Former President Donald Trump's allies have been quietly engineering a takeover of the Georgia State Elections Board, staffing them with MAGA extremists whom Trump affectionately refers to as "pit bulls fighting for victory" to enshrine the "Big Lie" that the election was stolen into the law for 2024, reported Rolling Stone.
The three board members, Rick Jeffares, Dr. Janice Johnston, and Janelle King, met earlier this month, days after the former president praised their work at a rally, and overruled the Democrats on the board, as well as a fourth Republican, to make multiple changes to election administration that Trump and his allies have long sought.
The first change, wrote Justin Glawe, "allows pro-Trump election officials in Georgia’s 159 counties to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results."
"Election certification has long been a ministerial, rather than discretionary task, according to experts and judges. Now, county election officials in Georgia could hold up certification of votes that are crucial to determining which candidate wins Georgia," the report said.
The second change was "to reopen a case in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, regarding double-counted ballots — ballot counting errors that were not nearly enough to overcome Trump’s 11,779-vote deficit to President Joe Biden in the state in 2020," a move designed to cast further doubt on the legitimacy of Trump's loss.
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This comes after Trump personally lobbied Georgia Republicans in who they would appoint to the board — and as the lone other Republican, John Fervier, warns that some of these rules have no "guardrails" to prevent chaos in the election, even inviting an attorney from the liberal-oriented watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to explain at the recent meeting why this rule change could cause a crisis.
The watchdog, noted Glawe, recently "released a report laying out remedies for the phenomenon of certification refusals and other election denier tactics in Georgia and elsewhere," which specifically prioritizes having top-level state officials and local prosecutors advise that the practice is illegal. The move by Georgia's MAGA-dominated election board serves to do the opposite.
Trump has never admitted to legitimately losing Georgia, and a key part of his state prosecution there for election racketeering centers on pressuring GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" extra votes to help him beat President Joe Biden shortly after the 2020 election.
