On the morning of October 1st, Janice Johnston, a mild-mannered former ob-gyn in her early seventies, was sitting in the back of a crowded courtroom in downtown Atlanta, taking notes on an iPad. She wore an orange skirt suit and a pearl necklace. On her lap was a well-worn copy of a book titled “Georgia Election Code Annotated.” Most Georgians wouldn’t recognize Johnston, but in the past few months she has emerged as one of the most divisive political figures in the state. She is a member of the State Election Board, an unelected and historically obscure body with the unceremonious job of crafting procedural rules for election administrators in Georgia. “We’re supposed to be a quiet group of lawyers making sure the trains run on time,” a former board member said. The board has five members, each of whom is appointed by either the governor, the Georgia House, the Georgia Senate, the state Democratic Party, or the state Republican Party. Johnston, who was the G.O.P.’s pick, wanted to expand the board’s sway over the 2024 election process.
A superior-court judge had called back-to-back hearings in two cases that went to the heart of the State Election Board’s recent work. The first was a challenge to a pair of new rules, passed by the board, that gave more power to county officials to scrutinize returns before certifying the results. Besides Johnston, two other Election Board members had supported the rules: Rick Jeffares, who was chosen by the lieutenant governor (a fake elector in 2020) and who has, according to the Times, told several people that he has secured a job in a future Trump Administration, and Janelle King, a conservative media personality appointed by the House. “Look, I’m a Black conservative,” King once said. “Criticism is nothing for me.” At an August rally in Atlanta, Trump praised, by name, Johnston, Jeffares, and King, who hold a 3–2 majority on the board, calling them his “pitbulls.” Johnston, who was at the rally, sitting in the second row, is widely regarded as the most influential. “The others are opportunists,” one of Johnston’s colleagues said. “She is a true believer.”
The second case was brought by Julie Adams, a right-wing member of Fulton County’s election board, who was suing her own board to establish that, under certain circumstances, she had the right to refuse to certify the election result in November. The America First Policy Institute, a group associated with Trump and former members of his first Administration, had sponsored Adams’s lawsuit. Among the lawyers arguing this case was Alex Kaufman, an attorney in private practice who was representing the state Republican Party. He’d been on the phone call that Trump made to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in January, 2021, when Trump asked him to “find 11,780 votes.” (“One of the key GA lawyers helping the President” is how Cleta Mitchell, a legal architect of Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 election, described Kaufman in an e-mail at the time.) “This is the first game of the World Series,” Kaufman said, just before walking into the courtroom. “Either side, whoever wins, will appeal.”
What tied the two cases together was the most bitterly contested question in Georgia elections this year: Can anything happen at the county level after the polls close but before the local election boards sign off on the results? By law, county election officials are required to certify the results, according to a strict timeline specified in state regulations. In legal parlance, their job is “ministerial,” not “discretionary.” If there are challenges, the venue for adjudicating them is the courts—after certification, not before.
For this reason, Democrats and many state Republicans have been suspicious of policies from the State Election Board that are aimed at giving county election officials more discretion around certification. “The whole game is delaying certification,” a high-ranking state official who requested anonymity because of safety concerns, told us. “They want to delay the count. And then they want to go to Republican-held and -controlled local election boards and throw up their hands and say, ‘There’s so much fraud here, we can’t certify.’ ”
On October 14th, the judge, Robert McBurney, issued a firm decision in Adams’s lawsuit. If county-election-board members were “free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so—because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud—refuse to certify election results,” he wrote, “Georgia voters would be silenced.” (Adams has appealed the ruling.) The next day, he blocked another rule pushed by the State Election Board that would have required poll workers to count every ballot by hand. The board’s legal losses mounted rapidly. On October 16th, a different judge, hearing another challenge to the new election rules—this one brought by a group led by a former state Republican lawmaker—invalidated many of the board’s new rules, including those concerning certification. (An appeal was filed with Georgia’s Supreme Court, which declined to reinstate the rules before the election.) “One would hope that the absolutely vociferous nature of these recent opinions would instill a little bit of caution,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the State Election Board, said. And yet, she went on, “I’m prepared for anything.”
State courts can force county election boards to certify the results, if they have to. Gowri Ramachandran, a voting-security expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that she was not especially worried that results would go uncertified. What preoccupies her, and other fair-election advocates, is the possibility that the intransigence of a small number of election officials could cause confusion, strife, and possibly violence once the polls close on November 5th. “The bigger risk,” she said, is that Georgia’s State Election Board will create “more excuses for people to refuse to accept the results.”
Since Trump fought the 2020 results in Georgia, the state has turned into a kind of vanguard for the national movement to contest elections. In the past four years, according to a survey by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, at least nineteen election-board members in nine counties across the state have objected to certifying an election. There have been rogue election administrators in other states, too: as of last year, in a third of the country, an election denier was in charge of overseeing or certifying the results at the state level. “The thing that makes Georgia ground zero is that you’ve had the added factor of the State Election Board injecting its own form of chaos,” Ramachandran, of the Brennan Center, said.
The controversy surrounding the board began in the spring of 2021, when the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, signed into law a bill known as the Election Integrity Act. It was a reckoning of sorts for Georgia Republicans. Democrats had just carried the state in both the Presidential and Senate elections, something that hadn’t happened in decades. The year had also been exceptional in terms of process—because of the pandemic, Raffensperger had sent vote-by-mail applications for the Presidential primaries to all registered voters. In 2016 and 2018, roughly five per cent of voters who cast a ballot in the state had done so by mail. Although Trump routinely criticized voting by mail on the campaign trail, it traditionally favored Georgia Republicans. Yet in 2020, with more than a million people casting absentee ballots, the Republican advantage was reversed: according to FiveThirtyEight, sixty-five per cent of mail-in voters in Georgia supported Joe Biden. “This opened the world of voting by mail,” Saira Draper, a Democratic state representative, said. “A lot of blame was laid at Raffensperger’s feet for that.”
The Election Integrity Act tightened rules around absentee ballots, made changes to early voting, and limited many of the more expansive voting practices adopted during the height of the pandemic. Biden called the law “Jim Crow in the twenty-first century.” One provision, which made it illegal to hand out water or food to voters waiting in line to cast ballots, became a central plotline in the final season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Still, many nonpartisan experts saw the changes in less dramatic terms: the restrictions on mail-in ballots and drop boxes, while mostly unnecessary, rolled back emergency measures put in place the year before. The more lasting concern for advocates was a less mentioned aspect of the law, which stripped Raffensperger, as the secretary of state, of chairmanship and voting power on the State Election Board. “The fact that he was removed had no basis in policy,” David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit group that works with local and state election officials of both parties, said. “It was fuelled by all the lies about the elections.”
Kemp’s willingness to go along with separating Raffensperger from the board reflected a risk that many in the G.O.P. establishment were willing to take. With the Party divided between bona-fide conservative officeholders and a pro-Trump faction at war with Kemp and Raffensperger, neutralizing the secretary of state on the election board seemed like it might temper the intra-party feud. Republican legislators could have it both ways, by appeasing the Trumpists with a concession that seemed largely symbolic. (Another law passed earlier this year severed the secretary’s ties to the board completely.) “Anyone who plays footsie with the Trumpers loses,” the high-ranking state official said. “You can’t play games with these guys and win. You have to pick a team. Are you team rule of law or not?”
In the summer of 2022, Kemp appointed William Duffey, a retired federal judge with a reputation for conservatism and probity, as the board’s new chair. Duffey was reluctant at first. The chairman of the state Republican Party at the time, David Shafer, who was later indicted in Fulton County, along with Trump, for his role in the fake-electors scheme and has since denied wrongdoing, had approached Duffey twice to ask whether he’d be interested in chairing the board. The two had known each other for more than twenty years, and Duffey respected him. On one occasion, Shafer showed Duffey a video of someone putting envelopes in a ballot drop box in 2020. (Shafer, who recalled sharing other evidence of suspicious activity with Duffey rather than footage, said the material had come from a group involved in the documentary “2000 Mules,” which advanced a widely debunked conspiracy theory about election theft.) “I recommended that he provide the video to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation or the F.B.I. for them to investigate,” Duffey said. As for the chairmanship of the board, Duffey declined. “I didn’t have a background in elections and didn’t think it was a good fit for me,” he said. Eventually, Kemp’s chief legal counsel, David Dove, got in touch. “We’ve never had a neutral, nonpartisan chair,” he said. “Now that the secretary of state is out, we need someone to transition it into this new form.”
The board’s first months under Duffey were turbulent but effective. It heard, and dismissed, multiple conspiracies surrounding the 2020 election. “It became a game of Whac-a-Mole,” one of the board members at the time told us. “We didn’t find the systematic fraud that the conspiracists wanted, and that infuriated them.” There were allegations that the state’s Dominion voting machines had flipped votes from Trump to Biden, that Fulton County had somehow been hiding ballots, and that two election workers in Fulton County had smuggled a suitcase full of Biden ballots into an office. But the board members, of whom only Johnston questioned the results of the 2020 election, also forced moments of real transparency. At one point, they subpoenaed a Texas-based group called True the Vote to provide evidence of now-rejected claims about voters forging ballots and depositing them in drop boxes, which were repeated in “2000 Mules.” Under pressure from the board, the group admitted that it could not provide the identity of a key source, and the film’s production company eventually issued an apology and ceased distributing the documentary.
Behind the scenes, though, tensions were growing. Members of the board began to learn that Johnston was conferring with right-wing activists who, since November, 2020, had been hounding state election officials over unproven allegations of fraud. One of the activists, a Texan named Kevin Moncla, wrote threatening e-mails to members of the board, prompting Georgia officials to seek an F.B.I. investigation, according to the Journal-Constitution. (“I said that I would hold them accountable with all proper remedies, and that’s exactly what I’ve done,” Moncla told us.) Duffey said that Joe Rossi, a teacher at a technical college in Macon who had become a prominent election denier, would call him “virtually every night.” (When reached for comment, Rossi said he “had to resort to daily follow-ups,” because state officials had been unresponsive to an election complaint he had lodged several months earlier.) These activists, who said they had been in contact with Johnston, seemed to be interested in two matters above all: investigating wrongdoing in Fulton County, in 2020, and removing ineligible voters from the rolls.
The 2021 Election Integrity Law allowed private citizens to directly challenge the eligibility of as many voters on the rolls as they wanted. The immediate result was a flood of challenges in individual counties, many of them based on partial or inaccurate information gleaned from public sources. (One group of activists filed more than a hundred thousand challenges.) The challengers frequently used a software program known as EagleAI, which cross-referenced existing public records to identify voters who may have moved or died or were otherwise ineligible to vote in a particular district. Election experts across the country have repeatedly said that this software produces unreliable results, but it led to thousands of voter challenges in Georgia. Johnston, who had been speaking with the software’s designer, wanted individual counties to start using it to clean their rolls. (Nothing came of the idea.)
The vast majority of the challenges were dismissed, but in the course of 2022 and 2023 a pattern emerged. Isolated allegations were giving rise to more pointed criticisms of Georgia’s electronic voting system. “It occurred to the lawyers on the board that we needed a legal opinion on whether our authority allowed us to review decisions made by the secretary of state,” Duffey said. Four of the five members agreed that, before doing anything further, they needed to determine the scope of the board’s legal power. Johnston asked why that was even necessary—she told the others that she was “interested in doing something.”
