New rules from GOP-majority election board could cause disarray in battleground Georgia
Atlanta (CNN) — The once-wonky Georgia State Election Board has burst into the limelight this year as a new Republican majority – made up of a retired obstetrician, a former state senator who put out feelers for a Trump administration job and a right-wing media personality – push ahead with new rules that could create chaos in November.
The reshaping of the election board in one of the most critical battleground states of 2024 highlights how some Republicans who cast doubt on the 2020 presidential election results have now taken on prominent roles driving election rules and, in some areas, overseeing elections.
With less than two months before Election Day, three Republicans on the five-member board are pushing through new rules that could jeopardize election certification, particularly if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the state, election experts and voting rights groups said.
“We can’t be doing this at the last minute because it creates chaos. And chaos undermines confidence in our elections, full stop,” said Sarah Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the board. She has kept a low profile since she was appointed in 2021 but has recently emerged in the press to try to counter the election board’s sharp right turn.
The board is set to consider another slate of new rules at its September 20 meeting.
“They’re not taking the advice of attorneys, they’re not taking the advice of election administrators – who are really critical in this whole calculus – and they’re certainly not listening to anybody who doesn’t think that the elections are rigged,” she said of the three Republicans driving the raft of rule changes.
The five-person election board was once led by Georgia’s secretary of state. But after 2020, former President Donald Trump fought to overturn his loss in the Peach State, pressuring Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the thousands of votes Trump needed to win. Raffensperger refused, and in the aftermath, the GOP-led state legislature removed the secretary as a member of the board.
“The state election board is a mess,” Raffensperger told reporters recently.
Defending the changes
Republican Janelle King, a media personality and the newest member of the board, has also become its most vocal defender. She was appointed in May by Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns and has since shrugged aside criticism and ethics complaints that the board’s recent moves have generated.
“I don’t care because I know we haven’t done anything wrong,” King told CNN in an interview. “This is a method of trying to weaken the Republican side by making it seem like we’re out here trying to steal elections. There’s no win for me to steal the election for anybody.”
King insisted she does not believe the 2020 election was stolen. But she has backed several of the board’s new rules, including a controversial change allowing partisans who serve on local election boards to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying election results.
The state election board in Georgia does not certify the results of any election. But it makes rules that guide election administrators and the local boards that certify results before they are sent up to the secretary of state and then the governor. The state election board also investigates election irregularities.
King and other Republicans have argued recent rule changes are necessary to ensure vote counts are accurate and local election board members have the information they need to feel confident certifying the vote.
“The concerns around these rules creating chaos, I do not see that happening at all,” King said.
Rick Jeffares, a former Republican state senator, also joined the board this year. He was appointed by Georgia’s Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, one of the 2020 pro-Trump fake electors.
When he joined the board, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Jeffares had spread claims on social media, which have since been removed or made private, around the 2020 election about Democrats cheating and dead people voting.
Jeffares has continued to court controversy by floating his name for a possible role in a future Trump administration.
“I said if y’all can’t figure out who you want to be the EPA director for the south-east, I’d like to have it,” Jeffares told The Guardian.
He later told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution it wasn’t a formal ask and, “I didn’t talk to anyone in the Trump administration.”
Jeffares didn’t respond to an interview request from CNN.
Janice Johnston, a retired obstetrician who has spread falsehoods about the 2020 election, joined the board in 2022. At a recent MAGA-branded event – Trump campaign signs behind her – Johnston remarked on her senior status on the newly reshaped board.
“It’s a relatively young board,” Johnston told the crowd. “Now I’m second in seniority, which is shocking because it’s just been a couple of years.”
Johnston also attended a Trump rally in Atlanta last month where the former president applauded the three Republicans, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honestly, transparency and victory.”
Johnston did not respond to CNN’s request for an interview.
Rapid rule changes spook election officials
The board is now led by a longtime Waffle House executive, John Fervier, an independent who was appointed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp but has voted against the most controversial rules pushed by the board’s Republican majority. He’s warned the three Republicans that some of their moves could be legally precarious and pushed them, unsuccessfully, to abandon an effort to try to reopen investigations into the 2020 election.
The seemingly partisan – and sheer amount – of activity from the board so close to November has raised alarms across the state.
“On election night, the most important thing we’re doing is getting results out. This is going to delay that,” Deirdre Holden, the supervisor for elections and voter registration in Paulding County, said of the board’s new rules at a recent training for election officials. “And it’s not going to be the state election board they are yelling at, its’s going to be our local offices and we already take enough scrutiny.”
A statewide association of election workers wrote an open letter to the board imploring it to stop passing rule changes so close to the election.
A Democrat state senator also filed an ethics complaint against King, Jeffares and Johnston, as did Cathy Woolard, a Democrat and the former chair of the Fulton County Board of Elections.
“We are having a partisan split on every single issue. Election boards should be very predictable, plodding, not partisan,” Woolard said in an interview. “We should be boring.”
Asked whether the board had pushed ahead with enough changes to potentially swing an election, Woolard said, “Oh sure. I think they’ve done enough to cause chaos in election training in 159 counties. They have created openings for people to say they have a reason not to certify an election.”
Over the weekend, a top official in the secretary of state’s office looked to reassure wary members of the public. “We are confident certification will be completed by November 12,” Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling posted on X.
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