Josh McKoon, the chair of the Georgia Republican Party, boasted at the state convention in late May that he had “very good news.”
Georgia Republicans had just orchestrated a takeover of the state election board, an unelected body that sets voting rules. With this new majority, Republicans could enact an agenda that would help former President Donald J. Trump win in November, Mr. McKoon said.
“I believe when we look back on Nov. 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,” he said.
Since the takeover, the Georgia State Election Board has approved a host of rules on certifications and investigations backed by right-wing election activists who claim, falsely, that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump. The moves underscore a sharp rightward turn for what is supposed to be an apolitical body and have alarmed Democrats, election officials and even some Republicans.
“Clearly, the Trump allies have learned their lessons from the failure of the attempted coup of 2020, and they’re starting earlier and attempting to burrow more deeply into the most vulnerable pieces of the election system,” said Norm Eisen, a longtime Washington lawyer and chair of the State Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonpartisan election watchdog group.
If there is another chaotic challenge to the election results this November, Georgia is shaping up to be a hot spot, as it was in 2020. Polls show a close race in the state. Trump-aligned election activists there are well organized. Republican county officials have already shown a willingness to adopt practices from the election denial wing of the party. And the state election board will almost certainly be at the center of the dispute.
Like similar entities in other states, Georgia’s elections board was established to be an independent agency that determines voting rules and issues guidance for poll workers to maintain order and integrity in elections without consideration of their political impact.
But the board’s new right-wing majority has instead aligned itself with the goals of conservative activists, drawing rebukes even from the Republican secretary of state. For example, the board this month issued a new rule that could empower local officials to refuse or delay certification of a county’s election results they deem questionable.
The majority also requested another investigation by the state attorney general into questions of impropriety in the 2020 election in Fulton County, allegations that have already been investigated on multiple occasions.
The three board members who voted to pass these rules have been accused by watchdog organizations and Democrats of working with Trump-aligned activists in preparation to reject the results of a presidential election if Trump loses.
Members of the board, however, see it differently.
“I’m not looking at this as I’m trying to do something that’s going to benefit Republicans, because that would be a very idiotic approach,” Janelle King, a Republican member of the board who was appointed in May, said in an interview. “What I’m looking at is, when the petition is presented in front of me, I’m listening to why. I’m listening to past performance what the issues may have been.”
The right-wing takeover of the Georgia State Election Board is a significant victory for conservative election activists who have spent the past four years looking for ways to influence the electoral infrastructure, with a focus on local institutions.
The three members of the Republican majority — Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Ms. King — earned praise from Mr. Trump at a rally two weeks ago, calling them out by name as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”
“They’re on fire,” Mr. Trump told the crowd.
A Hostile Takeover
It took just under a year for the State Election Board to fall into control of far-right election officials.
Throughout last year, Ms. Johnston was the lone member aligning with conservative activists. But in January of this year, Mr. Jeffares, a longtime friend of Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is being investigated over his role in helping to overturn the 2020 election, was appointed to the board and began siding with Ms. Johnston.
Mr. Jeffares, who declined to comment for this article, recently told The Guardian that “it makes me mad that we’ve been labeled” as election deniers.
In February, Ms. Johnston proposed a rule to end the popular no-excuse mail voting in the state and was joined by Mr. Jeffares, but they were outnumbered. Sara Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic member of the board, John Fervier, the chairman appointed by the Republican governor, and Edward Lindsey, another Republican member of the board, voted against the proposal.
Two weeks after that vote, the Georgia Republican Party passed a resolution banning lobbyists from serving on the state election board. (As a former representative and a lawyer, Mr. Lindsey was a registered lobbyist for multiple counties in the state.)
Amy Kremer, a committeewoman at the R.N.C. who helped organize the Jan. 6, 2021, rally, publicly called for his removal on Twitter. Marci McCarthy, the chairwoman of the DeKalb County Republican Party, also called for his resignation, along with other Trump-aligned groups across the country. And the Georgia Republican Party put a question on the primary ballot asking whether registered lobbyists should be banned from serving on the State Election Board.
After the pressure campaign, the dam broke — Mr. Lindsey resigned in May and Speaker Jon Burns appointed Ms. King.
The New Majority Gets to Work
With an effective majority, outside groups began to push their agendas to the board.
In April, the Election Research Institute, a right-wing group run by Heather Honey, an activist in Pennsylvania known for spreading conspiracy theories about elections, submitted a proposal to weaken certification requirements and allow counties to exclude results from individual precincts if there is evidence of discrepancies or malfeasance. While the rule did not pass, it received support from Ms. Johnston.
Ms. Johnston has also proposed a team to monitor Fulton County elections headed by Ms. Honey.
In July, Mr. McKoon sent Mr. Jeffares two new proposed rules — one on poll watchers and one on results reporting requirements — as well as one-page talking points for each rule, according to email records obtained by The New York Times. Mr. McKoon included Josh Helton, a senior adviser for election integrity at the Republican National Committee, and Alex Kaufman, a Republican lawyer in Georgia, on the emails. The Atlanta-Journal Constitution first reported the emails.
Mr. McKoon, in an interview, said the state party regularly reaches out to the board on ways to improve elections. “Of course, I’m going to interact with and contact members of the board to advocate for that position,” Mr. McKoon said. “I don’t think I would be doing this volunteer job correctly if I was not doing that.”
Board members themselves have been active in meetings of the right-wing election activist network. Ms. Johnston has attended at least three virtual meetings of the Election Integrity Network, the sprawling activist coalition helmed by the Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell, according to recordings of the meetings obtained by The Times.
In a meeting in May, Ms. Johnston said in a message that she had spent “two hours at the D.M.V. board meeting” and had been “invited to meet with the commissioner and secretary of state” to discuss helping election officials gain access to Department of Motor Vehicles databases.
During a presentation by the leader of the United Sovereign Americans, a right-wing group focused on election litigation, in another May meeting, Ms. Johnston again chimed in the comments.
“Please come to Georgia,” she wrote.
The Trump Influence
The former president has taken an intense interest in the Georgia state election board, an obscure entity and one unusual for a nominee for president to focus on so intently.
In multiple messages on Truth social, Mr. Trump has weighed in on the minutiae of state board of election meetings, including sharing the raw footage of a debate among board members at a public meeting.
The attention has concerned voting rights groups in Georgia.
“It is unusual for Trump to dive into details, so his specific praise for Georgia’s unelected State Election Board members is bizarre and should raise alarms,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the chief executive of Fair Fight, the left-leaning voting rights group. “Trump is continuing to meddle in our state’s election, which is extremely concerning.”
But Mr. Trump looms large over the members of the board.
Mr. Jeffares has told multiple people in Georgia government that he had a job in a future Trump administration, according to three people familiar with the conversations. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Mr. Jeffares clarified that he had pitched himself as a potential candidate for a regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency in a conversation with Brian Jack, the former White House political director in the Trump administration. But when Mr. Trump held a rally in Atlanta, only Ms. Johnston attended, seated just a few rows from the podium.
When Mr. Trump called out her name, she stood up and waved to the crowd. They responded with a lengthy ovation.
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