Georgia Election Board Pitches Anti-Voting Wish List for 2026 Elections

The Georgia State Election Board (SEB) is pushing to severely restrict access to the ballot box ahead of the 2026 midterm elections — including an end to absentee voting, and a drive for paper ballots.

Janice Johnston, the vice chair of the SEB and a longtime election denier, brought the board’s wishlist of voting law changes to the final meeting of the General Assembly’s Blue-Ribbon Study Committee on Election Procedures Thursday, before the committee makes recommendations to lawmakers for changes to the state’s election laws. 

Johnston’s wishlist included a switch to hand-marked paper ballots, a push for handwritten numbered voter lists and getting rid of no-excuse absentee voting.

“Discourage absentee voting and encourage in-person voting,” Johnston told the committee. “Ballot drop boxes were a pandemic response, they’re no longer needed and should be removed.” 

Johnston also recommended that lawmakers pass a measure to revoke Georgia’s membership from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), an information-sharing database that helps states maintain accurate voter rolls. 

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, red states left ERIC after President Donald Trump and other right-wing propagandists spread conspiracy theories about the program. 

“On ERIC… we know that that’s been problematic and we’ve seen some security loopholes, as presented in the last meeting,” Rep. Martin Momtahan (R) later replied to Johnston. 

Johnston, who was appointed to the SEB in 2022, has a history of election denialism and has reportedly spearheaded the controversial board’s recent push to restrict voting access and promote election conspiracy theories. In the months leading up to the 2024 election, the SEB tried to impose a slew of strict anti-voting measures — including hand counting of ballots, video surveillance on drop boxes, increased poll watchers and others — that were met with a barrage of lawsuits.

Since then, Johnston has been leading the SEB’s effort to get the Trump administration to investigate the state’s 2020 election results. In July, the SEB voted 3-2 in a last-minute resolution calling 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. 

Rep. Saira Draper (D) grilled Johnston on the “dysfunction of the State Election Board,” specifically calling out the lack of transparency of the SEB adding last-minute agenda items on the day of its meetings. 

“All of these items you added to the agenda, same day, you did not give the public notice,” she said. “And it certainly violates the spirit of the Open Meetings Act, if not the law.”

During Thursday’s meeting, Johnston asked the Assembly to codify the board’s strict anti-voting rules from 2024. She also called on the Assembly to pass legislation modeled after a Virginia law that targets voters who’ve allegedly moved within the state but vote in their previous jurisdiction.

This isn’t the first time that the state’s Blue Ribbon Study Committee has heard from anti-voting activists. At September’s meeting Brad Carver — an attorney who leads the Georgia Republican Party’s Election Confidence Task Force and a 2020 Republican elector for President Donald Trump — urged the committee to recommend ending no-excuse absentee voting, cutting a week of early voting, and scrapping automatic voter registration.