The election deniers with a chokehold on Georgia’s state election board

A rule passed last week, which bipartisan election officials in Georgia say will delay the counting of votes in November, was introduced by an election denier who appears to believe in various rightwing conspiracies and whose apparent experience in elections dates only to February.

The rule – which requires poll workers to hand-count ballots at polling locations – was passed by an election-denier majority on the Georgia state election board on Friday. It was introduced by Sharlene Alexander, a Donald Trump supporter and member of the Fayette county board of elections, who was appointed to her position in February. Alexander’s Facebook page alludes to a belief in election conspiracies, the Guardian has found.

Alexander is one of 12 people – all election deniers – who have introduced more than 30 rules to the state election board since May, according to meeting agendas and summaries reviewed by the Guardian. Of those, the board has approved several, including two that give county election officials more discretion to refuse to certify election results, in addition to Alexander’s hand-count rule.

Alexander’s lack of experience in elections underscores the recent phenomena of unelected, inexperienced activists in Georgia’s election-denial movement successfully lobbying the state election board to pass rules favored by conspiracists. Democrats, voting rights advocates and some Republicans have said the rules are not just outside the authority of the state election board, but may result in delays in the processing and certification of results.

“There is widespread, bipartisan opposition to these anti-voter rule changes and opposition from the local elections officials, as well as experts in the field,” Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the voting rights group Fair Fight, said in a statement. Groh-Wargo noted that Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, and bipartisan county election officials from across the state as well as former governors Nathan Deal and Roy Barnes have said the recently passed rules are “destroying confidence” in Georgia’s election systems.

Raffensperger and other Georgia election officials have warned that Alexander’s rule and the two certification rules “are going to make counting ballots take longer”. Those delays could be used by Trump and Republicans to call results of the election into question, representatives of Raffensperger’s office have said.

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Anyone can submit a rule to the state election board, but all but one of the 32 rules submitted since May have come from a small but vocal group of election officials and activists who believe in Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud, including Alexander. The board hadn’t implemented a new rule since 2021, and between September 2022 and May, no rules were introduced. Since then, Alexander and a group of election-denying officials and activists – called “petitioners” in the parlance of the state election board – have introduced 31 rules that will affect millions of Georgia voters.

These petitioners include Julie Adams, a member of the Fulton county election board who also works for the rightwing groups Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network, which is run by prominent national election denier Cleta Mitchell; Michael Heekin, Adams’ Republican colleague on the Fulton county election board, who has refused to certify results this year; David Cross, an election denier who has pressured the state election board since 2020 to take up investigations into unfounded claims of voter fraud; Garland Favorito, head of the election denier group VoterGA; David Hancock of the Gwinnett county election board; Bridget Thorne, a Fulton county commissioner who ran a secret Telegram channel in which she discussed election conspiracies; and Lucia Frazier, wife of Jason Frazier, an election denier whom Republicans in Fulton county tried and failed to appoint to the election board there, and who recently withdrew a lawsuit claiming the county had allowed ineligible voters to remain on voter rolls.

Like many county election officials in Georgia, Alexander makes her beliefs in election and other rightwing conspiracies known on her personal Facebook page. Last week, she posted a claim that 53 counties in Michigan have more registered voters than citizens who are old enough to vote. The claim is part of a lawsuit brought by the Republican National Committee that seeks to purge voters from Michigan’s voter rolls – one of a slew of lawsuits that Republican groups have filed across the country claiming that voter rolls are bloated with ineligible voters.

Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state, has called the lawsuit “meritless” and “filled with baseless accusations”, noting that her office has removed more than 700,000 voters from voter rolls in her tenure.

Other posts from Alexander allude to a belief in conspiracies about the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as transphobic sentiment and fear of immigrants.

“Vote like your daughters and granddaughters chances to compete in sports and their right to have private spaces to dress and undress in it depends on it. Because it does,” reads a post Alexander shared on 11 August.

Alexander did not immediately respond to questions for this story.

Under previous iterations of the board, rules introduced by election-denying activists were regularly dismissed, said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the board. But that began to change earlier this year, when Republicans in Georgia’s legislature appointed two new members to the board – Janelle King and Rick Jeffares – after pressure from Trump to replace the former board chair, Ed Lindsey, a more moderate Republican who didn’t concede to demands from deniers.

Dr Janice Johnston, a driving force behind much of the board’s work on behalf of the election-denial movement, was appointed to her post in 2022.

Matt Mashburn, a Republican who preceded Lindsey as chair of the state election board, told the Guardian that the board’s new members were in uncharted territory.

“The people voting to pass these new rules at this late date don’t seem to have any idea how these new rules are supposed to be implemented and they don’t seem to care,” Mashburn said.

Related: How Janice Johnston is ‘laying the groundwork for chaos’ in Georgia’s elections

Bipartisan election officials across the state have asked the board to stop implementing rules so close to the November election, with the Spalding county attorney calling them “unfunded mandates”. But Trump has lauded the trio of Johnston, King and Jeffares, calling them “pit bulls … fighting for victory” at a rally in Atlanta on 3 August. As the crowd cheered, Johnston stood and waved.

Since then, the three – none of whom has previous experience administering elections – have passed several more rules.

In August, the board passed a rule that allows county election officials to refuse to certify results if they feel a “reasonable inquiry” is necessary to investigate claims of fraud or irregularities, and another rule that allows local officials to request a virtually unlimited number of election-related documents before certifying results.

Those rules were introduced by two election deniers, Adams and Salleigh Grubbs. Adams has sued for more power to refuse to certify results with the help of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute; Grubbs is the chair of the Cobb county Republican party whose involvement in elections stems from Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020.

That year, she chased a refuse truck that she believed was carrying shredded paper ballots, the Atlantic reported. There is no evidence that paper ballots were discarded in that incident, election authorities have said.

Both women are members of a behind-the-scenes network of election officials and activists who call themselves the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition, the Guardian revealed. The group has coordinated on policies and messaging key to the success of the election-denial movement in the state. Johnston has been in frequent contact with the group’s members, working with them to craft at least one of the certification rules the state election Board recently passed.

The movement’s success continued last week when the board passed Alexander’s hand-count rule. The rule requires poll workers to open boxes of ballots collected by machines and count them by hand, increasing the chance that legal chain-of-custody requirements could be violated, according to Raffensperger.

Alexander and others in Georgia’s election-denial community believe that the practice of hand-counting ballots will prevent falsified ballots from being scanned into voting machines – a conspiracy theory that bipartisan election officials have said has no basis in fact.

• This article was amended on 26 September 2024. A previous version incorrectly stated that the Democratic former Georgia governor Roy Barnes was a Republican.