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

A MAGA takeover... Trumpian quid pro quo... More madness from new rules... The clock is ticking...

When the Georgia State Election Board meets tomorrow, it will come with more attention than has perhaps ever been paid to what was once a relatively obscure, quasi-governmental body. That last identifier is important, because the SEB is now more “quasi” than governmental — voting rights advocates say the SEB is now simply an extension of the Trump campaign, a “MAGA government body,” as Max Flugrath of Fair Fight put it last week.

In the last two weeks, the SEB passed a rule that gives more power to county election officials to refuse to certify results. The board reopened a case into Fulton County centering on double-counted ballots that investigations found had no meaningful impact on the outcome of the 2020 election. The SEB also passed a rule that will require hand-counting of ballots. This rule will slow the vote-tallying process, Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger said on Friday. 

Now, the board will consider a rule that requires hand-counted paper ballots to be used en masse, among other rules to be discussed tomorrow, including one on certification. But it doesn’t look like one of the board’s Republicans will be there: Rick Jeffares told me that he’ll be in Europe for the next few weeks.

Jeffares is one of the three Republicans who Trump shouted out at his Atlanta rally on Aug. 3. Since then, Jeffares voted for the new certification rule and other policies implemented by the board at the behest of election deniers. For a story of mine last week at the Guardian, Jeffares also told me that he had solicited a Trump administration job, and that he got his position on the SEB thanks to Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, which I reported for the Bulwark. You might remember Jones from his involvement in the fake elector scheme in which Republicans in Georgia and several other states tried to submit their own electoral votes to Congress to illegally install Trump as president. (I first exposed Jeffares for his election denier beliefs when I came across his Facebook page in February.)

Since Jeffares opened up to me about his solicitation of the Trump administration job and his placement on the SEB thanks to Jones, he’s come under heavy criticism. On Friday, a Democratic former member of the Fulton County election board, Cathy Woolard, filed an ethics complaint against Jeffares and the two other MAGA members of the SEB, Dr. Janice Johnston and Janelle King. Woolard said Jeffares’s attempted solicitation of a director role at the EPA with a Trump campaign aide was part of the MAGA trio’s “willingness to disregard state law for partisan ends — and potentially for personal gain as well.” Woolard is asking Gov. Brian Kemp to initiate hearings on the slew of issues raised in her complaint. 

The Trump campaign aide who Jeffares had floated himself to for the EPA role has turned on Jeffares, telling the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “anyone lobbying for a role in a future administration is only hurting President Trump and themselves, and distracting from the campaign before us.” (Political translation: I am covering my own ass.) The chair of the Georgia GOP, Josh McKoon, however, has stuck by Jeffares, calling my reporting “smears from the left-wing Guardian newspaper” in an interview with the Politically Georgia podcast.

McKoon is another name you might remember from one of my last stories on the SEB, just a month ago. Then, the SEB had held what American Oversight called an “illegal” meeting at which only Jeffares, King and Johnston were in attendance. Ahead of the meeting, I obtained emails to Jeffares from McKoon. Attached to those emails were talking points on rules being proposed by election deniers — here was McKoon, telling Jeffares what to say and what rules to pass. If that weren’t enough — the chairman of Georgia’s Republican Party telling a sitting member of the State Election Board what to do — the emails showed that coordination on Georgia election rules goes much higher in the Republican party: CC’d on the emails was Josh Helton, the “election integrity” chief of the Republican National Committee.

I asked McKoon to explain how my factual reporting on what Jeffares had told me —and you can listen to the audio from our conversation above for yourself — amounted to “smears.” I also asked both him and Jeffares detailed questions about any conversations they may have had with the Trump campaign or the RNC regarding election rules in Georgia. Jeffares insisted he has not talked to either organization about Georgia election rules, which we should probably make a mental note of for future lawsuits and/or RICO election interference cases. McKoon did not respond.

Jeffares took no responsibility for his own actions — actions that have brought him unwanted scrutiny from Democrats and Republicans alike for his attempted solicitation of a federal job in a second Trump administration around the same time he began implementing election denier rules that favor Trump at the SEB. “I blame y’all for taking a nothing story just to benefit y’all’s gains,” Jeffares told me in an email, noting that he’ll be out for the next few weeks while traveling in Europe.

I should note that the conversation in which Jeffares admitted seeking the EPA role as well as revealing that Jones had personally asked him to serve on the SEB came as a result of Jeffares calling me. For my Guardian piece last week, I had emailed all the members of the SEB with a list of questions on a variety of fronts. In response, Jeffares gave me a ring, we talked for 30 minutes, and I told him that I was recording the conversation. Now, he says it’s my fault that I reported what he told me.

Meanwhile, Raffensberger has said that the SEB is operating outside of its authority, and that the hand count rule it has already passed will prompt delays on election night. “I guess they want to see elections take until 3 a.m.,” Raffensberger told WSB-TV in Atlanta. “I don’t know what their intentions are, but they are going to delay results.”

Without Jeffares tomorrow, Johnston and King may not have enough votes to continue passing rules that benefit Trump and are pushed by election deniers. But that surely won’t be the end of what is becoming a messy fight over rules affecting millions of Georgia voters as we inch ever onward toward election day.

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