After completing the MAGA takeover of the Georgia State Election Board, Donald Trump’s allies quickly cemented his 2020 election lies into policy, and moved to allow conspiratorial-minded county election officials to refuse to certify election results if they see fit. Even before the election board granted broad powers to county election officials to deny election results and reopened an investigation into minor vote-counting errors in Fulton County in 2020, Trump was publicly praising the work of three Republicans who hold majority power on the board.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard but the Georgia State Election Board is in a very positive way… They’re on fire, they’re doing a great job,” Trump said at a rally in Atlanta on Aug. 3, before naming three Republican members of the board — Rick Jeffares, Dr. Janice Johnston, and Janelle King. “Three pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory,” Trump called them.
Three days later, the State Election Board met at the Georgia State Capitol. Over the course of two days, Jeffares, Johnston, and King outvoted a fourth Republican and the board’s lone Democrat to pass two rules proposed by election deniers that will go into effect immediately.
One of the rules allows pro-Trump election officials in Georgia’s 159 counties to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results. Election certification has long been a ministerial, rather than discretionary task, according to experts and judges. Now, county election officials in Georgia could hold up certification of votes that are crucial to determining which candidate wins Georgia, a state where Republicans control the legislature, the secretary of state’s office, the governor’s mansion and, now, the State Election Board, in the form of a MAGA majority.
“The State Election Board has become a MAGA government body,” says Max Flugrath, communications director for Fair Fight, the left-leaning voting rights group founded by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
The board also voted to reopen a case in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, regarding double-counted ballots — ballot counting errors that were not nearly enough to overcome Trump’s 11,779-vote deficit to President Joe Biden in the state in 2020.
The rules rammed through last week were made possible by Trump’s personal interference in the makeup of the board. Earlier this year, as Rolling Stone reported, Trump privately lobbied Georgia Republicans to replace election board member Ed Lindsey, a relatively moderate Republican who did not broadly support election denier policies. After Lindsey resigned, he was replaced by King, a conservative media personality with no experience administering elections.
Less than three months after King took her seat on the board, the MAGA takeover produced policies that will cause “chaos” in November, Democratic board member Sara Tindall-Ghazal tells Rolling Stone.
“I think it’s important to put it all in context with what’s happened in the last month,” Tindall-Ghazal says, noting the surging support for Harris’ presidential campaign. “Yes, we’ve got some rules that are particularly egregious and threaten a smooth election process but you’ve also got some really pernicious rules that will cause chaos right at the election.”
One of those rules may open the floodgates to county election officials refusing to certify results in November. Proposed by Michael Heekin, a Republican member of the Fulton County election board, the rule says that county election officials in Georgia’s 159 counties must certify results only “after reasonable inquiry” finds that the results are “complete and accurate.” In July, Rolling Stone and American Doom found that at least 20 county election officials in Georgia have expressed beliefs in election lies or have refused to certify results.
Now, they have even greater power to do so.
“Our State Election Board exists to protect the right to vote for all Georgians, not to favor any single candidate in any election,” the Democratic Party of Georgia’s executive director, Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, says in a statement. “The three members Donald Trump called his ‘pitbulls’ for ‘victory’ disagree, and they’re determined to establish a new power of not certifying an election result should their preferred candidate lose — as he did in 2020.”
Last week, the board’s fourth Republican, John Fervier, who was appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp (R), warned that the new certification rule came without “guardrails” preventing abuse.
“For that reason, I can’t support [the rule] because I feel that those guardrails are necessary for that certification process,” Fervier said.
Since 2020, election certification has been used by pro-Trump local election officials across the country to call results of elections into question. Largely considered a “ministerial” task that Democratic lawyer Marc Elias has called part of the “pageantry of democracy,” certification has been weaponized by local election officials who believe Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Since 2020, local election officials across the country have refused to certify election results at least 25 times, Rolling Stone and American Doom previously found.
“What Donald Trump is preparing for is to lose the election in Georgia and around the country and to try to hope he will be spared a humiliating defeat … by trying to work the refs,” Elias said recently.
The “refs” in Elias’ analogy are the members of Georgia’s State Election Board, who have handed broad power to local election officials to refuse to certify results in November. The 25 attempts to deny certification of elections — which have repeatedly been shot down by courts — include refusals to certify in Coffee County, where pro-Trump election officials helped election deniers working with the Trump White House to illegally access election equipment. Certification refusals backed by Trump’s election lies have also taken place in Spalding, Cobb, DeKalb, and Gwinnett counties in Georgia.
Now, these local officials have received state officials’ blessing to refuse to certify results, says Fair Fight CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo: “Since 2020, states like Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and others, have seen election officials attempt to hijack certification — trying to delay or refuse to certify election results. Now, local officials in Georgia have been given a manufactured sense of legal cover to refuse to certify results in 2024.”
The certification rule was the subject of lengthy discussion at last week’s meeting. As part of an apparent attempt to educate his fellow Republicans on the board about certification, Fervier invited a lawyer for Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW), a liberal watchdog group, to give a presentation on the issue. The lawyer, Nikhel Sus, reiterated a point made by election law experts, the Brennan Center for Justice, and many others, telling the board that 100 years of Georgia case law has determined that certification is a “ministerial” task that is not up to the discretion of county election officials.
The presentation angered Johnston, one of the Republican board members.
“I would suggest that anyone in the audience who is in support of this rule raise their hands and come up here and speak in favor of it,” she said following Sus’ presentation. “We just gave 30 minutes to a lawyer from Washington. Well, may I ask who invited him here?”
“I invited him here,” Fervier said. “It is important for this board to hear both sides of every story. If you only hear one side, we’re not doing our job.”
Heekin, the Republican Fulton County election board member, argued with Sus over the proposed rule, which was ultimately passed by the board’s MAGA majority as Fervier and Tindall-Ghazal voted against it.
On Monday, CREW released a report laying out remedies for the phenomenon of certification refusals and other election denier tactics in Georgia and elsewhere. At the top of the list: “State election boards, secretaries of state, attorneys general, and local prosecutors should explicitly advise county officials of their non-discretionary certification duties,” the organization wrote.
Heekin isn’t the only election official in Georgia’s most populous county, one that leans heavily Democratic, seeking more power to refuse to certify results. His colleague on the Fulton County election board, Julie Adams, is suing — with assistance from a pro-Trump think tank — for more power to refuse to certify election results, which she has done twice so far this year.
A judge is currently considering the county’s motion to dismiss Adams’ lawsuit. In an amicus brief on the case, the Brennan Center said the lawsuit should be thrown out because Georgia courts have repeatedly determined that certification is a “ministerial, non-discretionary task” of county election boards.
“For as long as our country has held elections, rogue local officials have attempted to manipulate and interfere with the process to benefit their political agendas,” the organization wrote in its brief.
Tindall-Ghazal, the Democratic state election board member, told Rolling Stone that the MAGA takeover of the board is part of a “connected and deliberate” plan by the Trump campaign to call Georgia’s election into question in November. She compared the takeover to Project 2025, the notorious conservative policy and personnel project created to help a new Republican president (i.e. Trump) quickly impose a far-right agenda if the GOP wins in November.
“I think the board is a microcosm of what Project 2025 would be — replacing competent bureaucrats with political loyalists who have no underlying competence and therefore cause chaos,” Tindall-Ghazal said.
The Georgia State Election Board’s certification rule and the reopening of the case against Fulton County weren’t the only controversial actions taken by Trump’s “pitbulls” on the board last week.
The board also passed a measure requiring more complex rules for what absentee ballots must look like, more rules for depositing absentee ballots into drop boxes, and constant video surveillance on those drop boxes — which has long been a white whale of the election denial movement, and was infamously featured in the debunked election conspiracy documentary, “2,000 Mules.”
While the board’s actions last week may seem unmoored from the reality of election facts, the Trumpian takeover of the board shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Trump team sees Georgia as their “laboratory” for a campaign that increasingly looks like it’s designed not necessarily to win Georgia, but to call a Trump loss here into question. And at the center of those efforts is Fulton County.
The state’s largest county has been home to the Black political power structure of the South since its pivotal role in the civil rights movement. Since 2020, election conspiracists have worked feverishly to prove that Democrats cheated in Fulton County — and are planning to do so again. Their shaky proof behind their false claims of coordinated election fraud stems from an audit conducted after Trump’s loss in 2020.
The audit, overseen by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), found that election workers in Fulton County had mistakenly double-counted some 3,600 ballots. The audit eventually found that Trump had garnered 345 more votes than were initially counted in Fulton County. Trump still lost to President Joe Biden by 243,000 votes, but he claimed that the duplicate ballots were evidence of “A LOT OF CRIME.”
Despite the findings, election denial activists have never let up on the Fulton County case.
In its resolution on the case last week, the State Election Board instructed Georgia Attorney General, Chris Carr, a Republican, to “immediately investigate with outside investigators” the errors in Fulton County.
“We are putting this board in legal jeopardy,” Fervier said just before being outvoted by Jeffares, Johnston, and King to reopen the Fulton County case. “Please make sure the votes are in the record for any potential future litigation.”
Less than a few hours later, Trump took to Truth Social, backing the decision.
“The Attorney General of Georgia MUST get moving on this,” Trump wrote. “So must Governor Kemp, and the Secretary of State. It’s Fulton County again.”
Except it’s not happening “again.” Fulton County was already punished for its workers erroneously double-counting ballots. Those errors were nowhere close to enough for Trump to overcome his loss to Biden. Following Raffenspergerand the State Election Board’s investigation into the ordeal, Fulton County complied with a reprimand from the board and implemented policies the county says will alleviate the issue of double-counting ballots in the future.
“We will not engage in any further discussions, investigations or other action related to this case,” Fulton County spokesperson Jessica Corbitt says in a statement. “To do so would be a waste of taxpayer dollars and time that is best spent preparing for the upcoming General Election.”
It will now be up to Carr to determine whether to charge anyone in Fulton County with a crime for double-counting ballots in an election in which Trump lost the state by almost 12,000 votes. Trump will surely be watching.
Like Kemp, who Trump has once again targeted and belittled for refusing to help Trump overturn election results in Georgia in 2020, the former president has also taken aim at Carr. In 2022, Trump endorsed Carr’s challenger in a Republican primary that Carr won, going on to defeat a Democrat and hold on to his position as attorney general. Carr has repeatedly said that Trump lost in Georgia fair and square, and that the 2020 election was not beset with widespread election fraud.
In a statement to the Associated Press, Carr’s office said it takes “election integrity very seriously, and we will apply the constitution, the law and the facts as we have always done.” If Carr is “unwilling/unable” to investigate, the board resolution states the board will “seek outside legal counsel to conduct the investigation” — a concern for Democrats and voting rights advocates in the state who fear the board will align itself with a right-wing group to pursue a politically-motivated investigation of Fulton County in the name of proving non-existent fraud.
That’s already the case for Adams, the pro-Trump election board member in Fulton County who sued her own county demanding more power to refuse to certify election results. Adams’ lawsuit was filed by lawyers with the Trump-aligned American First Policy Institute.
Cathy Woolard, a Democrat and former chair of the Fulton County board of elections, tells Rolling Stone that the State Election Board’s revival of the case and its implementation of rules demanded by election deniers is a troubling sign of Trumpian chaos to come in November.
“It’s particularly concerning that the State Election Board is indulging and, in some cases, collaborating with conspiracy theorists who have been refuted time and again,” Woolard says. “It’s time for them to be replaced with board members who will adhere to the rule of law and not sow chaos in our election system.”
This story is being published in partnership with American Doom, a newsletter that focuses on right-wing extremism and other threats to democracy.
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