ballots on Election Day, could have delayed the reporting of results into the wee hours of the morning. “Really, that just becomes a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.”
Democrats and election watchdogs breathed a sigh of relief when Georgia courts blocked the Trump-inspired rules, including two that would have given local election officials more power to attempt to block certification. But they should not rest easy, as significant peril still remains. At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state. And over the past four years, Trump-aligned election deniers have asserted their power throughout local GOP organizations, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog.
Together, these MAGA Republicans could throw the election in Georgia—and thus the nation—into disarray. Officials at the county level, for instance, could still attempt to refuse to certify the results if Kamala Harris carries Georgia, while the state election board could amplify false allegations and launch bogus investigations supporting Trump’s inevitable claims of a stolen election. And those are just a couple of the nightmarish scenarios that could unfold next week.
Whatever transpires in the November 5 election, the radicalization of the board into a nakedly partisan arm of Trump’s election denial machine shows that our democratic system rests on a knife’s edge. What took place in Georgia can—and is—happening throughout the country. The takeover of much of Georgia’s election apparatus offers a distressing vision of the future if Trump returns to the White House, one in which the federal government is run by zealots whose only qualification is their fealty to Trump.
“That’s exactly what Project 2025 is all about,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the state election board’s lone Democrat. “It is about replacing the bureaucrats within the federal government with political employees whose sole requirement for the job is loyalty to the president.” Tindall Ghazal points out that some of those people “don’t understand and don’t care about what the law requires. They’re completely unconstrained in their actions.”
The path to this troubling reality began on election night 2020, when Republican activists began spreading claims of widespread voter fraud. Believing that Trump ballots had been thrown out, a crowd gathered at an election office in Griffin, the seat of Spalding County, an hour south of Atlanta. Led by a county commissioner who filmed election workers through the glass, some in the crowd eventually climbed into a dumpster to find the supposedly discarded ballots. In Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, Grubbs, the Cobb County GOP chair, chased a truck she believed contained shredded ballots. In an Atlanta ballot-counting facility, plastic bins under a folding table were labeled the infamous “suitcases full of ballots” that supposedly flipped the election in favor of Joe Biden. In the small town of Douglas in south Georgia, a county election board official claimed that voting machines had flipped votes. The state became ground zero for election fraud claims.
None of it proved true. The dumpster in Griffin contained no ballots—just empty ballot envelopes that had been thrown away by election workers. The truck in Marietta did not have shredded ballots, Grubbs eventually discovered. The boxes under the table in Atlanta didn’t hold ballots for Biden that were double-counted to seal his victory over Trump. Instead, they just held regular ballots that were opened when workers were told by the secretary of state’s office to stay late and count more votes. The Dominion voting machines Grubbs and others prayed over never actually flipped votes—in Douglas or anywhere else—but they were broken into by local officials and attorneys working on behalf of Trump.
At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state.
From these debunked origins, the claims of a stolen election grew, spreading to include other outlandish allegations of a plot that supposedly involved Italians and Venezuelans hacking voting machines and the forgery of untold thousands of ballots that were placed in drop boxes by “mules.”
Top Georgia election officials repeatedly discredited claims of a stolen election, as did multiple legal proceedings and court judgments. Three separate counts of ballots reaffirmed Biden’s 2020 victory. Voting-machine companies won major settlements against Fox News and Newsmax for airing false claims about their machines. A Fulton County judge threw out a lawsuit filed by DeKalb County Republicans challenging the security of the state’s voting machines. Two Georgia poll workers in Fulton County won a $148 million defamation judgment against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading the myth of “suitcases” of ballots. Jenna Ellis, another top lawyer for Trump, took a plea agreement in a wide-ranging election interference case and admitted she made false statements about illegal ballots being counted.
Nonetheless, Trump-aligned Republicans throughout the state and nation began amplifying these claims and calling for investigations. They also got to work making sure “the steal” couldn’t happen again, beginning at the local level, where influential figures like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn were encouraging Trump supporters to take over local election boards. In 12 counties, local representatives in the state legislature passed laws that remade county election boards in favor of Republicans. One of the bills, HB 769, transformed the Spalding County board of elections from a mundane government body on which Black Democrats held a majority to an activist board controlled by white Republicans who amplified Trump’s election lies.
When Spalding County officials first heard about HB 769 in the spring of 2021, they were confused. Typically, when the county’s representatives in the state legislature introduce a bill that affects the county, local officials are part of the process. But that wasn’t the case with this measure, which changed how the members of the board of elections were chosen. The board had always been essentially split between the parties—Democrats got two appointments and Republicans got two, with the foursome then choosing a fifth member to serve as chair. But HB 769 changed that—the board’s fifth member would now be chosen by local judges in a closed-door process and secret vote. In May 2021, the judges chose Republican Jim Newland, giving election deniers control over the board.
Two of the new Republicans—Ben Johnson and Roy McClain—believed Trump had rightfully won the election. Johnson is a Trump-supporting QAnon fan and Elon Musk aficionado who frequently posts on Facebook about various right-wing culture war grievances and conspiracies, including that voting machines were subject to hacking and fraud. McClain has pushed for automatic hand recounts of all elections and in 2023 made a public showing of his refusal to certify results while privately signing off on certification, fulfilling his legal duty while maintaining his MAGA bonafides. Both Johnson and McClain were involved in a brief but failed effort in August 2021 to hire an Atlanta law firm to help them access voting machines in their hunt for evidence of election fraud. The plan was nixed when Raffensperger’s office warned them that it would be illegal to allow a third party to access election equipment.
Even in counties where election boards weren’t overhauled to favor Republicans, election deniers still had a presence. In Fulton County, home to Atlanta, two election deniers sit on the election board. Boards in the Atlanta metro counties of Cobb, DeKalb, Floyd, and Gwinnett also include skeptics who, while not holding a majority, frequently amplify misinformation about elections. By early 2024, at least 21 election deniers were in place on election boards in nine counties.
As election deniers won seats on election boards, they also gained power in local GOP chapters. In Spalding County, Republicans who refused to go along with Trump’s claims of a stolen election were pushed out of the local party. There and elsewhere, Republicans refused to give campaign funds raised from donors to Gov. Brian Kemp for his unwillingness to toe the line on Trump’s lies about election fraud, said Mary Braun, a Republican in Spalding County who told Mother Jones that Johnson and some local party members had a “vendetta” against her for opposing the false claims spread by her colleagues. (Johnson and other members of the Spalding County election board, along with its election supervisor and county attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.)
Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers set their sights on perhaps the biggest prize of all, the state election board. In March 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tucked a provision into a sweeping new voter suppression bill that removed Raffensperger as chair and a voting member of the board, a previously obscure body of appointed officials whose meetings were scantly attended and typically mundane. Raffensperger had become a leading target of election deniers for defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election and refusing Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory. In addition to removing Raffensperger, Georgia lawmakers gave the state election board the authority to investigate the secretary of state for his handling of the 2020 investigation—and virtually anything else the board dreamed up.
“This was punishment for him not obeying the president and revealing that conversation,” Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic member of the board, said of Trump’s infamous phone call to Raffensperger, pressuring him to overturn the 2020 election.
After ousting Raffensperger, influential state Republicans continued to remake the board in Trump’s image by pushing out establishment Republicans and replacing them with election deniers. In 2022, the Georgia GOP used its appointment to place Dr. Janice Johnston on the board. (Each party gets an appointment to the five-member board, both chambers of the legislature pick a member, and the legislature chooses the chair unless it is out of session, in which case the governor appoints the chair.) A former obstetrician, Johnston served as a poll watcher in Fulton County in 2020 alongside Julie Adams, an election denier who currently sits on Fulton’s election board. Johnston began frequently attending Fulton County board meetings after the election, spreading false claims about the 2020 vote count.
In January 2024, the state Senate appointed Rick Jeffares, a former GOP state senator, to replace a well-regarded conservative election attorney Matthew Mashburn, who had opposed investigating Raffensperger. Jeffares was handpicked by his neighbor, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a fake elector for Trump in 2020, who said Jones urged him to “be strong” on the board. (Jones did not respond to a request for comment.) Jeffares had spread memes on social media questioning the outcome of the 2020 election, including false claims that dead people had voted by mail, and had few obvious qualifications for the job. The owner of three wastewater treatment companies, Jeffares went on to solicit a director position at the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration through a campaign intermediary while serving in his role on the State Election Board, which Democrats said raised ethical questions about his independence on the board.
At that point, election deniers were one vote short of a majority on the board. So they began to pressure Edward Lindsey, a lawyer and former Republican member of the state House, who had also voted against bogus investigations into the 2020 outcome, to resign. Lindsey’s term was up in May 2024, but he told Republican House Speaker Jon Burns that he was willing to serve through the election to maintain continuity on the board.
“I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.”
At a board meeting in February 2024, Johnston introduced a resolution asking the legislature to repeal no-excuse absentee voting, which MAGA Republicans blamed for Trump’s defeat in 2020, and to limit mail voting to those who were disabled, over 75, or out of town. Lindsey voted against it, blocking the resolution from passing. “We should not as a board, only a few months before the 2024 election…start to limit the ability of people to vote, particularly people who find it most difficult to stand in line because of certain life situations,” he said.
That infuriated Trump, who privately told Georgia Republicans that Lindsey had “got to go,” according to Rolling Stone. Local GOP chapters called on Lindsey to step down. In May 2024, Lindsey voted against referring officials in Fulton County to the attorney general for prosecution over their handling of the 2020 election. Election deniers who packed the state board meeting responded with jeers and carried signs that said, “Time to Go Ed!”
A few weeks after that vote, and just days before Georgia Republicans met for their state convention, the House speaker announced he was replacing Lindsey with Janelle King, a conservative media personality with no election experience who was married to a Republican candidate who lost the 2022 GOP primary for US Senate to Herschel Walker. King tweeted on election night in 2020 that she had “questions!!” about the “vote counting process” and later said on her podcast that she opposed no-excuse absentee voting.
The MAGA takeover over the board was complete. “I believe when we look back on November 5, 2024, we’re going to say getting to that 3–2 election integrity–minded majority on the state election board made sure that we had the level playing field to win this election,” Georgia Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon said at the party’s convention after King was appointed to the board.
The takeover of the state board went mostly without notice until August, when Trump praised Johnston, Jeffares, and King during his Atlanta rally, saying they were “on fire” while going on a 10-minute tirade against Kemp for refusing to overturn the 2020 election. Johnston sat in the second row and stood and waved to the crowd when Trump name-checked her. (Johnston, Jeffares, and King declined to comment for this article.)
With mainstream Republicans out of the way, the board’s pro-Trump majority quickly got to work. State election board meetings became election denial symposiums, where conspiracy theorists spoke for hours about their demands for investigations and rule changes. Anyone can introduce a rule to the board, but in recent months, almost all of the new rules proposed have come from the network of election skeptics that includes some of the people who held a prayer vigil at the state Capitol in October. Between September 2022 and May 2024, no new rules were introduced. Since then, election denial activists and officials have introduced 31 rules for the board to consider. Of those, 15 have passed or are under consideration by the board.
Days after Trump’s August visit to the state, the board passed its first controversial rule change. It came from Adams, the Fulton County election board member who served as a poll watcher with Johnston in 2020 and had refused to certify the state’s May primary election. Adams works with the Tea Party Patriots, which helped organize the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection. She also serves as regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election and was on the call in which Trump demanded Raffensperger reverse Biden’s victory. Finally, Adams is a member of a state network of activists and officials called the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. The rule Adams introduced, which was eventually blocked by a state court, could have allowed local officials to refuse to certify election results if a “reasonable inquiry” determined that fraud had occurred. The rule did not spell out what a “reasonable inquiry” entailed, and voting rights advocates warned that it could be used as a pretext by GOP officials not to certify the results if a Democrat won Georgia.
At another contentious board meeting a few weeks later, Grubbs, the GOP chair of Cobb County, introduced a rule that allowed county election board members to request a virtually unlimited amount of records and documents relating to voting machines and vote tabulation before certifying results—what became known as the “examination” certification rule. The measure, which passed 3–2, was a welcome addition to officials like Adams in Fulton County and David Hancock in Gwinnett County, both of whom had demanded scores of records before refusing to certify results in recent years.
In abstaining from a vote to certify the results of both a May primary and a runoff election in June 2024, Adams said she had not received election records and documents she wanted to inspect for evidence of fraud. Cathy Woolard, at the time the Democratic chair of the Fulton County board, said Adams had received extensive records and documents related to the collection and tabulation of votes.
“Julie asked for these things with great authority, but she has no idea what she’s looking at,” Woolard told Mother Jones. “When she gets the records, she goes outside in the hallway and calls somebody. I can’t quite figure it out; the only thing I can come up with is, they just want to be right. They want to be right for Trump so they can say, ‘See, I told you guys, you cheated.’ Nothing of the sort happened.” (Adams did not respond to a request for comment.) This has led Democratic officials and voting rights groups to allege that Adams and her fellow election deniers at the local level are coordinating with national Republicans to enact skewed rules that could rig the state for Trump. Adams continues to push for more power to refuse to certify results as part of a lawsuit she filed with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute.
“Here’s what I think they really want,” Woolard says. “I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.”
“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario. I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.”
Finally, in late September, just weeks before early voting began, the state election board approved another rule that would have required poll workers to “reconcile” the number of ballots cast on Election Day with the number of voters who checked in at every precinct in the state. This time-consuming task—referred to as a hand count—would have slowed the tallying of returns throughout the state, Raffensperger said. He accused the board of engaging in “activist rulemaking” and, along with Attorney General Chris Carr, also a Republican, said the board was both acting outside of its authority and passing rules that were in direct conflict with Georgia election law.
The board’s MAGA majority had overstepped the law. Amid a national outcry, its rule changes were blocked by Fulton County judges as early voting began. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the Georgia State Supreme Court declined to reinstate the rules before November.
Trump supporters throughout Georgia denounced the state Supreme Court’s decision. McKoon, the state GOP chair, called the rules “common sense” on X, claiming they would enhance election security. He blamed “Democrats and their allies” for the court’s ruling, even though the court is composed solely of conservative justices.
But court rulings can do only so much to restrain a movement that has already shown how far it will go to undermine democratic norms.
Hancock said in an email that Gwinnett County had passed its own ordinance requiring the release of a lengthy list of documents that he and other election board members could inspect before certifying results in November.
“Even if the policy is somehow revoked, I will still be looking at these documents,” Hancock vowed in the wake of a judge’s decision that the “examination” certification rule conflicted with Georgia election law. (He did not respond to a request to explain his comments.)
Despite a separate court ruling in October reaffirming that election certification is mandatory for county officials, Tindall Ghazal worries that some counties under the sway of pro-Trump activists could still attempt to refuse to certify results “in a bad-faith way.”
A nightmare scenario in which numerous county election board members refuse to certify results could require Carr, the attorney general, to step in, filing court orders known as writs of mandamus to force officials to certify. Carr has tried to have it both ways when it comes to pro-Trump election deniers, his critics say. He sent a letter to the State Election Board saying many of its rules were illegal, including the hand-counting rule. But an attorney in Carr’s office also defended the state election board in a separate lawsuit over the certification rules that were challenged by Democrats. Moreover, Carr shielded Kemp from responsibility over the board when Democrats alleged ethics violations on the part of Johnston, Jeffares, and King in a lawsuit. In a motion to dismiss the suit, Carr wrote that Kemp didn’t have the authority to consider removing the members.
“He’s less solid” than Raffensperger, state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, said of Carr. “He’s not an election denier, however, he’s planning to run for governor and has to contend with that base who believes the election was stolen.”
Widespread certification refusals could cause Kemp to miss a crucial federal deadline on December 11. That’s the day Kemp will have to certify slates of presidential electors for whoever wins Georgia’s popular vote. Unlike in 2020, when Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to defeat Biden, it could be Kemp, who has backed Trump’s presidential bid despite the abuse he has received from the former president, getting a call from Trump urging him not to certify Harris electors.
Missing the December 11 deadline is one of the scenarios that might allow congressional Republicans to reject certification of a Harris win—and install Trump regardless of how Americans voted, according to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), an election law expert and former member of the congressional January 6 committee.
“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario,” Raskin said in an interview. “I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.” If Georgia misses the deadline to certify its electoral votes, depriving either candidate of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where a majority of House delegations, not a majority of members, choose the winner. Because Republicans control a majority of those delegations, that could allow them to install Trump as president in a disputed election.
Courts have dulled the Georgia election board’s fangs for the moment. But in the longer term, the threats to fair elections continue. The trio of Johnston, Jeffares, and King appear to be laying the groundwork to potentially take over election administration in Fulton County, the epicenter of past and ongoing election lies. The board could also pressure Georgia’s General Assembly to enact more voter suppression laws or give them the power to certify election results instead of the secretary of state. Recently, Johnston was voted vice chair of the board.
“Despite a judge blocking their unconstitutional rules changes, the MAGA board members continue plotting ways to plunge our election into chaos,” said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a progressive voting rights organization.
Johnston has already sown distrust about the results in Fulton County, questioning the legitimacy of a monitoring team that is overseeing election administration there as part of the county’s punishment for erroneously double-counting ballots in 2020. (About 3,600 ballots were double-counted in Fulton County in 2020 but were found not to have changed the results of the election.) Johnston had proposed her own monitoring team that would oversee elections in Fulton, what Flugrath called an attempt to “force partisan monitors onto the county, with the ultimate goal of undermining confidence in the election, to provide Trump fodder to claim fraud if and when he loses.”
Instead, the county chose a monitoring team that includes Ryan Germany, a former staffer in Raffensperger’s office, who is a frequent target of election deniers because he defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election and debunked conspiracies about ballot counting in Fulton. “Will the Ryan Germany Monitoring Team account for all absentee ballots?” Johnston posted on X.
Perhaps most importantly, the board could amplify disinformation spread by Trump and his MAGA allies, like US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has falsely claimed that voting machines “switched” votes during the state’s early voting period. In reality, the incident Greene referenced happened as a result of a Republican voter who made an error on her own ballot, but Greene’s post on X went viral nonetheless, garnering nearly 4 million views.
Election deniers at the county level—influenced by the likes of Greene and members of the state board—could use false claims of fraud to refuse certification in defiance of the law, furthering the distrust of the election process that Trump’s movement has weaponized so successfully.
“The only reason not to to certify is to provide fodder for an election challenge and for the disinformation grist mill,” Tindall Ghazal says. “Disinformation is what led to January 6.”
