How Pro-Trump Activists Hijacked Georgia’s Election Board | The New Yorker

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 either 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 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 new board’s first months 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.”

In August of 2023, after barely a year as chairman, Duffey stepped down. Officially, he said that his job was done: the board had successfully transitioned into a new era, operating independent of the secretary of state’s office. Privately, according to sources close to the board, he had little choice because of Johnston, whose association with conspiracists was causing too many problems. There was an irony in this turn of events: when Johnston had first been appointed to the board, she sought out Duffey for guidance and had even suggested that he consider serving as chair. “Duffey brought a real gravitas to the board,” Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic member, told us. “He was this judge, known to be conservative. Once he left, there was this sense that other changes could now be made.”

Duffey’s replacement was John Fervier, an executive at Waffle House. He was conscientious about maintaining the board’s nonpartisan course, but the political pressures were intensifying. In January, 2024, Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, a Trump ally, announced that he wanted to replace his pick, an election lawyer, with Jeffares, a former state senator and pliant partisan, who soon began voting with Johnston. The majority now consisted of Tindall Ghazal, Fervier, and Edward Lindsey, a lawyer well versed in election law and a longtime Republican lobbyist. (He’d also been a member of the Georgia House, where he’d served as the Republican whip.) “All of a sudden, instead of 4–1, isolating the conspiracists, it was 3–2, and I was next,” Lindsey said.

Activists began showing up at election-board meetings with signs calling Lindsey corrupt. “Ed and I used to joke that it was easier for me,” Ghazal said. “I was the enemy, but he was the traitor.” On the Republican-primary ballots, this spring, one measure was directed at Lindsey: “Should the legislature ban registered lobbyists from serving on the State Election Board?” By then, the campaign against him had gone on for several months. On May 17th, he resigned (and was eventually replaced by King, the conservative media personality). Later that night, Josh McKoon, the new chair of the Georgia Republican Party, gave a speech at a fund-raising dinner during the state G.O.P. convention, in Columbus. “I believe when we look back on November 5, 2024,” he said, “we’re going to say getting to that 3–2 election-integrity-minded majority on the State Election Board made sure that we had the level playing field to win this election.”

In a series of phone calls less than a month before the election, Johnston, who has otherwise avoided interviews, reflected on her life and the political moment. She grew up in Florida, outside Tampa, and eventually enrolled in the Emory School of Medicine, in Atlanta, from which she graduated in 1977. “My medical work was my calling, my purpose and passion,” Johnston said. She soon began an ob-gyn residency at one of the largest public hospitals in the country, and then joined a practice, where she thrived. Johnston says that, as a working mother, she didn’t have time for politics; her friends at the time didn’t view her as political, either. Asked whether she identified as a Republican back then, she demurred: “I’d say I’ve always been a conservative person—maybe more fiscally conservative than socially. But we’re all individual and complicated.”

She and her husband, Frank, a conservative from Alabama who worked in banking, lived in an affluent Atlanta neighborhood full of sprawling ranch houses built in the mid-twentieth century. They had a zipline in the back yard for their three kids, all of whom attended a liberal private school called Paideia. (One of us also attended this school and knew one of Johnston’s sons.) The family worshipped at a liberal Episcopal church in downtown Atlanta, which, during the AIDS epidemic ministered to the L.G.B.T.Q. community. In the mid-nineties, the Johnstons left the church. “I was surprised,” a member of the church said. “But I understood that it was because we suddenly became a mecca for gay people.” After retiring, Johnston spent time flying a small propeller plane, which she’d learned to pilot in her fifties. “If Jan Johnston wanted to do something, no one was going to stop her,” a fellow ob-gyn and longtime friend, told us.

The 2020 election was a turning point for Johnston. She and Frank were at their vacation home, in Florida, and she voted absentee for Trump. (“I am a Republican,” she said, explaining her decision.) Then, like everyone else, she watched as the results came in, followed closely by claims of fraud. “It was, like, ‘Whoa, this sounds like crazy stuff,’ ” she recalled. “An election can’t be that hard to understand. So I said, I’m retired, I have some time. I’ll just observe.”

The U.S. Senate races in Georgia featuring Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, had both gone to runoffs, with control of the chamber at stake. Johnston, for the first time in her life, went to watch voting at precincts around Atlanta. “I thought, I’m an objective person,” she said. “I’ll see what’s going on.” Observing the processing of absentee ballots at the Georgia World Congress Center, in Fulton County, she strained to see from her allotted station. “I watched election workers drinking coffee and eating doughnuts and checking their cell phones,” she said. “It appeared as if they were going through the process to look like they were verifying signatures. It was just, like, Huh, that’s odd.” She also noted “large batches of absentee ballots that were not secured as they should have been.” She continued, “I found it curious that it all seemed so relaxed. If somebody wanted to perhaps create some mischievousness, they could. It didn’t seem like a well-run process.” (In a statement, the county’s Department of Registration and Elections said that, after multiple reviews and audits, there had been no evidence of fraud or malfeasance, adding, “No election in the country has been more closely scrutinized than Fulton County’s performance in 2020.”)

Johnston threw herself into election law, she said, reading Georgia’s entire election code. “She really wanted to understand what was going on,” a former ob-gyn patient, who also observes elections, and tends to vote for Democrats, told us. “She was not asking partisan questions. She wanted to know how to go from A to B to C.” But at a certain point, her effort to understand what had happened in 2020 turned into activism. She attended meetings held by the Fulton County election board, where members of the public—largely disgruntled citizens convinced that there’d been malfeasance in 2020—were allowed to give floor speeches. Johnston reportedly called for the firing of the county’s director of elections, assailed the conduct of temporary election workers, and repeated unproven allegations that the county, during an audit, had used “falsified tally sheets.” After Ossoff and Warnock were elected to the Senate, Johnston joined the Republican Party. “If you want to improve something, it’s best to try to do it within,” she said. “My perspective is that elections should be sort of protected and pristine and not infringed upon. They need to be as free from political influence as possible.”

Georgia’s Republican Party appointed Johnston to the State Election Board in March of 2022. At her first meeting, she introduced herself to the public by emphasizing her origin story. “I started as a citizen who had some free time and wanted to volunteer,” she said. “This experience was followed by participation in as many aspects of the election process as I could do from the grassroots level.” We asked her who her constituency was, assuming that the answer would be about the state’s registered voters. She paused before responding. “I’m appointed by the Republican Party,” she said. “The rationale, as I understand it, is there’s a person from the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, probably to make sure that both parties represent maybe the concerns of each party, as far as election conduct.” Still, she added, “you just have to be impartial.”

The board was “evolving” from a “dysfunctional” state, Johnston told us, referring to the removal of Raffensperger and the eventual appointment of Duffey. “When I came on to the board, I couldn’t find where they kept the book of complaints of violations of election law,” she said. She was troubled by the thousands of complaints fielded by the state Party, which, she felt, were important to investigate and could undermine the results. She pushed back against being called an election denier. “I get a sense that it’s a label that’s thrown onto anyone who is either, A, maybe a Republican or, B, one that questions the conduct of an election,” she said. “I’m about the conduct of the election. It makes no difference to me who won. So it’s kind of curious that that’s been lobbed onto me most recently, and it’s probably because I got ambushed at that Trump rally.”

Johnston had never been to a rally of any kind, she explained. “But I thought, It’s in town. I’ll go and just see what a rally is like, and, Lord-a-mercy, that happened.” At the rally, Trump said that Kemp and Raffensperger, by refusing to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia, “want us to lose.” If there was cause for hope in Georgia, Trump went on, it was in no small part because of the work of a group known in local circles as the Gang of Three: Jeffares, King, and Johnston. “I don't know if you’ve heard, but the Georgia State Election Board is in a very positive way,” Trump told the audience. “They’re on fire. They’re doing a great job.”

Jeffares and King weren’t in the crowd, but several people sitting near Johnston leaped up and pointed her out to the former President. Johnston rose and waved.

Johnston now acknowledges the poor optics of being an “impartial” election official at a rally where the candidate thanked her by name. (“Look at the love they have for Janice,” Trump said. “That’s what people want—they want to have honest elections.”) “I think I was naïve,” she went on. “That attention afterward by the opponents to Trump created such a stir.” She now receives angry and inquisitive e-mails from around the world. “I’m whatever people want to attach to that,” she said. “But I am a Republican. There shouldn’t be anything surprising about that.” She hasn’t given money to Trump’s campaign, she added. “So it gives me pause when I get accused of being a puppet.”

In 2021, Cleta Mitchell, the former Trump lawyer who tried to block the 2020 vote from being certified, formed a national coalition called the Election Integrity Network. It has been recruiting volunteers to hunt for voter fraud and to pressure local and state election officials. “For the last four years, a small cadre of billionaires and far-right donors have been pouring millions into building a so-called election integrity infrastructure to lay the groundwork to reject the results when MAGA Republicans lose,” Brendan Fischer, the deputy executive director of Documented, a D.C.-based watchdog group, said. “Elections are run at the local level, so this nationally organized effort is being implemented locally.”

The Election Integrity Network’s Georgia chapter is run by Julie Adams, the right-wing member of the Fulton County election board. On the group’s semi-regular Zoom calls, recordings of which have been obtained by The New Yorker, attendees have included county officials across Georgia and former Trump Administration officials.

At the start of a recent call, just after Judge McBurney’s ruling, Adams cleared the air. “We’re in much better shape than we were,” she said. “The way we were before we filed the lawsuit was most people didn’t get any documents and had to certify yes. The way it is now is we get all the documents, we have to certify yes, we can let the D.A. know, or we can take any other reasonable measures we want.” She went on, in an optimistic tone, “Who knows? Maybe we all find discrepancies and we file an immediate injunction. Maybe we go to the press. Maybe, when we’re certifying, we say we’re certifying under protest.”

Thirteen days before the election, Janice Johnston picked up her phone again. Sounding exhausted, if not defeated, she described the “hubbub” over the board’s “put on hold” election rules as “most likely just a political maneuver.” The recent overturning of these rules was “unfathomable,” she said. A ruling on her appeal is unlikely before Election Day, so Johnston hopes that Georgia election officials will “follow the law and obey the rules and be honest” in November. The processing of ballots in Fulton County, one of Georgia’s main Democratic strongholds, continues to vex her. “Everybody I have spoken with in Georgia, the election officials, have been concerned about Fulton County for many years,” she said. Ultimately, we asked, should Georgia voters have confidence in the 2024 election results? “I don’t know,” Johnston replied. “You’ll have to ask the voters.” ♦