Julie Adams’ Rise From Conservative Activist to Georgia Election Official — ProPublica

In an ornate room in Georgia’s Capitol, Julie Adams — a member both of the election board serving the state’s most populous county and of a right-wing organization sowing skepticism about American elections — got the news she was waiting for. And she couldn’t wait to share it.

With pink manicured nails that matched her trim pink blazer, she tapped out a message on her phone to a top election lawyer for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. “Got it passed,” she wrote to Gineen Bresso, photographs reviewed by ProPublica show.

What had passed that September afternoon in Atlanta was a state rule, championed by Adams, that would allow poll watchers like those she’d trained to gain greater access to sensitive areas in counting centers where votes were being tallied. The rule was a priority for supporters of former President Donald Trump who are looking to pave the way to challenge election results if their candidate loses this week’s vote.

The win was one in a string of them for Adams, who quickly ascended from a little-known, financially troubled conservative activist to a surprise appointee to the Fulton County board of elections. Her note to Bresso signaled not just this particular victory but the extent to which the 61-year-old has used her new perch to carry out the efforts of national players seeking to tilt the election in Trump’s favor.

Fulton itself is significant in state and national politics for a host of reasons: its sheer concentration of Democratic voters (380,000 in 2020, more than any other Georgia county), the scrutiny it received from national election skeptics after Trump lost the state by fewer than 12,000 votes — and, now, its newest election board member’s outsize role in trying to influence Georgia’s election processes.

Her actions in her nine months on the Fulton County board have been prodigious. She secretly helped push another, arguably higher-stakes rule through the state election board that vastly expanded the authority of county board members to refuse to certify votes they deem suspicious. She herself refused to certify the results of the presidential primary in March (though the board’s Democratic majority overruled her), and then she sued her board and election director, asserting local officials should be allowed to refuse to certify vote totals if there are discrepancies, which experts say are almost always innocuous. Some of her lawyers in that case work for the America First Policy Institute, an advocacy group staffed with former Trump officials.

So far, Adams’ efforts have mostly failed. Two judges have invalidated rules that Adams backed, with one calling them “illegal, unconstitutional and void.” But other efforts are still underway. The month after joining the Fulton County election board, Adams became regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, the group founded by lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who joined Trump on a call when he asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to overturn the 2020 election results there.

In that role, Adams runs weekly calls for Republican activists who have described Georgia’s voting as rigged, and she has pulled conservative members of local election boards into a loose coalition, many of whom have challenged results in their counties, too. And prominent conservative election lawyers, writers and national groups have used Adams’ push against certification in Georgia as the basis for a national argument.

Adams did not respond to numerous requests for comment or a detailed list of questions. Nor did representatives for the Election Integrity Network.

The Georgia-based group that hired Adams in 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action, has received millions of dollars from organizations closely tied to conservative legal activist and fundraiser Leonard Leo and billionaire Richard Uihlein, tax records show. Uihlein-backed groups launched unsubstantiated attacks on the legitimacy of voter rolls in at least a dozen states after the 2020 election.

A representative for Uihlein did not respond to questions. A representative for Leo would not elaborate on his contributions to organizations that supported Tea Party Patriots.

The true test of Adams’ effectiveness will come on Election Day — and, if the results in Georgia are anywhere near as close and consequential as they were in 2020, in the days and weeks beyond.

“She’s trying to help Trump win or trying to create chaos in the administration of the election in order to cast aspersions on it if he doesn’t win,” said Patrise Perkins-Hooker, who served as chair of the county election board when Adams joined. Perkins-Hooker described Adams’ work as centered on carrying out the agenda of right-wing activists and not making “the elections run smoothly or transparently.”

In response to ProPublica’s questions, the Republican National Committee provided a statement that said: “The Georgia state election board passed commonsense safeguards to secure Georgia’s elections. The Trump-Vance Campaign and RNC supported these rules to bring transparency and accountability to the election process.” It also said, “The RNC defended these rules in court against attacks from Kamala and the DNC and will continue to fight against Democrat election interference.”

Back in 2020, Mitchell and others challenging the results across the country had to rely on disorganized groups of Trump supporters who came together at the last minute and were mostly unfamiliar with election systems. Experts now warn about the more pronounced impact that election deniers like Adams will have, given that they have come to occupy positions of power in local election administration. As Trump said at an October rally in North Carolina: “The vote counter is far more important than the candidate.”

“It was universal support for Julie,” said Earl Ferguson, a vice chair of the Fulton County Republicans, who has also filed challenges to voters’ eligibility and repeated debunked conspiracy theories about the reliability of voting machines at election board meetings. (Ferguson does not agree that the points he made about the machines were not valid.) “She is honest and very capable, and very pleasant.”

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Adams and a small group of conservative activists became regular attendees at election board meetings. On a few occasions, she addressed the board during the public comment period, questioning the integrity of the county’s elections and its certification process. But she was much less outspoken than other activists in the group.

“When Adams was appointed, little was known about her connections to election deniers to justify opposition,” said Max Flugrath, spokesperson for Fair Fight, the Georgia-based voting advocacy organization. “Voting rights groups instead focused on opposing candidates with documented anti-voter records.”

Adams had worked in human resources and executive recruiting. Records show she also had experienced major financial setbacks. She’d filed for bankruptcy in 2005, and her mortgage company had auctioned her Cobb County home on the courthouse steps in 2010. A landlord later sued her, and she agreed to pay more than $13,000 in back rent, according to a 2021 consent agreement.

That same year, she trained 32 poll watchers to monitor the 2021 municipal elections. And she told county commissioners that she believed some tally sheets from an audit of the 2020 election had been “falsified.”

In 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action, the politically active arm of one of the largest national Tea Party groups, hired Adams as a field director, paying her about $124,000 a year according to tax filings.

Her hire came at a time when the group was pulling in cash and intensifying its focus on election issues. Groups funded by Leo, who is seen as the architect behind the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, provided the Tea Party group and a related foundation at least $1.1 million between 2020 and 2022, records show, including a 2021 grant related to election integrity. The group also hired Leo’s firm as consultants.

In 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action more than doubled its annual revenue, thanks in part to a $2.5 million grant from Restoration of America — which is backed by Uihlein, the billionaire owner of the packing supplies company Uline. That year, former Trump campaign official Gina Swoboda was a Restoration for America executive director. Restoration has spent the years since Trump lost in 2020 pushing the unfounded idea that discrepancies in voter roll data between the number of votes and the number of ballots cast are evidence of fraud, despite insistence by elected officials from both parties that the claims are baseless.

That year, the Tea Party group added a program to bring in poll watchers and workers in Georgia, records show. And it had Adams in place.

Representatives for the Tea Party group and Restoration of America did not respond to requests for comment. Swoboda did not respond to questions.

Adams has run scores of poll watcher and worker online trainings, with some drawing dozens of people, records reviewed by ProPublica show. In a May training, Adams listed over 10 things that she wants trainees to report, from the serial numbers on voting machines to the names of poll managers. “There’s no such thing as too much documentation,” she said in a recording of a May training. “If something doesn’t feel right to you, you need to write it out.”

At an October training, she told the roughly three dozen attendees, including those joining from out of state, to first report discrepancies to their state GOP and RNC hotlines and then to VoterGA, an organization whose leader has cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election. The Republican Party and right-wing organizations plan to use the poll watchers’ reports in post-election litigation, ProPublica has reported.

“VoterGA has an 18-year proven track record of nonpartisan activity,” said co-founder Garland Favorito. “Republicans and Democrats are told to call their own party hotlines for election issues. We have no plans or resources to file any type of speculative litigation in any matter.”

While working for the Tea Party, Adams also led weekly meetings frequented by prominent state activists, RNC officials, GOP county heads, conservative election board members and voter registration challengers, according to records including emails obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and shared with ProPublica.

Agendas included subjects such as “Voter Integrity concerns for 2024 Elections” and warnings like “New York Times Reporter traveling to several counties in Georgia.”

In 2022, Adams had appeared at the Election Integrity Network’s Georgia chapter launch and was described the following year as its state liaison in social media posts by other activists.

But much of her work was done behind the scenes. So when the county GOP nominated her to join the election board in the heavily Democratic Fulton County, commissioners approved the choice 6-0.

After Adams joined the board in February, it did not take long for fellow members to begin worrying about her intentions. The board is made up of four political appointees, two by each party, led by a chair chosen by the Democratic-majority county commission. Traditionally, the board’s primary goal has been to make Fulton elections run smoothly, past and present board members said.

However, Perkins-Hooker, the chair when Adams joined, said that during meetings, she could see Adams receiving text messages from a Republican activist “telling her what to say, and what to do.” After Perkins-Hooker stepped down in April, the new chair banned board members from using phones during meetings.

“She came with a mission to try and paint our elections as being fraught with fraud and incompetency,” said Perkins-Hooker, an opinion echoed by other board members.

Adams had been on the board for just a few weeks when, in March, she was elevated to regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, the organization that Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer, had launched. The new position put her near the top of the leadership’s organizational chart.

Adams quickly began pushing conservative priorities at election board meetings. She wanted poll watchers to have more access to vote tallies from election machines. And she was very concerned about the mechanics of certifying elections. Though a century of case law says that certification is a mandatory duty for officials like her — whom experts compare to scorekeepers, not referees — Adams began questioning if she had to do it. She demanded reams of information she said that she needed to be certain of the results before certifying.

At Adams’ third meeting, in March, she and the other Republican board member shocked Democratic board members by voting against the certification of the presidential primary election — though the Democratic majority overruled them.

Adams’ push to have power over certification of election results couldn’t succeed under the state’s current rules, so she set out to change them.

To do so, she lobbied to remake the body that determined them, the State Election Board, which at the time was composed of two moderate Republican members, two MAGA-aligned members and a Democrat. She activated the coalition she had been building with the support of national Republicans, inviting them to a March meeting where the goal was to ensure that the moderate Republican on the State Election Board was replaced. “The Georgia House of Representatives needs to take action immediately!!!!” the meeting invitation read, providing the phone number of the speaker of the house.

Not long afterward, the speaker replaced that board member with a conservative media personality whom Trump would soon praise by name at a rally.

The new Trump-backed majority quickly began passing rules that the prior board had criticized as illegal, including one, originally pushed by Adams, expanding the power of county board members to refuse to certify votes they found suspicious. It was passed by the new board along with another rule potentially allowing county board members to delay certification.

A national outcry ensued, with The New York Times calling it “The Republican Plan to Challenge a Harris Victory.”

Three of the nation’s leading conservative election lawyers backed the new rules. A conservative group ran ads targeting swing state election officials that echoed the lawyers’ arguments. And the certification rule Adams pushed became a talking point for conservative media outlets. One article in The Federalist argued that it “could stop leftists from bullying election officials into certifying results without completing their duties.” Lawyers for the Republican National Committee and a Trump-aligned conservative think tank also defended the certification rules in Georgia superior court, testing arguments that certifying election results was optional.

Adams’ arguments that certification is not mandatory inspired David Hancock, a GOP member of Gwinnett County’s election board, to vote against certifying the same presidential primary as Adams. (He described several minor inconsistencies as sufficient reason for him not to certify.) “It was, like, a big deal,” Hancock said of Adams’ decision to vote against certifying.

Because two judges in October invalidated the new rules passed by the State Election Board, the mechanics of the election this week will be the same as before Adams’ pushes to empower poll watchers and county election board members.

But at a combative Fulton County board meeting the week before the election, Adams made clear that she wasn’t going to let the judge’s rulings stop her from continuing her campaign. Despite the county’s lawyer telling her that the certification rule she had pushed had been stayed, she argued that it had actually not been, citing her lawyers. “I’ve learned how the system works — or at least how it was supposed to work,” Adams said. “I’ve learned how sometimes it doesn’t work as the law requires, right here in Fulton County.”