"Organized conspiracy": Experts warn Trump allies on Georgia election board are "sowing chaos"

Allies of former President Donald Trump on the Georgia state election board are stirring up chaos by passing new mandates ahead of the November election in a bid to dissuade voters and overwhelm local election officials, election experts warn.

The Georgia elections board passed a handful of rule changes this month that election officials across the state have decried as unnecessary and burdensome.

One rule, passed by a 3-2 partisan line vote Aug. 19, would allow county election board members to delay the certification of votes by investigating discrepancies between ballots cast and the number of voters. 

The board the same day also advanced a rule requiring those ballots to be counted by hand. 

And earlier in August, the board adopted a rule to allow local election boards to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” of election results – without defining what exactly that means. 

The Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, which represents over 500 officials across the estate, asked the board to stop making sweeping rule changes in the weeks leading to the election.

Cathy Woolard, former Chair of the Fulton County Board of Registrations & Elections, said normally, the association itself would have come to the board to ask for particular changes – well ahead of an election cycle.

“That has not happened in any of these rule petitions,” she said on a call with reporters this week organized by advocacy group Fair Fight Action. “They have come from citizens who, generally speaking, have been, I hate to say it, but election deniers and activists who have kind of continued to stir the pot and have dialogue that there's something wrong with our elections.”

She continued: “This is 159 counties, election administrators and people who do the work day in, day out. When they come back and say: ‘You know, we don't need this. This doesn't clarify something. This is going to be a problem for us, just in terms of the logistics.’ And then they run roughshod over that and vote and with a partisan split. You have a problem there.”

Patrise Perkins-Hooker, the former chair of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, said the changes are driven solely by partisanship – in favor of Trump.

“As they become more politicized, they have become a political weapon of parties, a preference to undo the confidence in the election system, to raise doubt about the election system so they become much more politicized in their approach, and these rule making things are just evidence of it,” Perkins-Hooker said on the call with reporters.

Perkins-Hooker, a county attorney for Fulton County, pointed out that research shows voter fraud is rare and that Georgia in particular has a solid reputation for handling elections. 

“if there is nothing, if there's no problem, and we've had courts say there's no problem in the conduct of elections in Georgia, why do you need all of these rules?” she said. 

She said political and outside influence is driving election board decisions – not what’s in the best interest of Georgians. 

“What has happened with the SEB is it has been populated by public comment from people who will believe our election system is flawed, and they want to curtail the free access of voters to elect their candidates,” she said.

The Trump allies on the Georgia Election Board are focusing on a little-known part of the voting process: certification.

Local election officials are tasked with certifying election results as a ministerial duty under statute. 

Certification doesn't happen until local election officials have repeatedly verified the results during the canvas and audit process — which includes everything from cross-checking ballots and tallies against voter lists to verifying signatures on mail-in ballots. States can address suspected errors and fraud with mechanisms from recounts, to audits, to evidentiary hearings before state election boards.

State laws make it clear that election officials have no discretion to refuse to certify election results,

Legal experts have told Salon that they expect courts will reject any efforts by local officials to question election results and delay certification.

Those experts say they’re more concerned about the role of state legislatures and the Trump-friendly Supreme Court coming to Trump's aid as he sows the kind of discord and doubt in the nation’s electoral processes that preceded the violence in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Woolard said it’s likely that Trump allies who try to delay certification will end up outvoted by other local board members.

“You may have counties where there's a lot of attention right now, like Fulton County, where they most likely will be outvoted, because we understand what certification is,” she said. “But then you have other counties, where we might not be focused, perhaps maybe a county like Coffee County, where they might actually not certify the election.”

Still, she’s concerned about counties that might not certify and the confusion and disorder that could be unleashed. 

“It gets back to that sowing chaos problem that you know that's happening to this day, quite frankly,” she said.

Woolard said when she was previously director of the Fulton County board, the two Republicans and three Democrats on the board almost always ruled unanimously.

“We identified things that we needed to look into, and including things that were brought from my Republican colleagues, but we still came to a measured conclusion,” she said. “Now we have the same partisan split, but we have two people who aren't voting for certification, who are entertaining notions of things that are being brought from other counties, from the Republican Party, from groups that don't have anything to do with what is before us in terms of administering an election.”

ProPublica revealed that election deniers, through the rightwing Election Integrity Network, have secretly pushed a rule adopted by the state election board to make it easier to delay certification.

Woolard said she and other election officials are highly concerned about how the rule changes could throw election preparations into disarray.

“Getting ready to run an election like in Fulton County, we have 1000 volunteers, 250 Election Day precincts,” Wollard said. “Our traffic is a nightmare, and we're having the same deadlines and time concerns in smaller counties that you know might have 1000 voters. We have 800,000 voters. It becomes very challenging to get about the work of running those elections when you're constantly having this barrage of craziness that has nothing to do with what is before you as set out by law.”

She said our society often considers such logistical concerns will just get worked out at the end of the day. 

“That's sort of a concern that we don't pay a lot of attention to, because you just assume it's all going to go right,” she said. “But you know, what we do logistically is amazing, and it's set up by state law. We follow it to the letter, even when it's challenging. But then you throw all this other stuff on top of it that our staff has to deal with, and you really run the risk that you're creating the potential for a failure that you know could have been avoided if people had time to actually do their work.”

Fair Fight Action CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo said even if votes end up certified at the end of the day, election deniers allied with Trump may achieve their overriding goal of stowing disinformation and distrust in the voting system. 

“Their disinformation is already disenfranchising American citizens by getting it into law,” she said. 

She pointed out that Trump allies are trying to invalidate categories of ballots, including provisional, out-of-precinct ballots. 

“That is a successful strategy,” she said. “That is successfully disenfranchising voters. Number one, we have to take it seriously from that way, because it's moving into statute.”

Groh-Wargo said the U.S. has seen more voter suppression, anti-voting bills passed in this country's history in 2021 and 2023 than any time before. 

She said the Trump effort in 2020 to pressure local officials to switch votes to him was alarming and noted that while some members of the Trump “voter suppression architecture” have ended up pleading guilty, the system moves slowly, and voters must understand both their rights and how local election officials have worked for years to develop a trustworthy system. 

“Having gone through what we all went through four years ago, we take it seriously and know the power that these disinformation narratives have, and are ready for them to try to execute on all of this at a higher level,” she said. “Because the big difference from four years ago is that the MAGA, anti-voting election deniers, they have moved their way into so many local boards and state, state election boards all over the country. And so we know there's an organized conspiracy, but we also know there are all those rogue actors.”