by Jay Bookman, Georgia Recorder [This article first appeared in the Georgia Recorder, republished with permission]

July 25, 2024

Georgia’s Republican leadership has created a major problem for itself and the state of Georgia. If they don’t find a way to fix it before the November elections, we could be in a world of trouble.

The problem is the State Election Board, and what they’ve done to it. Thanks to a series of legislative changes and bad appointments, what had long been a credible, responsible, bipartisan agency charged with ensuring clean elections has been handed over to a group of far-right election deniers with trouble on their minds.

If we have a close election this fall, as seems likely, they have been handed the potential to do significant damage.

And again, this is on Georgia’s Republican leadership. First, they changed state law to remove Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as head of the state election board, supposedly because he was no longer trusted by the people of Georgia, people who have re-elected him overwhelmingly.

Then they changed the law again, this time to give Republicans four votes on the five-member board. The Republican Party was given a nominee, and it chose Janice Johnston. The GOP-run state Senate was given a nominee, and it chose Rick Jeffares. The GOP-run state House was given a nominee, and it chose Janelle King.

None of the three is willing to acknowledge that Joe Biden carried Georgia in the 2020 elections, and as a majority on the five-member board they show worrisome signs of trying to use that majority to throw the 2024 election into legal and political turmoil.

In one ominous sign, conspiracy theorists around the country are thrilled by the changes in Georgia’s election board makeup, treating it as a major victory.

Cleta Mitchell, for example, is a far-right lawyer from Washington, D.C., who founded what she calls the Election Integrity Network, which is trying to set the stage for election crises in several swing states, Georgia included. She was central to the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results, and was at Donald Trump’s side when he made his infamous phone call to Raffensperger, demanding that the secretary of state “find” the 11,800 additional votes needed to put him over the top.

“There are now 3 great members of the GA State Election Board – support them,” Mitchell told her supporters in a tweet on July 12 of this year. “They are fighting hard for us!!! The Dems + Kemp + Raffensperger + Carr are fighting our great SEB Members. Fight back!”

When Cleta Mitchell is elated, I’m worried.

Then there’s Garland Favorito, a Georgia-based conspiracy monger and head of a group called VoterGA. For years, Favorito has made far-fetched yet oddly detailed allegations about dead people voting and other massive voter fraud, yet whenever he’s asked to prove those allegations he recedes into vagueness and hand-waving. He too sees the remade election board as an opportunity.

As pointed out by Georgia attorney and mediator Loren Collins, Favorito has a long, bizarre history as a conspiracy theorist on matters that have nothing to do with election fraud. In the past, he has claimed that Bill Clinton had been involved in murders in Arkansas, that George H.W. Bush was involved in drug-trafficking, that both men were secret agents of Chinese Communists, and that the Sept. 11 attacks were the result of a conspiracy among Israel and the Bin Laden and Bush families in hopes of profiting from oil and opium.

Favorito believes Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone, that James Earl Ray did not assassinate Martin Luther King Jr., that Sirhan Sirhan did not assassinate Robert F. Kennedy, and that Jews secretly control the United States as well as the rest of the world. Yet too many people in Georgia, many of whom are well-intentioned, still treat his arguments as credible.

Earlier this month, the new three-member majority tried to call the election board into “emergency” session to cram through changes in state election regulations, at a time when they knew that the other two board members, including its chairman, were unable to attend. Those three board members were warned by the state attorney general’s office that no such emergency seemed to exist, and that the sudden meeting violated the state Open Meetings Act. They were told that any action they took would not be considered legitimate.

They met, and took action, anyway.

This is not the behavior of people who respect and intend to follow the law, who are willing to stay within the guardrails, to do only the job they were appointed to do. To the contrary, the changes they are attempting to make seem intended to create false grounds on which local boards of elections can claim possible fraud and refuse to certify the outcome of elections that they do not like.

That’s an extremely dangerous path to tread, but when you turn over a state board to zealots and conspiracy theorists, that’s what can happen.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and X.