Here’s How Pro-Trump Georgia Officials Wrote New Rules to Deny Election Results
New emails obtained by Rolling Stone and American Doom reveal how conservative Georgia election officials laid the groundwork for new controversial state election rules designed to give more power to those officials to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results.
Months before the Georgia State Election Board passed the rules, emails show a Donald Trump-supporter on the board solicited a wish list from conservative county election officials of the materials they would need.
“Thank you all for agreeing to provide input on this proposed Rule for Certification Documents needed for Superintendents prior to certification,” Dr. Janice Johnston, the Georgia State Election Board member, wrote on May 12. “What documents and reports do you need to certify the election results?”
The documents, obtained through a public records request, show specific election materials that Gwinnett County election board member David Hancock claimed he needed in order to certify results of the May 2024 primary. The materials he mentioned are reflected in the two controversial rules recently passed by Johnston and two pro-Trump colleagues on the State Election Board that give broad power to officials like Hancock to refuse to certify election results.
One hundred years of Georgia case law has made clear that the duty of county election officials to certify results is a “ministerial” task, not a discretionary one, election experts and Democrats say. Still, election deniers like Hancock who serve in appointed roles as county election officials have demanded more power to refuse certification — power that has been granted in recent weeks by Johnston and two pro-Trump Republicans on the State Election Board.
Refusing to certify results could prevent state officials from counting results in those counties in a timely manner — and potentially delay the results of the presidential election this November, Democrats and election experts warn. Certification refusals also lend credibility to false claims of widespread voter fraud that could aid the Trump campaign in their efforts to challenge the results of the 2024 election.
With Democrats raising the alarm about certification refusals, Trump brought the issue further into focus when he praised Johnston and two other Republican members of the State Election Board at an Aug. 3 rally in Atlanta, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”
Hancock, an election denier who has repeatedly posted false information about election fraud and commented on the issue of certification, was appointed to his post by Gwinnett County Republicans in January. Officials like Hancock and others argue that intricate, detailed materials from voting machines and polling locations can help show proof of voter fraud.
Despite acknowledging he only found a handful of errors in the results of the May 2024 primary, Hancock shared his enthusiasm for the new rules, one of which allows county election officials to deny certification of results if they decide a “reasonable inquiry” is necessary to investigate irregularities or fraud.
“I am looking forward to moving this process along at the state level!” Hancock told Johnston in the May 26 email.
The emails show Johnston corresponding with Michael Heekin and Julie Adams, GOP members of the Fulton County election board who have refused to certify results this year; Debbie Fisher, a Republican election board member in Cobb County who has also refused to certify results; and Bridget Thorne, an election denier who sits on the Fulton County Board of Commissioners.
Johnston, Thorne, Heekin, and Adams did not respond to questions for this story. Fisher declined to comment.
The emails obtained Monday shed even more light on the deep coordination between Johnston and election deniers who serve as county election officials, as well as Hancock’s discussions with prominent Georgia election deniers Garland Favorito, David Cross, and Elizabeth Delmas, who is tied to the Constitution Party of Georgia. The emails also show Hancock discussing voter purges with his fellow Republican on the Gwinnett County election board, Alice O’Lenick, who has refused to certify results herself.
“This confirms what we’ve suspected — Trump and his election denier allies are engaged in a conspiracy to subvert Georgia elections,” Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the left-leaning voting rights advocacy group, Fair Fight, says in a statement.
Democrats said the emails were evidence of continued coordination between Georgia election officials and election denial groups like Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network because Adams, the Fulton County election board member, received emails from Hancock and Johnston to an email address associated with her role at the Election Integrity Network.
“If anyone needed further proof that Donald Trump’s ‘pit bulls’ for ‘victory’ are working in concert with his 2020 election denying attorney, Cleta Mitchell, here it is,” says Georgia Democratic Party Chair and U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams in a statement. “They’re determined to establish a new power of not certifying an election result should their preferred candidate lose — as Trump did in 2020.”
While Hancock went on to certify the results of the May primary, the emails show how widespread and coordinated efforts to call results of elections into question have become in Georgia. In March, Hancock, Heekin, and Adams refused to certify the results of the presidential primary. In 2023, Fisher joined Republican election officials in several counties in refusing to certify election results.
Adams is now suing with the help of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute for more discretion to refuse to certify results — power that was granted in the past month thanks to two new certification rules passed by Johnston and two of her Republican colleagues on the State Election Board, Janelle King and Rick Jeffares. (Adams’ lawsuit remains pending.) Those certification rules are now the subject of a lawsuit filed Monday by the Democratic Party of Georgia and the Democratic National Committee, which called the rules not just outside the authority of the State Election Board, but possibly against Georgia law.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has also criticized the two certification rules passed by the State Election Board, saying that Johnston, King, and Jeffares engaged in “activist rule-making” that would “undermine voter confidence and burden election workers.”
Also on Monday, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) appeared to react to calls from state Democrats to remove Johnston and fellow pro-Trump election board members King and Jeffares, when Kemp asked Attorney General Chris Carr (R) to determine whether the governor has the authority to remove members of the board.
The emails obtained by Rolling Stone and American Doom further expose the involvement of local election denial officials like Hancock in the promulgation of the two controversial certification rules.
On May 26, Hancock provided Johnston with a list of materials he was able to view before voting on certification. He had found only a few errors — and no apparent evidence of fraud.
“So far the errors I have found only affect a few ballots,” Hancock wrote. Still, he demanded access to more materials.
Cathy Woolard, a Democrat and former member of the Fulton County election board, is one of many Democrats who has said the “reasonable inquiry” gives election officials like Hancock too much discretion to refuse to certify results.
“One of the problems with reasonable inquiry is that we have 159 counties that will interpret that differently,” Woolard tells Rolling Stone. “There are tens of thousands of documents that cannot be reviewed in time for certification and part of my concern is that reasonable inquiry will include removal of documents from the building for review by people who may not even understand what they’re looking at but can use that information to call election results into question.”
At the top of Hancock’s list of materials he required for certification are “the number of votes cast at each precinct does not exceed the number of registered voters at each precinct.” That demand is at the core of the second rule the State Election Board passed in recent weeks, requiring that the numbers of votes cast and ballots line up before certification can proceed.
Election experts told ProPublica that these numbers often don’t add up due to machine errors routine in polling locations with large populations, like in large cities where voters tend to skew toward Democrats. On Tuesday, ProPublica also reported that the rule was originally dismissed because State Election Board members thought it went against Georgia law, a potential illegality that Democrats claim in a lawsuit against the State Election Board filed Monday night.
The controversy over certification comes as Republicans continue to pursue voter purges in Georgia and across the country — purges that Hancock and Johnston discuss in detail in the emails. Those discussions include Hancock’s claims that tens of thousands of Georgia voters are registered in other states. In the emails, Johnston is receptive to these claims, forwarding an email detailing 27,000 duplicate registrations she calls a “perfect match” because voters in multiple states had the same first, middle, and last names, as well as the same birth year and some similar address information.
“Assuming this data is correct, the systemic problem is either a failure to detect duplicate registrations or a failure to remove duplicate registrations,” Johnston wrote.
Hancock tells Rolling Stone he pays the Secretary of State for lists of voters to identify those with duplicate registrations and that “even though they are obviously bad registrations, we then attempt to contact them.” (Contacting voters whose eligibility has been challenged is required under Georgia law.)
He claimed that changes passed by the State Election Board “will guarantee that everything will be in order and reviewed days before the certification vote,” adding that “while many liberal publications imply that the new rule will allow delay of certification, the new rule actually does the exact opposite for board members like me.”
Democrats say that’s not true, and that the new certification rules could cause counties to miss their certification deadlines, possibly holding up state-level certification that’s required to determine who wins Georgia’s electoral votes.
At a Gwinnett County election board hearing last week, Hancock and O’Lenick tried to remove more voters from voter rolls but were outvoted by the board’s Democrats in some cases. Democrats on the board said the challenges amounted to “disenfranchisement.”
In an email to Johnston on Aug. 18, Hancock called the Democrats’ refusal to uphold some voter challenges in Gwinnett County a “travesty.”
This story is being published in partnership with American Doom, a newsletter that focuses on right-wing extremism and other threats to democracy.
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