In 2021, Cleta Mitchell, the former Trump lawyer who tried to block the 2020 vote from being certified, formed a national coalition called the Election Integrity Network. It has been recruiting volunteers to hunt for voter fraud and to pressure local and state election officials. “For the last four years, a small cadre of billionaires and far-right donors have been pouring millions into building a so-called election integrity infrastructure to lay the groundwork to reject the results when MAGA Republicans lose,” Brendan Fischer, the deputy executive director of Documented, a D.C.-based watchdog group, said. “Elections are run at the local level, so this nationally organized effort is being implemented locally.”
The Election Integrity Network’s Georgia chapter is run by Julie Adams, the right-wing member of the Fulton County election board. On the group’s semi-regular Zoom calls, recordings of which have been obtained by The New Yorker, attendees have included county officials across Georgia and former Trump Administration officials.
At the start of a recent call, just after Judge McBurney’s ruling, Adams cleared the air. “We’re in much better shape than we were,” she said. “The way we were before we filed the lawsuit was most people didn’t get any documents and had to certify yes. The way it is now is we get all the documents, we have to certify yes, we can let the D.A. know, or we can take any other reasonable measures we want.” She went on, in an optimistic tone, “Who knows? Maybe we all find discrepancies and we file an immediate injunction. Maybe we go to the press. Maybe, when we’re certifying, we say we’re certifying under protest.”