While an obscure body like the Georgia State Election Board may not seem terribly important, last week’s news shows that it could play a pivotal role in interference efforts in the coming weeks and months. I’ve been reporting on the SEB for years now, and I’m one of the only reporters paying this close of attention. To support my work, from now until Election Day you can get 40 percent off Doom subscriptions, or drop a few dollars in our Coffee Fund.
Programming note: Head to Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Narrative Edge to hear my conversation about my book, If I am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened, with hosts Orlando Montoya and Peter Biello. Later this week, I’ll have more to share from the episode. For anyone interested, you can purchase the book here. If you choose to become a founding member of American Doom, I’ll send you a signed copy. Now, on to the news… - jg
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It was a big week last week for displays of unfounded election skepticism here in Georgia, and it’s important to know what it’s really all about.
Last week, the Georgia State Election Board (SEB) approved a resolution aimed at giving federal law enforcement access to the state’s voting machines and elections systems.
First, this resolution was not legally binding in any way. It was a display on the part of the SEB, a way for them to signal to the election denial community, ‘Hey, we’re doing something about all this.’ Secondly, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger will ignore the resolution and proceed with his election administration plan, which includes use of the state’s current voting machines.
By Friday, the board had apparently decided that the resolution wasn’t enough and sent a formal letter asking the Justice Department and Homeland Security to investigate. Except, it wasn’t even the whole board that made this decision. Instead, it was executive director James Mills, a lifelong Republican who has no experience in election administration and has a background as a state legislator and the owner of mini-storage businesses.
It’s Mills who is leading the charge on behalf of Georgia’s election denial movement — whose highest goals are seeing Raffensperger arrested for perceived crimes and forcing every Georgian to vote in every election with hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots. In other words, completely doing away with the state’s voting machines.
It’s the machines, operated by Dominion Voting, that last week’s resolution and letter are aimed at. (Elsewhere, election deniers have taken aim at another voting machine company, Smartmatic.) Both documents seek to get Trump administration lackeys at the DOJ and DHS under the hood of voting machines so they can look for any scintilla of evidence that the machines could be hacked or manipulated. How do I know this? Because this was the exact rationale for the Trump administration’s accessing of voting machines in Puerto Rico, as Reuters reported in great detail last week.
Those efforts were led by Kurt Olsen, a leader in the national election denial movement who was given special government employee status to carry out his hunt for widespread voter fraud. Olsen was the driving force behind the already-adjudicated election fraud claims that led to the FBI raid on a Fulton County elections warehouse in January.
“Olsen wanted to search for traces of Smartmatic code that, under his theory, would show how Venezuela or another foreign actor such as China could manipulate Dominion machines,” according to Reuters.
In the end, Olsen’s team told the White House that they didn’t find any evidence that the machines had been accessed or fraud had occurred. In fact, they didn’t even find any evidence that the machines could have been hacked or votes manipulated.
But that possibility remains the obsession of election deniers like Mills, and it’s why he is now asking the Trump administration to send lawyers and investigators to Georgia.
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In the last year, Mills has emerged as a bulldog on the board on behalf of the election denial movement. He is particularly adept in raising questions and concerns about things that he has seen people post about on Facebook, and then acting as if those issues are real threats to election security. This pattern became apparent when, a few months back, Mills saw someone comment about long polling lines in a heavily-Republican county and sent the SEB’s new investigator out to look into things.
Mills has allies in three of the board’s four other Republicans: Salleigh Grubbs, Janelle King, and the newly-appointed Carolyn Roddy.
That’s why it was so interesting to see that Mills didn’t even wait for Grubbs to approve the letter to the DOJ and DHS — which she certainly would have, considering she is such a vociferous believer in election conspiracies that she once chased a garbage truck that she incorrectly believed contained paper ballots. Instead, he sent the letter on his own, drawing a vocal rebuke from SEB chair and fellow Republican John Fervier, who is unflappable in the face of constant vitriol from Mills and election deniers, and rarely speaks to the press.
“We have no control over our executive director, and he does whatever the hell he wants to,” Fervier told Votebeat.
That much is certainly clear. It’s hard to tell who is actually manning the strings above Mills’ head. It could Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a hardcore Trump supporter who illegally tried to give away Georgia’s electoral college votes to the president in 2020. It could be election deniers in the Georgia legislature, like Sen. Max Burns or Sen. Greg Dolezal. Mills often boasts of his contact with legislators — relationships that have yet to provide the increased legal powers for the SEB that board members like Grubbs have been demanding.
Maybe Mills himself, who in the last year has emerged from the obscurity of his longtime position on the state’s parole board to become the face of the election denial movement on the SEB, is calling the shots.
Regardless, the loud display of last week’s resolution and letter is as much about trying to give the Trump administration (very flimsy) legal pretext to seize or access voting machines in Georgia as it is about making wild claims that the state’s election systems could be manipulated. Under Mills’ apparent theory, if the machines aren’t entirely secure, then lots of fraud is probably being committed. And if there’s lots of fraud, then the Democratic wins that are likely to come from November’s midterms shouldn’t count.
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