In May, four of them voted down a proposed rule that would have given county election boards a new way to delay or reject election results, which could throw the November vote count into chaos.
“You run counter to both the federal and the state law,” said Ed Lindsey, a Republican board member and attorney who practices election law, to the woman who proposed the rule.
This rule “violates federal law. It also violates state law,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s lone Democrat.
“It’s just not ready for prime time yet,” said the board chairman, noting that it needed more work to ensure its legality.
Even the lone board member supporting the rule, Janice Johnston, a retired obstetrician who had made unvalidated claims about falsified vote tallies in Fulton County, voted against it. The fifth board member did not vote. The board agreed that two members would work on improvements to the rule.
Three months later, a new draft of the rule came back for a vote. This time, it passed 3-2.
How much did the rule change between drafts? A review by ProPublica shows: hardly at all. In fact, election law experts told ProPublica that the small changes made the rule even less compliant with existing law.
The rule dramatically expands the authority of county officials overseeing the usually mundane task of certifying elections. The passage of it was enabled by nationally prominent election deniers and the Georgia Legislature. And the board members who passed it were cheered on by former President Donald Trump. It comes at a time when Trump and his allies are already calling into question the fairness of the elections process and making preparations to contest the results — and as Trump slips behind Vice President Kamala Harris in swing state polls….
Thorne said she got advice and support on the revised rule from Hans von Spakovsky, a Heritage Foundation lawyer who has led efforts for stricter voting laws nationwide for decades; Ken Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general and the chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, a group advocating for Republican priorities in election law; and Cleta Mitchell, the head of the Election Integrity Network, a nationwide organization that has challenged the legitimacy of American elections, which secretly backed the submission of the rule. Mitchell had joined Trump on the call in which he asked for Raffensperger to find him votes.
Mitchell, von Spakovsky and Cuccinelli did not respond to requests for comment.