How pro-Trump officials in Georgia drafted rules to deny election results

Receive new emails from Rolling Stone and American Doom reveal how conservative election officials in the state of Georgia laid the groundwork for the state’s controversial new election rules, designed to give officials more power to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results.

Emails show that a Donald Trump supporter on the panel had requested a wish list of needed materials from conservative county election officials months before the rules were passed.

“Thank you all for agreeing to comment on this proposed rule regarding certification documents required by superintendents prior to certification,” Georgia State Election Board member Dr. Janice Johnston wrote on May 12. “What documents and reports do you require to certify election results?”

The documents, obtained through a public records request, show certain election records that Gwinnett County Election Board member David Hancock said he needed to certify the results of the May 2024 primary election. The records he cited reflect the two controversial rules that Johnston and two pro-Trump colleagues on the state election board recently passed that give officials like Hancock broad powers to refuse to certify election results.

A hundred years of Georgia case law has made clear that county election officials’ duty to certify results is a “ministerial” task, not discretionary, election experts and Democrats say. Still, election objectors like Hancock, who serve in appointed roles as county election officials, have demanded more power to refuse certification – power they have been granted in recent weeks by Johnston and two pro-Trump Republicans on the state election board.

Refusing to certify the results could prevent state authorities from counting the results in those counties in a timely manner — and potentially delay the results of the presidential election in November, Democrats and election experts warn. Refusing to certify also lends credence to false claims of widespread voter fraud, which could help the Trump campaign in its efforts to challenge the results of the 2024 election.

As Democrats raised alarm over the denial of certification, Trump brought the issue into even greater focus when he praised Johnston and two other Republican members of the State Election Board at an Aug. 3 rally in Atlanta, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”

Hancock, a voter objector who has repeatedly posted false information about voter fraud and spoken out on the issue of certification, was appointed to office by Gwinnett County Republicans in January. Officials like Hancock and others argue that intricate, detailed materials from voting machines and polling places can help provide evidence of voter fraud.

Although he acknowledged that he found only a handful of errors in the results of the May 2024 primary election, Hancock expressed enthusiasm for the new rules, one of which allows county election officials to refuse to certify results if they decide that a “reasonable investigation” is necessary to resolve irregularities or fraud.

“I look forward to moving this process forward at the state level!” Hancock said in the May 26 email to Johnston.

The emails show that Johnston corresponded with Michael Heekin and Julie Adams, two Republican members of the Fulton County Board of Elections who have refused to certify the results this year; Debbie Fisher, a Republican member of the Cobb County Board of Elections who has also refused to certify the results; and Bridget Thorne, an election denier and member of the Fulton County Board of Elections.

Hancock, Johnston, Thorne, Heekin and Adams did not respond to questions for this article. Fisher declined to comment.

The emails obtained Monday shed even more light on the close working relationship between Johnston and voter objectors serving as county election officials, as well as Hancock’s conversations with prominent Georgia voter objectors like Garland Favorito, David Cross and Elizabeth Delmas, who is associated with the Constitution Party of Georgia. The emails also show Hancock discussing voter purges with his Republican colleague on the Gwinnett County Election Board, Alice O’Lenick, who refuses to certify the results herself.

“This confirms what we suspected – Trump and his election denier allies are involved in a conspiracy to rig the Georgia election,” Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the left-leaning voting rights group Fair Fight, said in a statement.

Democrats said the emails were evidence of continued collaboration between Georgia election officials and election denial groups like Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, as Adams, a member of the Fulton County Election Board, received emails from Hancock and Johnston at an email address associated with her role with the Election Integrity Network.

“If anyone needed any further proof that Donald Trump’s ‘pit bulls’ for ‘victory’ are working with his 2020 election denial lawyer Cleta Mitchell, here it is,” Georgia Democratic Party Chair and U.S. Representative Nikema Williams said in a statement. “They are determined to establish a new power to refuse to certify an election result should their preferred candidate lose – as Trump did in 2020.”

While Hancock certified the results of the May primary, the emails show how widespread and coordinated efforts to challenge election results have become in Georgia. In March, Hancock, Heekin and Adams refused to certify the results of the presidential primary. In 2023, Fisher joined Republican election officials in several counties in refusing to certify the election results.

Adams is now suing, with the help of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, to gain more discretion in refusing to certify results — a power she was granted last month thanks to two new certification rules passed by Johnston and two of her Republican colleagues on the state election board, Janelle King and Rick Jeffares. (Adams’ lawsuit is still pending.) Those certification rules are now the subject of a lawsuit filed Monday by the Georgia Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee, which argues that the rules are not only outside the state election board’s authority, but may also violate Georgia law.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, also criticized the two certification rules adopted by the state election board, saying Johnston, King and Jeffares engaged in “activist rulemaking” that would “undermine voter confidence and burden poll workers.”

Also on Monday, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) appeared to respond to calls by state Democrats to remove Johnston and fellow Trump-supporting Electoral College members King and Jeffares. Kemp asked Attorney General Chris Carr (R) to decide whether the governor has the authority to remove members of the committee.

The emails received from Rolling Stone and “American Doom” also reveal the involvement of local election denial officials like Hancock in the announcement of the two controversial certification rules.

On May 26, Hancock gave Johnston a list of documents to review before voting on certification. He found few errors—and no obvious evidence of fraud.

“So far, the errors I have found have only affected a few ballots,” Hancock wrote, but he still demanded access to more material.

Cathy Woolard, a Democrat and former member of the Fulton County Election Board, is one of many Democrats who have said the “proper investigation” gives election officials like Hancock too much discretion to refuse to certify the results.

“One of the problems with a reasonable investigation is that we have 159 counties that interpret it differently,” says Woolard Rolling Stone“There are tens of thousands of documents that cannot be reviewed in time for certification, and one of the things I worry about is that a proper investigation will involve removing documents from the building so they can be reviewed by people who may not even understand what they are looking at but who can use that information to challenge the election results.”

At the top of Hancock’s list of documents he needs for certification is that “the number of votes cast in each precinct does not exceed the number of registered voters in each precinct.” That requirement is at the heart of the second rule the State Election Board adopted in recent weeks, which requires that the number of votes cast and ballots match before certification can proceed.

Election experts told ProPublica that those numbers are often off because machine errors are common in polling places with high populations, such as in large cities where voters tend to lean Democratic. On Tuesday, ProPublica also reported that the rule was initially thrown out because members of the State Election Board believed it violated Georgia law, a possible illegality that Democrats are citing in a lawsuit filed against the State Election Board on Monday night.

The certification controversy comes as Republicans continue to conduct voter purges in Georgia and across the country — purges that Hancock and Johnston discuss at length in the emails. Among those discussions is Hancock’s claim that tens of thousands of Georgia voters are registered in other states. In the emails, Johnston expands on those claims, forwarding an email that lists 27,000 duplicate registrations that she describes as a “perfect match” because voters in multiple states had the same first, middle and last name, as well as the same birth year and some similar address information.

“Assuming this data is correct, then the systemic problem is either that duplicate registrations are not detected or that duplicate registrations are not deleted,” Johnston wrote.

At a Gwinnett County Board of Elections hearing last week, Hancock and O’Lenick attempted to remove more voters from the rolls, but were overruled in some cases by Democrats on the board. Democrats on the board said the appeals amounted to “incapacitation.”

In an August 18 email to Johnston, Hancock called Democrats’ refusal to grant some voter challenges in Gwinnett County a “farce.”

This story appears in collaboration with American downfalla newsletter dealing with right-wing extremism and other threats to democracy.