OPINION: The drive to hijack Georgia elections part of ongoing plan

Last week, during a contentious meeting of the State Election Board, its chairman said he wanted to put “guardrails” around a proposed rule change favored by the board’s majority.

Forget election guardrails; they’re being torn down all over the place. The Election Board’s MAGA-leaning majority are doing whatever they can to muddle up the certification of the upcoming presidential election and pave the way for their guy if he doesn’t win outright.

Fair elections be damned.

On Tuesday, those three board members of the five-member panel pushed through a rule change that would allow members of local election boards to review an endless assortment of documents if they have a hunch something is up.

Or, more specifically in my view, it would allow them to dig and dig until they find something “odd” so they can feed their conspiracy-minded comrades. Then, with those “findings,” they could cast suspicion on vote totals, which is not hard to do these days. Then, the legislature could wade into the confusion and pick their own slate of electors.

One former GOP legislator told me the scheme was “dangerous, wrong — and genius.”

That is where we are these days.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

During an eight-hour marathon meeting Tuesday, Election Board Chairman John Fervier tried to get fellow board members to agree to a specific and limited list of basic documents that must be provided before local boards certify elections: such as statements of votes cast, vote total recap forms and lists of voters.

“I just believe there needs to be a list of documents that the board of registration and elections gets to see so it’s not a never-ending search for ‘I need this document, I need that document,’ " said Fervier, a Waffle House exec who was appointed to the board in January by Gov. Brian Kemp.

State law demands that local election boards certify the results the Monday after elections. Largely, the local officials are to count votes that were cast and make sure the totals are correct. Allegations that things are wrong — missing ballots, double counting, etc. — can be brought up after that time and be argued in court.

The rule change that would give local boards the power to demand any document they can think of was presented to the board by Salleigh Grubbs. One of her galvanizing forays into politics was in November 2020 when she followed a truck from a Cobb County vote-counting facility, thinking that vital documents were being shredded. The county said it was “routine” disposal of “non-relevant materials.”

Soon, she told her story before the state Senate’s “Stop the Steal” panel — one that also featured Rudy Giuliani.

Months later, Grubbs was elected Cobb’s Republican Party Chairwoman.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

The State Election Board has undergone its own MAGAfication in the past couple years.

In 2022, the state GOP appointed Janice Johnston, a retired obstetrician, to the Election Board. She had been a frequent critic of Fulton County after the 2020 election. She seems to be the brains of the current group.

This year, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a fake elector, picked former state Sen. Rick Jeffares, who has dabbled in election denying , to the board. My colleague Mark Niesse previously reported Jeffares posted Facebook memes in 2020 — when Donald Trump was contesting his loss — that suggested dead people had voted by mail, claimed the Democrats and China had colluded and implied that the Dems were cheaters.

Just the kind of reasoned intellect you want on an election board.

And finally in May, House Speaker Jon Burns sent conservative media pundit Janelle King to the board, giving the MAGA crowd their third vote. She replaced former GOP legislator Ed Lindsey, who was told to scram because he wasn’t fiery enough for the stolen election conspiracists .

I reached out to Johnston, Jeffares and King but heard nothing back.

Fervier, the chair who hoped to set “guardrails” for the new proposed rule, seems to be the reasonable conservative of this bunch.

He replaced retired federal Judge William Duffy, who left last year after more than a year of dealing with dyspeptic, suspicious and often uncourteous crowds.

That “passion” hasn’t subsided.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

During last Tuesday’s meeting, the crowd started catcalling Fervier after he called for an executive session, yelling “Shame on you!” and “Third world country!” among other things. The crowd cheered Johnston, Jeffares and King as they walked from the meeting. Then they lustily booed Fervier and Democratic member Sara Tindall Ghazal.

The audience members sort of remind me of the “Stop Cop City” crowd — without the nose rings.

Not to be outdone, the new MAGA majority pulled a fast one late in the week.

On Friday, those three members, knowing that the chairman and the board’s Democrat were out of town, called for a meeting on short notice to finish up business that was not completed three days earlier.

Why they needed to finish up without the two board members who disagree with them? Who knows? They have three votes and can pretty much do as they please anyways.

Before the meeting (that she couldn’t attend) Ghazal told me this “follows what we are seeing across the country.” That is election boards being hijacked and election laws weakened to serve the purposes of those who might want to cook an election.

“It’s only going to get worse,” she said.

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