Georgia election denial official fakes voting against certification

Spalding County's Roy McClain got his MAGA bonafides for refusing to certify election results last year — but it was a farce.

The battle of certification of election results continues in Georgia (and elsewhere) and today at Rolling Stone I have a bizarre tale to tell about this issue.

An election denier who sits on the Spalding County board of elections, an hour south of Atlanta, publicly voted against certifying results of an election last year only to privately approve those results in an official government document that is then sent to the secretary of state. While the public “no” vote from Spalding County’s Roy McClain was reported — as have more than 30 other such instances of certification refusal from pro-Trump election deniers across the country in recent years — the fact that he’d actually approved certification has gone unreported, until now. 

Spalding County claims that this information has been available the entire time. The official document approving the results of last November’s election — called a “Certification of Results” — was physically posted at the elections office in the small town of Griffin. 

But at no point does it appear that McClain or anyone else in Spalding County attempted to correct the record about his misleading “no” vote. That is, until a few weeks ago.

That’s when McClain sent an email to his fellow members of the election board, election supervisor Kim Slaughter and county attorney Stephanie Windham. The subject line of the email: “Lies being told.” In the body, McClain wrote nothing, but he did provide a screenshot of a recent report from the watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) that detailed McClain’s “no” vote. Attached to the email was the Certification of Returns that McClain had signed the very same day as that vote, officially approving the results that he had just voted against. 

The CREW report also mentioned something that I reported in March at Rolling Stone — that McClain was so upset over the fact that Windham wouldn’t give him more time to hand count results that he stormed out of the elections office and had to be coaxed back in order for the board to have an official quorum and vote to certify the results. My sources tell me that Slaughter coaxed McClain back in that day, where he voted against certification as two other members of the board — one Democrat; one Republican — voted for it.

The emails I obtained recently show that Slaughter then weighed in on McClain’s claims of “Lies being told,” claiming that McClain McClain “gladly returned” to the meeting room for the certification vote. 

“Let’s put out fires where we can as we should all desire to do this for one another and our community,” Slaughter added in the email.

I of course pressed Slaughter, McClain and others in Spalding County on the specifics of that day when I wrote about it back in May. They, of course, did not respond. Last week, I pressed Slaughter, McClain and their fellow election deniers on the board about why McClain voted against certification only to privately approve it. They didn’t directly answer my questions. Instead, Slaughter told me the following: 

“In the future, it would be best to acquire knowledge of Spalding Elections information from the source of where it originates, the Office of the Board of Elections and Voter Registration.”

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McClain also appears to be the only election official in Georgia to have voted against certification of election results only to approve those results by signing the Certification of Returns. Copies of those documents in Cobb and DeKalb counties, which I obtained under public records requests, show that the election officials there who publicly voted against certification in recent years did not sign the Certification of Returns.

McClain and Slaughter offered no explanation of why they have apparently made no attempt to publicly correct the record about the certification of the November 2023 election, despite his “no” vote being reported on by media outlets and watchdog groups. 

No members of the public were there that day, as is practice for the task of certification, and the meeting was not recorded. The only proof of what happened in the meeting comes from the memories of those in attendance, scant meeting minutes that show how the members voted on certification, and a document that serves as official approval of the votes. After McClain voted against certification while silently approving it, he doubled down on his public-facing claim of denying certification by complaining about a letter sent by Democrats admonishing him for his vote. 

“I think everybody here knows that if you’re going to try to bully or intimidate somebody, I’m probably not the good candidate for that (sic),” McClain said of the letter at a February meeting of the election board. “So, I’ll take it for information, but I’m not going to put up with it, and if I feel that my oath says I have to do something, that’s what I’ll do, regardless of someone’s interpretation of what they think might’ve been in the law.”

Lawyers I spoke with say that McClain’s actions don’t represent an obvious violation of election or open meetings laws, but they do make me wonder whether a county election board member could, for instance, publicly vote for certification only to refuse to sign the Certification of Returns. 

“Voting against certification is not the same thing as signing the certification of returns,” Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger’s office, told me.

As to whether someone like McClain could, in the future, vote to certify results in public and then refuse to sign the official Certification of Returns behind closed doors, I guess that remains an open question.

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