Georgia election board grants more power for local officials to deny results. RNC pushing 'illegal' voter purges.

Republicans in Georgia continue to remake the state's election rules in their favor — and push out voters and results they don't like.

The Georgia State Election Board on Monday passed more rules pushed by election denial activists, including yet another rule related to certifying results that could hold up the tallying of votes and prevent states from determining who wins November election — possibly leaving the decision up to courts or Congress. 

The rule passed today requires election boards to analyze precinct returns to look for inconsistencies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters who voted in an election. It would seem like these numbers should always add up, but experts say there’s a variety of reasons why inconsistencies exist, especially at precincts that see large numbers of voters, like those in major cities. 

“Ballots getting stuck in scanners and overlooked, citizens checking in to vote and then discontinuing the process before finalizing their vote, memory sticks failing to upload, election systems being slow to update that a provisional ballot has been corrected” — all could result in the number of ballots not matching up with the number of voters, six election experts told ProPublica, which previewed Monday’s meeting and exposed the rule’s origin as the work of Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network and election denial activists in Georgia. 

Now, county election officials in Georgia will have another means to deny certification. Already, county election officials could refuse to certify results if they decide a “reasonable inquiry” is necessary to investigate irregularities or fraud. That vague phase — “reasonable inquiry” — allows local election officials to use just about any claims of fraud they want, however specious, to hold up certification based on those claims. The reasonable inquiry rule went into effect just two weeks ago. 

On Monday, those county election officials — at least 19 of whom are full-throated election deniers, as I’ve previously reported — were given the power to refuse certification if there is even a single discrepancy between the number of voters and the number of ballots cast at a voting precinct. 

Discrepancies are more likely to occur in Democratic counties than rural ones, the experts told ProPublica. That’s because Democratic counties tend to have higher populations, which means more voters and more possibilities for errors. Election deniers see this as evidence of fraud. Others, including election experts, see this as an obvious result of larger numbers of voters in Democratic areas, inevitably resulting in discrepancies. 

John Fervier, the chair of the State Election Board and a Republican, voted against the rule, saying it could circumvent the processing of late-returning ballots. In conjunction with the certification rule based on “reasonable inquiry,” Fervier expressed concerns that election officials would engage in an “unlimited search for documents.” Fervier also said that today’s certification rule was simply outside the authority of the State Election Board.

“I believe these types of decisions must be left up to the legislature, not to this board,” Fervier said. “We are not elected officials and we should not create law.”

Fervier was joined by the board’s lone Democrat, Sara Tindall-Ghazal, in voting against the rule. They were outvoted by the board’s MAGA majority of Dr. Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King. 

That was expected to occur. But a relative surprise came when the person who proposed the rule brought some perhaps familiar names to argue for the rule at today’s meeting, which was held online. Bridget Thorne, a Fulton County commissioner who George Chidi at the Guardian exposed as an election denier in April, brought along a trio of speakers to argue for the new certification rule. They were Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, pro-Trump election conspiracy theorist Ken Cucinelli and Georgia lawyer Harry MacDougald. In February 2023, I tied MacDougald to efforts to prove election fraud conspiracies in the 2020 election — efforts that may have led to the illegal breach of election equipment in Coffee County.

Johnston also provided insight into the Republicans who support broader powers for local election officials to deny certification of results. Not surprisingly, they include the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute (AFPI). In arguing to pass the rule brought by Thorne on Monday, Johnston read a letter submitted by Kenneth Blackwell of the AFPI. The organization is suing on behalf of Fulton County’s Julie Adams for even more power to deny certification, as American Doom reported in June. Adams has worked for Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, bringing a nice, circular element to all of this election denier madness. Johnston also noted that former U.S. Sen. David Perdue is in support of the new certification rule. 

Several election supervisors from counties throughout Georgia spoke out against the rule, but to no avail. They simply could not overcome the three-vote majority of Johnston, Jeffares and King. The rule also requires that counts of ballots and registered voters must be completed by 3 p.m. on the Friday following the election, something that is “in direct contrast of state rules and state laws,” according to Travis Doss, the election director in Richmond County, who spoke against the rule. Currently, state law allows for certification to be completed by 5 p.m  that same day. The new rule “will lead to vote totals being inaccurate,” Doss said.

The board also passed a rule that will require the state and counties to provide lists of eligible voters before early voting begins. The rule was proposed by Lucia Frazier, who has spoken at State Election Board meetings before. (She doesn’t really ring a bell to me, and I have a pretty good database of Georgia election deniers in my head.) Frazier said she proposed her rule “to fulfill citizen oversight duty.”

The plain language reason for Frazier’s rule is that election deniers have seized upon voter rolls as susceptible to fraud. Deniers believe that many ineligible voters remain on the rolls and are illegally voting for Democrats. They believe that by having access to state and county lists of eligible voters, they’ll be able to more easily identify ineligible voters and have them removed.

These challenges to voter eligibility have been conducted en masse in recent years by Republicans and election denier groups. They’re now the subject of a New Georgia Project lawsuit that alleges roughly 1,000 voters have illegally been removed from voter rolls in violation of the National Voting Rights Act. In a filing on Friday, the Republican National Committee is seeking to intervene in the lawsuit, arguing on Trump’s behalf that the voter purges should continue, I reported today for Rolling Stone. 

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P.S. Well, yesterday was insane. I didn’t leave my computer for more than five minutes from 7 a.m. till 9. p.m. — covering the SEB plus exposing the RNC plans to continue purging Georgia voters from rolls. I’m almost through my second month of what has felt like nonstop breaking news — the RNC, Sonya Massey, Georgia election madness, election deniers throughout the South, what else? I can’t remember. Oh, an exclusive on Arizona election madness, too. Just a reminder that I’m an independent journalist and the only person covering the issue of local election denial officials this comprehensively. In fact, I’ve compiled a list of almost 100 election deniers working as county election officials in 11 states. You can support my work by subscribing to American Doom for as little as $5 a month. New subscribers in the U.S. can grab this American Doom sticker. You can put it on your water bottle, get asked what it’s all about, and then get sucked into some conspiracy-driven conversation about election fraud if you want. I do not recommend!