Doug Bock Clark, ProPublica

Heather Honey, a high-profile denier of Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, has been appointed to a senior position in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in which she’ll help oversee the nation’s election infrastructure.

Honey is a protege of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results. In 2024, ProPublica reported that Honey had played a key role in Mitchell’s behind-the-scenes effort to change Georgia’s election rules to allow Republican officials to contest a potential Trump loss in that year’s presidential race. Honey also promoted election conspiracy theories, including one Trump cited in a speech to his followers before they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Though states do the on-the-ground work of running elections, DHS supports them with tasks beyond their capacities, such as protecting IT infrastructure and voter databases from foreign intrusions. The agency, with bipartisan support, took on this role in the aftermath of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Experts on voting and state election officials warned that Honey’s appointment as DHS’ deputy assistant secretary of election integrity could erode trust between state and federal officials, prompting states not to share information with the agency.

“We are witnessing a dangerous trend: the elevation of known bad-faith actors like Heather Honey,” said Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, in a statement, citing Honey’s “well-documented history of spreading election lies that have been debunked in court.”

Fontes called her involvement with DHS “deeply troubling” and said “when the agency gives a platform to individuals who have actively worked to erode public trust, it becomes harder to view DHS as a reliable partner in election security.”

A DHS spokesperson did not answer questions from ProPublica on Honey’s appointment or the exact nature of her responsibilities. Honey didn’t respond to calls or emails. The White House also didn’t respond to a request for comment. Her name is listed on the organization’s leadership structure online, and her appointment was first reported by the website Democracy Docket.

In the first Trump administration, the federal government set up programs designed to shield U.S. elections from foreign interference, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of DHS. But Trump soured on this and other initiatives after the director of CISA publicly rebutted his claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Since the start of the second Trump presidency, the administration has gutted those programs, cutting hundreds of employees at CISA. Its director, Chris Krebs, is now under federal investigation, DHS has said; Krebs told CNN that the investigation appeared to be an act of political retribution. The Justice Department has also rolled back a program aimed at combatting foreign influence campaigns. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a memorandum that the Justice Department’s program was disbanded to “free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.”

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit focused on building trust in American elections, said the cuts had dismantled “nearly all” of DHS’ capacity to protect election infrastructure. He said state elections officials feared that Honey’s appointment, combined with the program cuts, signaled the Trump administration’s intent to eliminate bulwarks of fair U.S. elections.

“The hiring of an election conspiracy theorist with no election knowledge or expertise is the culmination of this reversal,” Becker said. “DHS now appears poised to become a primary amplifier of false election conspiracies pushed by our enemies.”

Two sources familiar with Honey’s hiring at DHS said she began working for the agency last week. An organizational chart dated Aug. 18 on the department’s website identifies her as a leader in the agency’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans. Her position wasn’t on a version of the website archived in July, and officials in former administrations said that there’s been no such job previously.

It’s not clear yet what Honey will oversee, but former DHS officials said that deputy assistant secretaries are typically the agency’s top experts in their subject areas. They’re often involved in drafting executive orders and crafting policies. They also serve as liaisons to the White House and the National Security Council.

Since Honey started, Trump has announced “a movement to get rid of” mail-in ballots and voting machines via executive order, though a top aide subsequently said the administration would pursue those goals through legislative action. DHS has also threatened to cut off about $28 million in grants to help states prepare for terrorism and disasters if they don’t change voting rules to conform to the administration’s priorities, NPR has reported.

Honey’s duties likely would include helping to organize the government’s policy responses if foreign actors make intrusions into the nation’s election systems, former officials said. To do this, and to assess the security of election infrastructure, someone in her position would typically have access to classified information, including the government’s election-related intelligence.

Experts expressed concern about Honey’s portfolio, given her history of spreading misinformation.

“Heather Honey’s past misleading claims about vote counts in Pennsylvania, among other things, have helped fuel false conspiracy theories about stolen elections,” said Larry Norden, an election expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, a nonpartisan law and policy group.

Before becoming swept up in the “Stop the Steal” movement, Honey had no experience in the federal government or as an election administrator, working as a Pennsylvania-based private investigator.

After the 2020 election, she became a contractor for a Republican-backed audit seeking proof of fraud in ballots cast in Maricopa County, Arizona. According to emails between employees working on the review, which ended up reaffirming Biden’s win, Honey helped draft the final report.

Since then, Honey has led at least three organizations devoted to transforming election systems in ways championed by conservatives, such as tightening eligibility requirements for people to be on voter rolls. Members of Honey’s Pennsylvania Fair Elections, a state chapter of Mitchell’s nationwide Election Integrity Network, have challenged the eligibility of thousands of residents to be on voter rolls.

Honey has also been involved in numerous other efforts to transform elections around the country, including a successful push to get many states with Republican leadership to pull out of a bipartisan interstate partnership to share data to make voting more secure.

A Republican judge has spent more than two months trying to overturn his narrow defeat for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat by arguing that around 60,000 ballots should be tossed out. But many residents have only recently learned that their votes are in danger of not being counted and say they have done nothing wrong.

ProPublica has heard from dozens of voters who expressed astonishment and anger at state appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin’s ongoing attempts to cancel their ballots. The claim at the heart of Griffin’s challenge: No ballot should be counted for a voter whose registration is missing a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.

The state election board and a Donald Trump-appointed federal judge have dismissed Griffin’s argument that the missing information should invalidate votes. What’s more, state election officials have made clear that there are many legitimate reasons for driver’s license or Social Security information to be missing. And it’s not as if voters can cast ballots without confirming who they are. North Carolina law requires that people verify their identity at the polls — in most cases by showing a driver’s license.

Elizabeth MacDonald, who registered as an unaffiliated voter and lives in an area of Western North Carolina ravaged by Hurricane Helene, made sure to cast a ballot, even though she was still consumed by both the devastation of the storm and the demands of caring for her infant. “The prospect of losing my vote for arbitrary and political reasons is especially painful given the personal and communal trauma we’ve endured over the past several months,” McDonald wrote in a letter to Griffin, which she shared with ProPublica.

“We’re extremely upset,” said Frank Jarvis, whose wife’s registration was challenged and who lives on the state’s eastern coast. “We’re traditional conservatives and Republicans — but it leaves a terrible taste in my mouth, no matter what side it is doing this. I don’t need that kind of person representing me on the Supreme Court.”

Multiple data analyses show that the voters whose ballots were targeted by Griffin are disproportionately Black, Democratic and young. Griffin’s lawyers have written in a legal brief that if a court grants their requests to nullify the ballots, Griffin will likely be able to overturn his 734-vote loss to Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs. The majority-Republican Supreme Court has issued an order blocking certification of Riggs’ win until Griffin’s challenge can be heard in a lower court.

Griffin responded to a list of detailed questions from ProPublica by writing, “I can’t comment on pending litigation. It would be a violation of our Judicial Code of Conduct for me to do so.”

Below are the stories of four of the dozens of voters ProPublica heard from, whose experiences reflect various reasons that driver’s license and Social Security information could be missing from their registration. One has a health condition that prevents him from driving and therefore doesn’t have a license. Another is among the voters who claim that their registration application was filled out correctly and that a clerical error is likely to blame. A newcomer to the state is among the many who didn’t yet have a North Carolina driver’s license when they registered to vote. And, at the other end of the spectrum, a longtime North Carolina voter is one of millions who registered before the information was marked as required on a state voter registration form.

“Today It’s North Carolina, and Tomorrow It’s Another State”

In mid-January, dozens of mostly Black voters gathered in a historical church in New Bern, North Carolina, to learn why a white judge was trying to throw out their votes. The congregation of St. Peters AME Zion Church was established during the Civil War for newly emancipated African Americans, and since then it has remained a central stage for the state’s political struggles. One of the organizers of the gathering was Vicki Sykes, a 58-year-old poll worker, who had been surprised one evening in early January to receive a call from a voting rights advocate informing her that her ballot was among those Griffin was attempting to disqualify.

“The audacity of challenging me was shocking,” Sykes said. “I know the rules.”

Sykes said she brought her driver’s license with her when she registered to vote in 2024 after moving to another North Carolina county and gave it to an election worker — and now suspects an administrative error could have been to blame for her driver’s license number not being entered on her form. Concerned that many people weren’t aware that their votes were in danger of being nullified, Sykes and her sister-in-law, a pastor, arranged the gathering, putting out the word through Facebook messages, calls, voting rights groups and flyers.

“I want people to know today it’s North Carolina, and tomorrow it’s another state,” said Sykes. “It could be a blueprint for what’s to come. So we’re going to fight like hell for that not to happen.”

“It Felt Like Griffin Was Trying to Cast Me Aside”

Connor Addison has epilepsy, a condition that makes it dangerous for him to drive if seizure were to strike while he was behind the wheel. But Addison never expected his medical condition would affect his ability to vote.

He said that around 2022, when he turned 18, he registered in Wake County using his Social Security number. He voted in the 2022 and 2024 elections without problems using a state-approved ID card.

Then, a few weeks ago, his mother told him his registration had been challenged by Griffin, after she heard about the challenges and searched a copy of them available online. “I was almost in disbelief. I’d had to take special actions already to make sure I could vote,” Addison said. “It felt like Griffin was trying to cast me aside.”

Since then, Addison has been speaking out about the challenges, especially in online communities, where he spends much of his time, as his health limits his ability to move about in the physical world. “I want people to understand that what is happening shouldn’t be happening,” said Addison.

“Make Sure Your Vote Counts”

One afternoon last week, Sofia Dib-Gomez, an 18-year-old college freshman, set up a table in Duke University’s main dining hall with a sign declaring, “Make Sure Your Vote Counts.” Then she began asking passersby hurrying to class if they knew whether their ballot was being challenged in the 2024 election. The first student who stopped by was shocked to find that his was.

Dib-Gomez is a member of the Student Voting Rights Lab at Duke and North Carolina Central University, a group that combed the list of Griffin’s challenges to identify around 750 students from Duke whose ballots were targeted and around 4,300 more from other colleges. Research by the group suggests that Griffin’s challenges disproportionately affect young voters. According to the research, people between the ages of 18 and 25 were 3.4 times more likely to be challenged than those over 65.

While assisting with the research, Dib-Gomez was surprised to discover that she was among the challenged voters. When she moved from New York to North Carolina last year, she registered to vote by providing her Social Security number, since she lacked a state driver’s license.

“This was the first election I was able to vote in, so I was very frustrated when I found out,” said Dib-Gomez, who provided her passport to prove her identity when voting. “Students shouldn’t have to feel that this is their fault or they did something wrong. This is targeting them in an attempt to overturn an election.”

“He Might Really Actually Get Away With This”

When Mindy Beller was growing up, her mother would take her to the polls and talk to her about how important voting was. In November, Beller took her own daughter to vote for the first time. Afterward, they went out to eat at an Indian restaurant to celebrate. “I said, ‘Thanks for voting,’ and she said, ‘Thanks for raising me to be a voter,” Beller recalled.

Not long after, a voting rights group contacted Beller to let her know that her vote was being challenged by Griffin. It’s been more than two decades since Beller, who is 62, registered to vote. Until about a year ago, the state’s voter registration form did not require people to include their drivers license or Social Security information, instead coding it as optional, before updating it after a complaint to the state election board pointed out that the form should require the information. Beller felt especially frustrated with Griffin’s challenge, as she lives outside Asheville, North Carolina, portions of which were wiped away by Hurricane Helene, and felt that neither she nor other impacted voters needed the additional stress of the challenges after striving to vote in the storm’s aftermath.

“I keep thinking it can’t be real,” said Beller. “But as it gets closer, he might really actually get away with this.”

Months before voters went to the polls in November, a group of election skeptics based in North Carolina gathered on a call and discussed what actions to take if they doubted any of the results.

One of the ideas they floated: try to get the courts or state election board to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by voters whose registrations are missing a driver’s license number and the last four digits of a Social Security number.

But that idea was resisted by two activists on the call, including the leader of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network. The data was missing not because voters had done something wrong but largely as a result of an administrative error by the state. The leader said the idea was “voter suppression” and “100%” certain to fail in the courts, according to a recording of the July call obtained by ProPublica.

This novel theory is now at the center of a legal challenge by North Carolina appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican who lost a race for a state Supreme Court seat to the Democratic incumbent, Allison Riggs, by just 734 votes and is seeking to have the result overturned.

The state election board dismissed a previous version of the challenge, which is now being considered in federal court. Before the election, a Trump-appointed judge denied an attempt by the Republican National Committee to remove 225,000 voters from the rolls based on the same theory.

The latest case is getting attention statewide and across the country. But it has not yet been reported that members of the group that had helped publicize the idea had cast doubt on its legality.

“I don’t comment on pending litigation,” Griffin wrote to ProPublica in response to a detailed list of questions. “It would be a violation of our code of judicial conduct.”

Embry Owen, Riggs’ campaign manager, disputed the challenge and called on Griffin to concede. “It’s not appropriate for this election to be decided in court, period. NC voters have already made the decision to send Justice Riggs back to the Supreme Court,” she said.

The theory Griffin is citing originated with a right-wing activist, Carol Snow, who described herself to ProPublica in an email as “a Bona Fide Grade-A Election Denier.” Snow promoted it with the help of the state chapter of the Election Integrity Network, a national group whose leader worked with President Donald Trump in his failed effort to overturn the 2020 election. The network also was behind extensive efforts to prepare to contest a Trump loss this year in other states, as ProPublica has reported, as well as in North Carolina, according to previously unreported recordings and transcripts of meetings of the state chapter.

State election officials have found that missing information on a voter’s registration is not disqualifying because there are numerous valid reasons for the state’s database to lack those details.

Those reasons include voters registering before state paperwork was updated about a year ago to require that information or using alternate approved documents, such as a utility bill, to verify their identities. What’s more, voters must still prove their identity when casting a ballot — most often with a driver’s license. “There is virtually no chance of voter fraud resulting from a voter not providing her driver’s license or social security number on her voter registration,” attorneys for the state election board wrote in response to the RNC lawsuit.

Bob Orr, a former GOP state Supreme Court justice who left the Republican Party in 2021, said he too doubts the theory. “I appreciate fighting for every vote: If you honestly think illegal votes have been cast, it’s legitimate to try to prove that,” he said. “But the bottom line is: Did anyone vote illegally? Have you been able to prove one person voted illegally? At this point, no. And we’re weeks past the election and multiple recounts, and there’s no evidence of that.”

In modern history, the state board’s decision on who wins elections has been final, said Chris Cooper, a professor specializing in North Carolina politics at Western Carolina University. That includes an even tighter race in 2020, when a Democratic justice conceded to a Republican after protesting her 401-vote loss to the board.

“We’re used to close elections, we’re used to protests, we’re used to candidates pushing every legal action up to the point the state election board rules,” Cooper said. But, he added, there is an important difference with Griffin’s petition, which goes beyond the state election board to the courts.

“This is basically saying the state elections system is wrong, and we’re going to court to try to change the rules of the game after the game has been played — which is unprecedented.”

In July 2024, the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network convened online to plan its efforts ahead of the presidential election. Worried about a surge of voter registrations from nonwhite voters who they believed would back Democrats, the activists discussed how to assemble a “suspicious voters list” of people whose ballots they could challenge.

Then, one of the group’s board members, Jay DeLancy, said he had another idea “that’s a lot slicker.”

DeLancy said that if a candidate lost a close election, the loss could be overturned by questioning the validity of voters whose registrations are missing their driver’s license and Social Security information. “Those are illegal votes,” he claimed. “I would file a protest.”

Jim Womack, the leader of the chapter, immediately pushed back: “That’s a records keeping problem on the part of the state board. That’s not illegal.”

Later in the call Womack said, “I’m 100% sure you’re not going to get a successful prosecution.” And he told the group, “That’s considered to be voter suppression, and there’s no way a court is going to find that way.”

But DeLancy asked for backup from the originator of that theory: Carol Snow. She argued that her theory could in fact overturn the outcome of an election.

“I guess we’re gonna find that out,” Snow said.

Snow is a leader of the conservative activist group North Carolina Audit Force and lives in the state’s rural mountains. After Trump’s loss in 2020, she threw herself into questioning the election’s results. In 2022, she accompanied a pair of far-right activists to a North Carolina election office where the two men unsuccessfully tried to forcefully access voting machines, and she participated in a failed pressure campaign to oust the election director who resisted them, ProPublica previously reported.

She also began filing overwhelming numbers of records requests and complaints to state election officials, an effort that Womack praised on the July call: “I think Carol has shown a way of really harassing — not that we want to do it for harassment purposes — but really needling the Board of Elections to do their jobs by just constantly deluging them.”

Since late 2021, the state elections board had spent far more time on her requests and complaints than those of any other individual, spokesperson Patrick Gannon said in a statement. “Ms. Snow’s constant barrage of requests and complaints causes other priorities and responsibilities to suffer,” Gannon said.

Snow described her work to ProPublica as “simply taking the time to learn about my state’s electoral process” and acting for the public good. “The records I’ve requested are owned by the public. In other words, I’m asking for what belongs to me,” Snow wrote to ProPublica. “If government agencies are understaffed and unable to comply with this state’s Public Records law, they should address the issue with the entities that fund them.”

In the fall of 2023, Snow filed a complaint alleging that North Carolina’s voter registration form did not clearly require voters to provide their driver’s license number and the last four digits of their Social Security number, as required by federal law — instead that information was coded as optional. Snow later described the missing information as a “line of attack” through which bad actors could cast fraudulent votes using fake identities. (A right-wing conspiracy theory holds that this was how Biden won the 2020 election.)

But she was not able to demonstrate that the missing information had led to anyone improperly voting. After obtaining public records for hundreds of thousands of voter registrations, Snow provided the state board with only seven examples of what she called potential double voting. The state board found all seven to be innocuous things like data entry errors.

The state board quickly updated the form to require the information. But from late 2023 through the fall of 2024, six complaints, some of which were partly based on Snow’s theory, were filed with the state election board. Aside from the updates to the form, the state board dismissed the complaints.

By the time of the July call, some of Snow’s peers seemed dismissive as well.

“I’m not suggesting that we can’t arm a candidate that loses a short, a close race with the information they need to file a protest using this,” Womack said on the call. “But I would just suggest to you that that’s not the way to win on this thing.”

Yet the information did end up in the Republican National Committee’s lawsuit trying to disqualify 225,000 voters, a challenge DeLancy filed against Riggs’ victory in North Carolina’s most populous county, and, the day after that was dismissed, Griffin’s challenge to over 60,000 voters.

DeLancy wrote to ProPublica that he filed the challenge on his own and did not coordinate with Griffin. He also said he disagreed with Womack’s description of such challenges as “voter suppression.” Instead, he said, he saw it as “a proper response” to the state election board’s “violation of federal law.” “Carol Snow deserves an Order of the Long Leaf Pine for exposing this treasonous behavior on the part of the election officials,” he wrote, referring to an award bestowed by North Carolina’s governor.

Womack wrote to ProPublica that the group he leads “is a non-partisan, neutral organization” that does “not favor one party over another.”

He also said that recordings of the group’s calls are “prohibited and violate our internal policies” and “whatever bootleg recording you may have is unauthorized and may well be altered.” ProPublica has seen a video recording of the call and verified portions of it with some participants.

Though Griffin’s challenge of Riggs’ victory is now being considered in federal court, legal experts say it could still end up back where he intended: in front of the state Supreme Court.

Griffin’s petition is making what experts describe as extreme asks to the Supreme Court: to allow him to bypass the lower courts, to allow ballots to be thrown out without proving that voters did anything knowingly wrong and to essentially decide whether to change its composition to six Republicans and one Democrat.

“Even if they do their best to be open-minded and independent, the facts of the potential conflicts of interest are just too obvious to the public,” said Orr, the former Republican justice.

Griffin has described Republican Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby as a “good friend and mentor,” and Newby promoted Griffin’s 2020 run for the court of appeals. What’s more, a ProPublica review of campaign finance reports show that the spouses of three justices, including Newby’s wife, donated over $12,000 to Griffin’s most recent or previous campaigns. (The husband of the Supreme Court’s other Democratic justice donated to Riggs.)

Newby and other justices did not respond to a detailed list of questions sent to spokespeople for the Supreme Court.

When announcing his candidacy for the Supreme Court, Griffin declared, “We are a team that knows how to win — the same team that helped elect Chief Justice Paul Newby and three other members of the current Republican majority.”

A cartoon illustration that hangs in the Supreme Court depicts all the Republican appellate jurists as superheroes from the Justice League, with Newby caricatured as Superman and Griffin as the Flash.

Georgia’s GOP-controlled State Election Board is poised to adopt a rule on Monday that would give county election board members an additional avenue to delay certification of election results, potentially allowing them to throw the state’s vote count into chaos this fall.

A former Fulton County election official who submitted an initial draft of the rule told ProPublica that she had done so at the behest of a regional leader of a right-wing organization involved in challenging the legitimacy of American election systems. That organization, the Election Integrity Network, is led by Cleta Mitchell, who helped orchestrate attempts to overturn the 2020 election and spoke on the call in which former President Donald Trump demanded that Georgia’s secretary of state “find” him 11,780 votes to undo Joe Biden’s victory.

The Election Integrity Network’s role in bringing forward the proposed rule has not been previously reported.

The State Election Board’s Monday meeting comes on the heels of a vote less than two weeks before that empowered county election board members to conduct “reasonable inquiry” into allegations of voting irregularities. That rule did not set deadlines for how long such inquiries might last or describe what they might entail, and critics worried that this omission could cause Georgia to miss the Dec. 11 deadline for sending its certified presidential election results to the federal government.

The new rule is even more concerning, election experts said, because it requires county boards to investigate discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of people who voted in a precinct, no matter how minor. It bars counties from certifying the election tallies until officials can review an investigation of every precinct with inconsistent totals. Such inconsistencies are commonplace, not evidence of malfeasance, and only in extremely rare circumstances affect the outcome of elections. The requirement to explain every one of them and litigation around investigations into them could take far longer than the time allowed by law to certify.

“If this rule is adopted, any claims of fraud, any claims of discrepancies, could be the basis for a county board member — acting in bad faith — to say, ‘I’m not confident in the results,’ and hold up certification under the flimsiest of pretexts,” said Ben Berwick, who leads the election law and litigation team of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections.

“The bottom line here,” Berwick said, is that “election deniers are intentionally creating a failure point in the process where they can interfere if they don’t like the results of an election.”

Until 2020, the certification of elections was a noncontroversial part of running them. After Trump made “stop the steal” a rallying cry in his attempt to overturn his loss to Biden, an increasing number of conservative election board members, especially at the county level, have attempted to block certification of subsequent elections. ProPublica has previously reported how these disruptions revealed weaknesses in the nation’s electoral system.

Among those who would have the ability to slow down the count in the fall is Julie Adams, who is a Republican member of the Fulton County elections board and a regional coordinator with Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. She was sworn in to the Fulton board in February, and one of her first official acts was to vote against the certification of the March presidential primary election, saying she needed more information to investigate discrepancies. She was overruled by her colleagues. She then sued the board and the county’s election director, asking for the court to find that her duties, such as certification, “are, in fact, discretionary, not ministerial.” The suit is ongoing.

The State Election Board received the proposed rule in April from Vernetta Nuriddin, a former member of the Fulton County elections board. In an interview on Friday, Nuriddin acknowledged that Adams “brought that particular concern” to her and was “instrumental” in bringing that rule and several others to the board.

In Nuriddin’s packet of paperwork asking for consideration of the rule, a cover letter said that the “Election Research Institute respectfully submits this petition for adoption.”

The Election Research Institute is led by Heather Honey, a conservative activist who also played a role in attempts to discredit the 2020 election results and has worked to advance election system overhauls supported by Mitchell, the head of the Election Integrity Network. Another organization Honey co-founded, Verity Vote, is listed as working on “joint projects and events” with the Election Integrity Network in its handbook. Mitchell has praised Honey as a “wonderful person” on her podcast.

Honey told ProPublica that her institute did not submit the proposed rule. “The Election Research Institute, like many, you know, nonprofits out there, have folks that have expertise in elections,” Honey said in a brief interview. “And so it is not uncommon for folks to seek our advice.” When asked about the language identifying the institute as submitting it, she said she would only answer further questions over email and then hung up. Honey did not respond to an emailed list of detailed questions.

Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment or a detailed list of questions.

Neither did Adams. In comments supporting the rule during a public meeting, Adams did not disclose her role originating it but explained that “it’s very hard to certify when you’re not following the law in knowing who voted, where they voted and how many ballots were cast.” She said that the purpose of the rule was to catch “problems beforehand” and that its goal was not “about throwing out precincts.”

Nuriddin eventually withdrew her submission. She would not say why.

An almost identical submission was provided to the board at about the same time by Bridget Thorne, a Fulton County commissioner and election denier. The primary difference was that Thorne’s version did not mention the Election Research Institute and said she was submitting it herself.

Thorne’s proposal was considered by the election board in its May meeting. “My hope is to reel in the blatant Fulton County not running their elections correctly,” Thorne told the board. She acknowledged that she had worked with Nuriddin on the rule, and that Nuriddin had withdrawn her name because “she wanted some tweaking of the language, last minute.”

In an interview, Thorne said she was encouraged to submit the rule by Honey, Adams and others.

She said that she did not know where all of the language in it came from because she had consulted with many lawyers and election experts while putting it together, but that some of it had come from herself and Honey. She said that Adams was not a writer but an organizer of the rule.

Thorne denied the rule was meant to be able to affect the outcome of the election. “The whole rule is to safeguard everybody’s vote,” she said, and to make sure that “nobody’s vote gets watered down by inadvertently double-scanning ballots.”

In a 45-minute discussion of the rule, a Republican member of the State Election Board warned that it ran “counter to both the federal and the state law” because it suggested counties could ignore the existing legal deadlines. The Republican chair of the board said that “this rule needs a little bit more work on it to make sure that it fully follows the statute” and that it was “not yet ready for prime time.” The board’s only Democratic member emphasized that it “is a criminal act to refuse to certify valid votes.”

Speaking alongside other conservative elections officials supportive of Thorne, Adams said that if an investigation was able to “find out why the numbers were wrong, a county might be late in certifying but they’d be a whole lot closer in returning accurate results.”

The five-person board, which has four Republicans on it, voted the proposal down unanimously, while offering to have two members work with supporters to refine the rule for future consideration.

That wasn’t the end of the proposal. In a matter of days, the Republican House speaker made a new appointment to the State Election Board, replacing a Republican lawyer who practices election law and who had said the rule was illegal and voted against it. In his place, the speaker appointed Janelle King. King is a conservative podcaster and panelist on a Georgia politics TV show, co-chairs a conservative political action committee, has no experience administering elections and has questioned the results of the 2020 election.

In June, a conservative activist resubmitted the rule with only minor updates, retaining a misspelling in its most important sentence.

In early August, during a rally in Atlanta, Trump praised by name the three members of the board’s new majority who are aligned with him, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory” and saying they were “doing a great job.”

Days later, the State Election Board adopted a rule by a 3-2 vote that allowed for county board members to delay certification of election results to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into them. The Republican chair sided with the lone Democratic appointee in opposition. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger harshly criticized that rule in a statement that called it “new activist rulemaking.”

“Quick reporting of results and certification is paramount to voter confidence,” Raffensperger said. “Misguided attempts by the State Election Board will delay election results and undermine chain of custody safeguards. Georgia voters reject this 11th hour chaos, and so should the unelected members of the State Election Board.”

ProPublica interviewed six election experts about the potential impact of the rule that is scheduled to be considered by the election board on Monday. Five said it seemed more likely to affect urban Democratic counties than rural Republican ones because the former are more populated and have more ballots and voters.

“The statistical probability of a discrepancy is more likely to occur in counties with many voters,” said Paul Gronke, a professor at Reed College and the director of the Elections and Voting Information Center. “What’s unusual” about the proposed rule “is saying that any discrepancy is enough to refuse to certify a whole precinct’s worth of votes,” without considering the magnitude of the discrepancy or the votes it might disenfranchise.

The six experts listed off numerous scenarios in which small discrepancies that do not impact the outcome of the election regularly occur, including: ballots getting stuck in scanners and overlooked, citizens checking in to vote and then discontinuing the process before finalizing their vote, memory sticks failing to upload, election systems being slow to update that a provisional ballot has been corrected and so on.

According to the experts, election laws across America do not allow minor discrepancies to halt the certification process because legally mandated deadlines are tight. There are later opportunities to resolve the discrepancies, such as mandatory audits, investigations and litigation.

“There’s a process for investigating problems” with vote tallies in the courts, “and so if a candidate feels there’s something wrongly done, they can go to the courts,” said Gowri Ramachandran the director of elections and security in the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government program.

If the proposed rule were used to delay certification, the battle would shift to the courts, according to the experts. Georgia law is explicit that certification is mandatory and that attempts by county board members not to certify votes would prompt interested parties to seek a writ of mandamus, a type of court order forcing government officials to properly fulfill their official duties. This prescribed remedy goes all the way back to an 1899 decision by the state Supreme Court, arising from a situation in which a county board was overruled when it tried to refuse to certify a precinct to give victory to their preferred candidates.

What would happen after that is less clear. Numerous outside groups would likely attempt to join the litigation, including the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee. On appeal, cases could end up at Georgia’s Supreme Court. Or they could get moved to federal court. The closest precedent is the recount of the 2000 election in Florida, which only ended after the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the count and awarded the presidency to Republican George W. Bush by a 5-4 vote.

“The 100% definitive answer is that no one knows how such a crisis would play out,” said Marisa Pyle, the senior democracy defense manager for Georgia with All Voting is Local Action, a voting rights advocacy organization. “No one wants to find out.”