Before 2020, the State Elections Board in Georgia seemed like just another piece of the quietly functioning machinery of government. Motions were made and considered. Lawyers weighed in on the technicalities. Its members were publicly known, but rarely acknowledged. You hardly ever heard about it.
But all that changed as seeds of doubt in Georgia’s elections were planted by then-President Donald Trump ahead of the 2020 presidential elections. Meetings became more crowded and heated, and the administration of elections in Georgia became the new backroom battleground of campaigns.
On Saturday night, President Donald Trump put the newest iteration of the State Election Board in the national spotlight, using his Atlanta rally to lavish praise on its most conservative members.
“They’re on fire. They’re doing a great job, three members: Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King,” Trump said from the podium. All three, he said, are “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”
One of the “pitbulls” was even seated in the second row of Trump’s rally — Dr. Janice Johnston, a retired obstetrician and 2020 election skeptic who was nominated to the board by the Georgia Republican Party in 2022. “Thank you Janice, very much,” Trump said as she stood to wave to the cheering crowd of thousands. “That’s really amazing.”
The transformation of the once-anonymous, relatively moderate board into a conservative group of “pitbulls for victory” can be traced back to recent changes to the membership of the five-member board. In 2021, during the aftermath of the 2020 elections, the Republican-controlled Georgia Legislature passed a bill stripping Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of his power as chair of the board and removing him from the panel altogether.
The sole Democratic member of the board, Sara Tindall Ghazal, and Johnston, of Trump rally fame, have been on the board since 2021 and 2022 respectively. But the arrival of three new members this year, its moderate chairman, John Fervier, and two new conservatives, former GOP state Sen. Rick Jeffares, who was confirmed by a split state Senate, and Janelle King, who was appointed by GOP House Speaker Jon Burns, have flipped the board from moderate Republican to a conservative, and often Trump friendly, majority.
Another noticeable change has been the departure of Ed Lindsey, an Atlanta Republican lawyer and former House Minority Leader, who often vocally objected to the most outlandish claims and election conspiracies brought before the board.
Lindsey was seen as such an impediment to the Trump-aligned state Republican party that it added a ballot measure to the 2024 GOP primary ballot asking whether registered lobbyists, like Lindsey, should be banned from serving on the State Elections Board. One of his many offenses was opposing an effort sponsored by Johnston earlier this year to limit no-excuse absentee voting in the state. In fact, Lindsey opposed most of Johnston’s efforts.
Lindsey’s replacement on the board in May was King, a former Georgia GOP staffer and conservative media personality whose frequent appearances on Fox News raised concerns among Democrats about her ability to be an impartial voice on the election panel.
In a Fox appearance in July discussing Vice President Kamala Harris, King said, “(Democrats) don’t know how to present with intelligence, instead they present it with these narratives and misinformation and I think we’re all tired of it.”
Unlike Lindsey, King seconded several of Johnston’s measures during the Elections Board meeting this week, including a decision to reopen an investigation into Fulton County’s conduct of the 2020 election, which the board had declined to do during Lindsey’s term.
King told me in an interview Thursday that she believes she has been impartial during her two board meetings so far.
“I’ve never been called an election denier. I’ve always said that President Biden won the election,” she said. “All sides are trying to pull in their direction. I am 100% looking at this with clear eyes.”
Unlike Johnston, King was not at the Trump event. “I had no idea that we were being discussed,” she said. “I haven’t had any interaction with the Trump campaign or anything. I didn’t know they were watching us.”
But Trump and his supporters are most definitely watching the Elections Board. Trump supporters at this week’s meeting cheered for Johnston in particular. “Hero!” they yelled. The room was so packed with activists that Capitol Police had to hand out tickets to manage the crowd.
After Johnston, King and Jeffares voted Wednesday to reopen the Fulton County investigation, Trump posted a video of the board approving the measure to his social media. “We can’t let this happen again. WE MUST WIN GEORGIA IN 2024!!! The Governor and A.G. MUST LEAD!” he wrote.
The new conservative majority also voted to approve a series of other significant changes less than three months before the November elections. One, approved 3-2, requires county election boards to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into election results before certifying them, a process that critics warn is too vague and could be used as a pretext not to certify a legal election later this year.
Another, also approved 3-2, requires a person physically dropping off another person’s absentee ballot to provide identification proving they are in an acceptable category of third-parties allowed to do so. People objecting to the rule said it would surely result in legal votes getting rejected.
With county election workers already stretched to capacity and under the spotlight, it’s hard to understand why making major changes to election procedures so close to an election is either necessary or wise.
Georgia has a track record of fair, honest, legal elections where challenges can be heard and examined. The biggest impediment to trust in Georgia’s elections in the last four years has been a presidential candidate wrongly claiming the system was rigged against him.
Because of Trump, the State Board of Elections is no longer operating out of sight. But he’s not the only one watching them anymore.
Voters across the spectrum deserve to trust their elections and the people overseeing them. We’ll all be watching the State Board of Elections now to make sure we can.
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