Fulton county brawl with Georgia state election board escalates as election approaches

The legal brawl between Georgia’s Donald Trump-oriented state board of elections and Fulton county’s election office continues to intensify, a warm-up for the post-election cavalcade of 2020 redux lawsuits expected in November.

Fulton county filed a lawsuit on Monday to prevent the board from placing 2020 election denialists on a monitoring team for the November election. In response, state board members voted to subpoena a wide range of records from the 2020 election in Fulton county.

The lawsuit asks for a judgment establishing that the state board of elections does not have the authority to force the county to accept appointments to their monitoring team. Fulton county and the state board came to a voluntary agreement in May to hire a monitoring team for the 2024 election after the state board found that it may have double-scanned as many as 3,000 ballots in a recount of the 2020 election. The state board reprimanded the county for the mistake in May.

Fulton county then agreed to implement a third-party monitoring system, in part to assuage critics like those on the board of elections. The monitors would observe election processes for training, ballot preparation, programming voting machines and other processes.

“Since that time, the SEB has repeatedly provided conflicting information and failed to take action related to monitors,” said Sherri Allen, the Fulton county board of registration and elections chair.

“State Election Board members have stated in meetings with Fulton County BRE members that the State Election Board would ‘disavow’ the Fulton County BRE if the Fulton County BRE did not accept the monitors proposed by the State Election Board,” the lawsuit states. “Any such adverse action would directly conflict with multiple provisions of the Election Code.”

An advisory letter sent to the state board last month by Georgia’s attorney general, Christopher Carr, also told the board that it did not have the authority to force Fulton county to accept its monitors.

“Let’s make it clear that this is a closed case under the law, as determined by the attorney general’s office,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, a Democratic appointee to the state election board, in dissent. Ghazal noted that the county was only legally obligated to retain the 2020 documents – volumes of absentee ballot data, scanner tapes, poll pad data, ballot images and other information – for two years.

But Janice Johnston, a Republican member of the state board praised by Trump as a “pit bull”, said she had been assured that the documents were available because of pending litigation. “If Fulton county cannot or does not have the documents, then the place to go is to the clerk of the court where they should be … available for completion of the investigation of Mr Rossi and Mr Moncla’s complaint.”

Joe Rossi, a teacher at a technical college in Macon, and Kevin Moncla, a Texan and the director of the Election Oversight Group, are prominent activists who have continued to press a case in court and before the state elections board over the 2020 election.

The county appointed a monitoring team led by Ryan Germany, former general counsel for Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state. But Trump-aligned members of the state board, at odds with Raffensperger over his handling of the 2020 election, want to add their own members to Germany’s team.

Those members include Heather Honey, who worked on the Maricopa county, Arizona, audit of the 2020 election with the Trump-campaign funded Cyber Ninjas investigation, and Frank Ryan, a former US representative who as a state senator in Pennsylvania made false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and rejected the state’s electoral count.

At the rancorous board meeting on Tuesday, the Georgia state representative Saira Draper, a litigant in a suit to block recent changes to election rules, sparred with Janelle King and Johnston, two Republican members of the state board, over the board’s investigation of some county election boards’ decision to reject voter challenges.

“What we’ve seen since 2021 is a targeting of certain counties,” Draper said, responding to a report from Mike Coan, the board’s executive director who investigated how elections offices around Atlanta, Savannah, Columbus, Athens and other large counties had responded to voter challenges.

“We haven’t seen the mass voter challenges across Georgia any more. We have seen them against Democratic centers … counties with large numbers of Democratic voters, and that’s a nakedly partisan ploy,” she said. “There are people who are sore losers, who have brought frivolous voter challenges targeting Democratic counties, and those challenges have been appropriately dismissed. And now they want a second bite at the apple, both in the courts and here at the state elections board one week before early voting starts.”

“Was Stacey Abrams a sore loser?” King asked Draper. Abrams never conceded her 2018 loss to the governor, Brian Kemp, and suggested that Kemp as secretary of state had manipulated the election apparatus to his advantage.

“I wish she had conceded,” Draper replied.

Fulton county is also contending with a lawsuit from the Georgia Republican party, alleging that the county’s election office hasn’t hired enough Republicans as poll workers for the 2024 election.

The suit states that Georgia law requires counties to hire poll workers from a list parties provide in equal measure. Republicans submitted the names of 74 workers to Fulton county elections director Nadine Williams to hire, but out of the 800 or more elections hires, only nine have been hired for early voting and six for election day, according to the suit. Williams has instead given hiring authority to temporary staffing agencies and precinct managers, who have not given preference to names on the Republican list, it states.

Williams’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the hiring of poll workers.

The Fulton county board of registration and elections will meet on Thursday at 11am. Among the items on the agenda are an update on the monitoring team and the terms of the proposal, a review of the state board’s new rules and the impact to operations, and an executive session to discuss litigation and personnel matters.