Georgia Election Board Wants Trump Administration to Probe 2020 Contest
Far-right members of Georgia’s election board want the Trump administration to investigate the state’s 2020 election results.
A last-minute resolution passed by the Georgia State Election Board by a 3-2 vote Wednesday called on state authorities to seek assistance from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and other federal agencies to obtain voting records and documents related to the 2020 contest from Fulton County, the state’s largest county and a Democratic stronghold.
The resolution is the latest effort by the board’s far-right wing to find wrongdoing in Fulton County’s handling of the 2020 presidential election after former President Joe Biden narrowly defeated Donald Trump in the state.
Since his return to the White House, President Trump and his allies have sought to use the federal government to scrutinize his loss in 2020. Earlier this year, Trump called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to probe false claims of fraud.
The new resolution called on Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (R) and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to seek “the assistance of appropriate local authorities or federal authorities, including the Department of Justice, to take any action necessary to bring a prompt resolution of the these issues, including obtaining all necessary voting records and documents.”
Kristin Nabers, All Voting is Local’s Georgia state director, said in a statement that the resolution was a “blatant abuse of power” and an “egregious overreach based on disinformation and outright lies.”
“There’s an obvious reason why conspiracy theorists in Georgia want to endlessly relitigate the 2020 general election but never mention the 2024 election” Nabers said. “They want to set a precedent where their candidates are the only ones that are allowed to win. That is not how elections work in Georgia or anywhere else in a democratic country.”
The U.S. Department of Justice and Georgia Attorney General’s Office did not immediately respond to Democracy Docket’s requests for comment.
Max Flugrath, communications director at Fair Fight, told Democracy Docket in a statement that the board’s new resolution “is a brazen attempt to use federal power to weaponize lies, intimidate local officials, and justify future voter suppression.”
“The MAGA-controlled State Election Board has repeatedly revived Donald Trump’s Big Lie – and now they want help from his DOJ to breathe new life into debunked conspiracy theories,” Flugrath said.
Janice Johnston, the Republican Party’s appointee on the election board, unexpectedly introduced the resolution near the end of the board’s eight-hour meeting Wednesday.
State Election Board Chairman John Fervier, appointed by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), said he was “adamantly opposed” to the resolution, and he was joined by Democratic Party appointee Sarah Tindall Ghazal.
Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King supported the resolution. Jeffares and King were nominated to the board by Georgia’s GOP-controlled legislature.
Its adoption builds on a subpoena Johnston, Jeffares and King issued against Fulton County on election night during the 2024 presidential election. The county responded to the subpoena with a motion to quash that’s still being litigated.
The subpoena came after the far-right board members’ previous attempts to investigate Fulton County failed. The Trump-aligned trio voted in August 2024 to refer a complaint alleging mass election fraud in Fulton to Attorney General Carr, who, days later, said the board could not force his office to investigate.
Raffensperger, who pushed back on Trump’s false claims of mass voter fraud in Georgia in 2020 but has championed a slew of restrictive voting policies, has repeatedly been at odds with the board’s Trump-aligned members.
“If the State Elections Board has requested action by the Secretary of State’s office, we have yet to receive it,” a spokesperson for Raffensperger’s office told Democracy Docket in a statement.
A previous investigation into Fulton found that the county likely scanned around 3,000 ballots twice during a recount of the 2020 election results — a recount in which Trump gained almost 1,000 votes. State investigators did not find evidence of intentional fraud or evidence that any of the double-scanned ballots were counted twice.
In response to those findings, the board reprimanded the county and installed independent election monitors during the 2024 election.
But Johnston said that “this case is not closed.”
“It is not dismissed,” she added. “To date, from the subpoena from November 5, 2024, not a single document has been presented to this board.”
While the board was debating the resolution, Tindall Ghazal criticized Johnston for giving other board members only minutes to review it before voting.
“Since you had time to type this up, and make copies of it, don’t you think it would have made more sense to make it available to us more than five minutes before you want to vote on it so that we can actually read and understand what you’re asking here?” she asked Johnston.
In response, Johnston said she “felt strongly” that she did not want “other parties” to see the resolution before she presented it to the board.