Georgia election board hires noted election denier for key investigative post

Georgia’s GOP-led state election board recently hired a notorious election denier with a history of anti-voting activism to a key post that allows him to investigate election processes across the state. 

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported that Jason Frazier quietly started work as an investigator with the Georgia State Election Board (SEB) on May 14. 

Frazier has a long history of election controversy in the Peach State. After Georgia passed a law in 2024 to make it easy for citizens to challenge a voter’s eligibility, Frazier challenged nearly 10,000 voter registrations in Fulton County — and claims to have successfully challenged over 25,000. He has close ties to the anti-voting lawyer Cleta Mitchell — who played a key role in President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia — and helped develop EagleAI, a flawed mass voter roll database pushed by Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network.

Most recently, Frazier was one of two election deniers who were blocked appointments last August on the Fulton County Board of Elections by the board of commissioners because of their extremist, anti-voting background. Per county rules, the Fulton Republican Party is allowed to nominate people to fill two seats on the five-person board, who are then approved by the board of supervisors. But the Democratic-led board of commissioners rejected Frazier’s nomination, along with fellow election denier Julie Adams, who was reappointed by the county GOP for another term. 

The saga turned into a heated legal battle, with members of the Fulton Board of Commissioners held in civil contempt for refusing to appoint the two Republican nominees. Adams remains on the board of elections, while the other GOP seat is still vacant. 

“Jason Frazier is the person I’ve successfully fought to keep off of our Fulton County Elections Board twice,” Fulton District 3 Commissioner Dana Barrett said in a statement to Democracy Docket. “He is a proud MAGA operative whose entire goal is to undermine elections by spreading lies and conspiracy theories and harassing eligible Georgia voters with thousands of unfounded voter registration challenges. Shame on the State Elections Board for using taxpayer dollars to pay a conspiracy theorist to spew election lies and misinformation.” 

In August 2024, Frazier sued the Fulton election board, falsely claiming that they failed to properly maintain the county’s voter rolls and respond to voter challenges — but the lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed a month later.

Frazier’s hiring at the SEB is hardly surprising given the direction the board has gone in recent years. Since 2022, the SEB has become overtaken with election deniers and MAGA loyalists. At the helm is SEB Vice Chair Janice Johnston, a Trump loyalist and conspiracy theorist who’s helped lead the five-person board in advocating for anti-voting policies throughout Georgia. 

“It’s shocking that an allegedly nonpartisan board would hire a political operative with a years-long record of baselessly accusing counties of wrongdoing to then turn around and ‘investigate’ these same counties,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, the SEB’s lone Democrat, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The majority members of the State Election Board appear determined to double-down on their MAGA credentials, foment public distrust in our elections and further marginalize themselves into irrelevance.”

All Voting Is Local Georgia State Director Kristin Nabers also slammed the SEB’s decision to hire Frazier. 

“The board’s hiring of an anti-voting extremist with a clear bias against county elections officials as an investigator not only eliminates any of their remaining credibility, it puts counties and voters at risk of vindictive actions and politically motivated investigations,” Nabers said in a statement. “If you were still somehow not convinced that the board’s election denier majority is trying to keep voters it doesn’t like from voting, Frazier’s hiring is the latest piece of evidence.”