Election skeptics are running some county election boards in Georgia. A new rule could allow them to exclude decisive votes

Caption

Chief Judge Robert McBurney, of the Superior Court of Fulton County, sits in his courtroom.

Credit: AP Photo/Ben Gray, File

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An examination of a new election rule in Georgia passed by the state’s Republican-controlled election board suggests that local officials in just a handful of rural counties could exclude enough votes to affect the outcome of the presidential race.

The rule was backed by national groups allied with former President Donald Trump. It gives county boards the power to investigate irregularities and exclude entire precincts from the vote totals they certify. Supporters of the rule, most of whom are Republicans, say it’s necessary to root out fraud. Critics, most of whom are Democrats, say it can be used as a tool to disenfranchise select buckets of voters.

An analysis by ProPublica shows that counties wouldn’t have to toss out many precincts to tip the election if it’s as close as it was in 2020, when Trump lost Georgia by less than 12,000 votes. Based on tallies from that year, an advantage of about 8,000 Democratic votes could be at risk in just 12 precincts in three counties under the new rule, the analysis found. There are 159 counties in Georgia.

A judge is expected to decide soon whether the rule will stand.

The three counties — Spalding, Troup and Ware — voted for Trump in 2020. But each has small yet significant concentrations of Democratic votes clustered in specific precincts. All three also have local election boards that have become stacked in recent years with partisans who’ve voiced support for the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election or have cast doubt on the integrity of the election process.

In Spalding, about 40 miles south of Atlanta, a man who is now county election board chair had previously alerted Trump’s attorneys to what police later determined was false evidence of voter fraud. More recently, he has tweeted that President Joe Biden is a “pedophile,” made sexually degrading comments about Vice President Kamala Harris and, this August, accused a top state elections official of “gaslighting” for saying there was no evidence of fraud in 2020.

In Ware County, in the southeast corner of the state, the election board chair is tied to far-right groups and has called democracy “mob rule.” In Troup County, which borders Alabama, the election board chair maintains that debunked “statistical anomalies” in the 2020 vote still haven’t been explained.

The legality of the rule was debated on Oct. 1 during back-to-back bench trials for two lawsuits. One was brought by the Democratic National Committee and others against the State Election Board, seeking to invalidate the rule. The other was brought by a Republican local board member against her county, the Democratic National Committee and others, seeking a judgment that she had the discretion not to certify election results.

During the trial, Judge Robert McBurney said to the lawyer representing the Republican board member, “You have very successfully pulled me down an intriguing rabbit hole about, well, maybe you could certify some of the votes, but not all of the votes.”

The boards’ new power is the culmination of ground-level efforts in Georgia that began the day Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election. After Trump lost — and after Georgia’s Republican secretary of state rebuffed his demand to "find” him the 11,780 votes he would have needed to win — GOP state legislators launched an effort to reshape county election boards, paving the way for removing Democrats and stacking them with Trump backers. Boards are supposed to administer elections in a nonpartisan manner, and some of these changes broke with the norm of having equal numbers of Republican and Democratic members, plus an independent chair to break ties.

The legislature also removed the secretary of state as head of the State Election Board and replaced members of the board— stacking it, too, with Trump partisans. At an August rally in Atlanta, Trump praised three of them by name, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.” The three board members did not respond to requests for comment.

With the addition of its newest member, the state board was able to do in August what the previous iteration of it wouldn’t: Pass rules giving the county boards unprecedented power.

What’s more, the rule allowing county boards to exclude specific votes was secretly pushed by Julie Adams, a leader of a group central to challenging the legitimacy of the American election system. That group’s founder joined Trump on the call in 2020 during which he pressured the secretary of state to hand him victory.

Adams, a Fulton County election board member, was the plaintiff in one of the two lawsuits. She did not respond to requests for comment or a list of detailed questions.

The State Election Board and attorneys representing parties in both lawsuits did not comment.

A lawyer representing the Democratic National Committee referred ProPublica to the Harris-Walz campaign. “For months, MAGA Republicans in Georgia and across the country have been trying to lay the groundwork to challenge the election results when they lose again in November,” deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said in a statement. “A few unelected extremists can’t just decide not to count your vote.”

During one of the bench trials, Richard Lawson, a lawyer for Adams and the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank aligned with Trump, argued that county board members should have the authority to exclude entire precincts’ votes if they find something suspicious.

A lawyer for the Democratic National Committee, Daniel Volchok, warned that board members making “individual determinations about if a ballot is fraudulent or otherwise should not be counted” is “a recipe for chaos.”

“It is also a recipe for denying Georgians their right to vote.”

Spalding County has for years played a prominent role in Trump supporters’ efforts to challenge election results.

In 2020, Trump’s allies trying to overturn the election quickly realized that the weakest points in America’s election system are its thousands of counties, where the day-to-day work of running elections is done. Previously unreported emails and messages show that one of the first places they targeted was Spalding County.

In the days after the election, Ben Johnson, the owner of a tech company who in 2021 would become chair of the Spalding County election board, began tweeting repeatedly at a team of lawyers challenging the election results on behalf of Trump, including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, a ProPublica review of his deleted but archived tweets found. Johnson also advocated on social media for overturning the election. The Daily Beast reported in 2022 on other Johnson tweets, including one suggesting that Wood investigate claims of election fraud in Spalding County.

About two weeks after the election, a hacker emailed Wood and others to say that that he and another operative were “on ground & ready for orders” near Spalding County, outlining in a series of attachments how they were seeking to acquire voting machine data to prove the election was stolen in Spalding and another Georgia county. (Wood previously told ProPublica, “I do not recall any such email” and that he did not give the hacker any orders, though he did say he recalled the hacker “leaving one night to travel to Georgia.” The hacker did not previously respond to requests for comment.)

Messages obtained by ProPublica show that about an hour later, the operative messaged the hacker: “Woot! We have a county committing to having us image” voting machine data.

The hacker and operative were able to help their allies access voter machine data elsewhere, which became a central pillar in a long-running conspiracy theory that voting machines were hacked. That theory was key to justifying attempts to overturn the 2020 election. In Spalding County, however, their plan fell apart after the secretary of state made clear in a memo that accessing such data would be illegal. “Our contact wants to give us access, but with that memo it makes it impossible,” the operative wrote, without “her getting in a lot of trouble.”

After Trump’s loss, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a massive bill “to comprehensively revise election" in response to “many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud.” And Republican state legislators began writing bills to revamp local election boards, one county at a time. Since 2021, the reorganizations of 15 boards have brought a wave of partisan Republicans, ProPublica found.

As a result of the 2021 reorganization in Spalding, the election board lost three Black Democrats. Three new white Republicans became the majority — including Johnson, who became chair.

In 2022, after news outlets reported that Johnson had supported the QAnon conspiracy theory on social media, he tweeted an open letter emphasizing that he “took an oath to serve in the interests of ALL eligible voters of Spalding County” and “There’s no room for politics in the conducting of Elections.”

Since then, Johnson has continued to share social media content questioning the integrity of Georgia’s elections. 

Reached by phone, Johnson said, “I don’t want to talk to any liberal media” and “You’re going to spread lies.” He did not respond to a detailed list of questions subsequently sent to him.

The new rule says that if there are discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of people recorded as having voted in a given precinct, “The Board shall investigate the discrepancy and no votes shall be counted from that precinct until the results of the investigation are presented to the Board.” If “any error” or “fraud is discovered, the Board shall determine a method to compute the votes justly.”

Minor discrepancies between the number of voters and ballots are not uncommon. For instance, ballots can become stuck in scanners, voters can begin filling out a ballot and then stop before submitting it, or election systems can be slow to update that a provisional ballot has been corrected. 

In counties like Spalding, Ware and Troup — with Republican-leaning boards and at least a few Democratic-heavy precincts — the conservative majority has the power to determine how to “compute the votes justly.” At the trial and in court documents, Democratic lawyers argued this could mean not certifying Democratic votes, with one arguing in a brief that county board members “will attempt to delay, block, or manipulate certification according to their own political preferences” by invoking the rule “to challenge only certain types of ballots or returns from certain precincts as fraudulent.” 

Democratic voters in many conservative rural counties are packed into a small number of precincts. In 2020, Spalding had five precincts with Democratic majorities, which provided about 3,300 more votes for Biden than Trump. Troup had five such precincts totaling about 3,000 such votes, and Ware had two such precincts totaling roughly another 1,600 votes.

Troup County removed two Black women and two men — all Democrats, one said — from its elections board when it restructured in 2021, shrinking the board from seven to five members.

“They definitely wanted us off the board,” said former member Lonnie Hollis, who is worried the new board will behave partisanly this election. She said Republican officials in Troup have connections to the state party.

The board’s new chair, William Stump, a local banker, said that he believes Troup got its vote totals right last presidential election but that “there were some fairly significant statistical anomalies” elsewhere in Georgia.

“It didn’t pass the smell test,” he said. Stump recently appeared at a GOP luncheon in LaGrange with State Election Board member Janelle King, whose ascension to the board cemented its MAGA majority and enabled the passage of the rules.

Stump said he was at the luncheon, where the GOP handed out Trump gear, to answer questions about the election process. “We don’t have, I don’t think, outwardly partisan folks on the board,” he said. “Everybody’s concern is to get the numbers right and get them out on time.”

When Ware County reconstituted its election board in 2023, it removed two Black members who were Democrats and installed Republican Danny Bartlett as chair. Bartlett, a retired teacher, served as executive director of the Okefenokee chapter of Citizens Defending Freedom, a Christian nationalist group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “anti government” and “part of the antidemocratic hard-right movement.”

Bartlett also started a Facebook group in 2022 called Southeast Georgia Conservatives in Action that asks potential members. “Are you ready to take action against the assault upon our country?” Bartlett sought to raise money for the group through a raffle that offered as a grand prize a “Home Defense Package” that included $2,000 worth of guns, gear and a “Patriot Pantry 1-week Food Supply Ammo Can.”

Bartlett did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Carlos Nelson, Ware’s elections supervisor, said he opposed the board’s restructuring but said that Bartlett hasn’t gone along when conservative activists have demanded measures such as hand-counting ballots. “He has been a really good chair,” said Nelson, who is a Democrat. He said he didn’t know about Bartlett’s outside political affiliations but that they were “totally different from his participation on the board.”

Shawn Taylor, one of the Black board members who was removed, said she’s concerned that the new election leaders are too partisan and may try to sway the election results.

“These MAGA Republicans are putting things in place to try to steal the election,” she said, adding she did not think all Republicans supported those attempts. “I believe that it’s going to cause major conflict within a lot of these counties.”

The Ware County commission in July removed a new conservative election board member, Michael Hargrove, who had complained about the “Biden/Harris Crime Syndicate” on social media, after he entered a polling site’s restricted area during spring elections and got into a confrontation with a poll worker. Hargrove said in an email that he “had, as an Elections Board member, EVERY right to be in that location at that time. Any other issue related to that event is juvenile nonsense.”

His replacement, Vernon Chambless, is a local lawyer who told ProPublica that he believes Trump should have been declared the winner in 2020. “We’re going to make sure that everything’s kosher before we certify,” he said.

Alex Mierjeski, Amy Yurkanin, Mollie Simon, Mariam Elba, Kirsten Berg and Doris Burke contributed research.

This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with ProPublica.