Three conservative members of the State Election Board held a hastily called meeting Friday, pushing through new election rules in spite of concerns from observers that the meeting was illegitimate.
Board members Rick Jeffares, Janice Johnston and Janelle King said they were required to hold the meeting Friday if they wanted rules approved at a meeting held on Tuesday to remain in play. Both King and Jeffares were appointed earlier this year.
Among the rules advanced Friday by the truncated board was one to expand access to partisan poll watchers during the counting of ballots following an election. Another proposal would require all county election boards to post daily online ballot counts within the county websites.
In the coming weeks, the two proposals approved by the board on Friday will go through a public comment phase before a later vote.
But it’s unclear whether any of the actions taken Friday are legal.
Neither Gov. Brian Kemp’s appointee, Chairman John Fervier, nor Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s lone Democratic member, attended the meeting. Both sent emails to their fellow board members saying they were unavailable on Friday.
“It seemed certainly to be a deliberate effort to schedule a meeting when they knew I was not available and when they knew the chair was not available,” Ghazal said during a virtual news conference held Friday several hours before the meeting.
King said the meeting was legitimate. The meeting was announced more than 24 hours in advance, she said, which is allowed in emergencies or special circumstances.
A sheet of paper on the doors of the Capitol meeting room detailed when and where the meeting was being held, and it directed people to the board’s website for details. But as of Friday evening, an announcement of the meeting had not been posted online on the state website where the board’s other meetings are listed.
State Election Board Executive Director Mike Coan, who joined the conservative trio on Friday, said the meeting was held because it was an “extraordinary circumstance.”
“I’ve got three board members out of five telling me they needed help doing this,” Coan told reporters after the meeting. “What do you do? I tried to help them.”
According to emails sent midday Thursday to the board and acquired by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the attorney general’s office warned all members of the board the emergency meeting could violate the state’s Open Meetings Act.
The Open Meetings Act requires state boards to publish notice of a non-emergency meeting at least seven days in advance. Meetings deemed an emergency or a “special circumstance” by the board can be held with less than 24 hours’ notice.
“I can’t imagine that such circumstances exist here, but then again I have not been privy to these conversations, so please let me know if there’s an actual emergency I’m unaware of,” the attorney general’s office wrote in the email.
King told reporters she did not see messages from the attorney general’s office regarding Friday’s meeting.
Richard T. Griffiths with the Georgia First Amendment Foundation said the meeting’s legality was questionable.
“This smells like a violation of the Open Meetings Act,” Griffiths said. “It doesn’t appear to meet the requirements of posting an agenda and keeping the public appraised of what will be discussed and voted upon at the meeting.”
King said Friday’s meeting was a continuation of a meeting held Tuesday that ran long. During that meeting, the conservative members of the board backed rules that would allow local election board members to review vast troves of documents before they certify this fall’s presidential election. The vote was 3-1, with Ghazal voting against.
Fervier did not cast a vote, but he said he opposed the rule because it was too broad.
Critics have said they fear if the rule is finalized, it would allow partisans to reject results they disagree with. Jeffares Johnston and King have all questioned the validity of Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Georgia’s presidential election.
“If we had not had this meeting today, everything that took place on Tuesday would have died. We would have been back at square one,” King said. At that, liberal groups who filled the room burst into applause, signaling their opposition to the proposed rules.
As King attempted to quell the crowd, they went on to chant “shame” and criticize the board for not publicizing a notice on the board’s website. At one point, Jeffares, a former state senator, threatened to have spectators removed by the Georgia State Patrol.
The state’s open meeting laws allow members to appear via teleconference as long as the public can watch the proceedings in real time and only if a quorum of the board, three members in this instance, meet in person. Of the trio, Johnston appeared via video conference. No livestream was provided to the public. Staff said a recording would be shared online later.
Friday’s meeting drew national attention on social media.
American Oversight, a liberal watchdog group, shared a letter online that showed an open records request for emails sent about the meeting.
Chioma Chukwu, interim executive director of American Oversight, said in a statement that “the election denial movement has deployed a number of tactics aimed at making voting harder and casting doubt on the integrity of our safe, secure elections.”
“The proposal to drastically increase the number of partisan poll watchers at tabulation centers in Georgia not only creates an environment of intimidation, but lays the groundwork for post-election chaos and confusion that could be used to deny election results in November,” Chukwu said.
Cleta Mitchell, one of the chief architects of pro-Donald Trump election conspiracy theories, also took note of the board’s action, applauding Friday’s meeting.
“There are now 3 great members of the GA State Election Board — support them,” she wrote on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
Mitchell was on the Jan. 2, 2021, phone call where then-President Trump urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in Georgia.
