Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Aug. 3, 2024. John Bazemore/AP
On August 3, Donald Trump held a raucous rally in Georgia, where he attacked Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for refusing to overturn the 2020 election and reiterated his lie that he “won” the state in 2020. But Trump singled out the new MAGA-aligned majority on the state’s election board for praise.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Georgia State Election [Board] is in a very positive way,” the ex-president said to cheers. “They’re on fire, they’re doing a great job. Three members: Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King. Three people, they’re all pit bulls, fighting for honesty, transparency and victory. They’re fighting.”
Johnston, a retired obstetrician who spread false claims about the 2020 election in Atlanta’s heavily Democratic Fulton County, rose from her seat near the stage and waved to the crowd. “My courage was contagious,” Trump remarked after she stood. “Well, your courage is contagious, too.”
Three days later, on the 59th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act no less, those three Republicans returned the favor to Trump, passing a new rule on a 3-2 vote requiring that counties undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into vote totals before certifying election results. It is set to go into effect in 20 days, two months before voters go to the polls in one of the country’s most important battleground states.
Legal experts say the rule is illegal and will likely be challenged in court, since county election officials have a ministerial role when it comes to certifying elections and Georgia law clearly states that local officials “shall certify” the results. But if the measure—which does not define what a “reasonable inquiry” is —stands, Democrats and voting rights groups are warning that Republican election deniers will use it as a pretext not to certify an election if a Democrat wins—the very thing Trump unsuccessfully tried to get election officials to do in 2020.
“The risk is using pretextual reasons to fail to certify when folks are not pleased with the results,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democratic Party representative on the board, when the rule was first proposed. “That is my concern—using excuses to fail to certify.”
This very thing has occurred in recent elections. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, Republican-appointed board members in Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, Gwinnett and Spalding counties voted against certifying results during both local elections last November and the presidential primary this March. The “reasonable inquiry” rule was written by a Republican board member in Fulton County, Michael Heekin, who voted against certifying the presidential primary results because of alleged ballot security concerns. Republican officials have also refused to certify election results in states including Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and New Mexico.
“These are MAGA certification rules, and they’re in direct conflict with Georgia law, which states in multiple places that local elections board officials shall perform their duties, meaning their duties are mandatory, not discretionary,” State Rep. Sam Park, a lawyer and minority whip for Georgia House Democrats, said at a press conference Tuesday.
The Georgia state board’s actions are a consequence of the sweeping voter suppression law passed by the state legislature in 2021 after Trump failed to overturn the results. The law, SB202, included 16 provisions rolling back access to the ballot; the conservative group Heritage Action, the sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, which is behind Project 2025, took credit for the measure, saying in a leaked video obtained by Mother Jones and Documented that it included “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended.”
“These are MAGA certification rules, and they’re in direct conflict with Georgia law”
Most notably, the law removed Raffensperger, who resisted Trump’s demands to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Biden’s victory, as chair and voting member of the state board, which oversees voting rules and election certification. Instead, it gave Republicans in the heavily gerrymandered legislature more power to choose the board’s members, which allowed election deniers to gain a controlling majority of the body this year.
As USA Today reported:
In January, the Georgia Senate, run by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, confirmed Rick Jeffares as that body’s pick for the board. Jeffares posted memes shortly after the 2020 election “that suggested dead people had voted by mail, claimed the Democrats and China had colluded, and implied that Democrats had cheated,” according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. (Jones, the lieutenant governor, served as a fake member of the Electoral College, as part of Trump’s effort to overturn the election.)
In May, the state House of Representatives confirmed King to replace Ed Lindsey, a Republican who faced criticism on the right for his support for no-excuse absentee voting and his lobbying career. King proposed re-opening a state investigation of the 2020 election.
Johnston, the board member who attended the Trump rally, was appointed by the Georgia Republican Party in 2022. She has already hinted that GOP county officials could use the new power given to them by the state board to refuse to certify election results.
“Not all elections are certified,” she said at the seven-hour board meeting on Tuesday. “There are ballot battles and there are elections that need to be addressed carefully, and there may be issues that prevent a board from certifying.”
State board member Tindall Ghazal says that Republican officials who have refused to certify election results “are not operating in good faith” and are trying to sow doubt about the legitimacy of elections. “It’s very clear some of the decisions are being driven by partisan interests and there’s a partisan interest in chaos.”
The move to thwart election certification is just one of many disturbing moves recently taken by the board’s MAGA-friendly majority. In another meeting Wednesday, they voted to re-open an investigation into the 2020 results in the Democratic stronghold of Fulton County, where Trump and his allies spread lies about “suitcases” of ballots being counted on election night after GOP poll monitors left. As a result of SB202, the state board now has new power to take control of election administration in up to four counties it deems “underperforming,” sparking fears that Republicans will usurp election operations in heavily Democratic areas.
The board is also considering another rule that would allow county election officials to demand to review a long list of election documents before certifying results, which could further undercut efforts to certify elections in a timely manner and another measure that would give partisan poll watchers greater access to monitor the vote counting process—a key demand of election deniers who tried to disrupt the 2020 vote.
“Changing Georgia election rules with under 90 days to go should raise alarms for everyone who values the integrity of elections—these changes can be used by Trump and his allies to obstruct certification of the 2024 election results,” says Max Flugrath, a spokesman for the voting rights group Fair Fight.
Even Republicans who have denounced Trump are doing the bidding of election deniers in the state. In late July, the secretary of state’s office unveiled a new online portal that allows someone to cancel the registration of another voter online if they have allegedly died or moved out of state. Users only need to know a voter’s name, date of birth, and county residence to initiate a cancellation request, and the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number or their driver’s license number in order to finalize a cancellation. That very information leaked online after the portal’s rollout, exacerbating concerns about voter privacy. Georgia Senate Democrats said the site “empowers conspiracy theorists and other bad actors to deny Georgians the right to vote.”
The portal is particularly worrisome because SB202 explicitly green-lit unlimited challenges to voter eligibility and right-wing activists challenged the registrations of roughly 100,000 people during the 2022 midterms. The Georgia legislature made it even easier to launch mass voter challenges this year, sparking fears that more voters could be wrongly removed from voter rolls. ProPublica reported that there have already been attempts to cancel the registrations of Raffensperger and far-right GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene using the new online tool.
Georgia is once again a toss-up state, as the latest projections show Kamala Harris pulling even with Trump. But the election deniers who have been empowered after 2020 are doing everything they can to rig the rules to prevent a Democrat from winning the state again.
