New emails received by Rolling Stone The American Dome and The American Dome documentaries reveal how conservative election officials in Georgia laid the groundwork for controversial new election rules in the state that aim to give those officials more power to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results.
Months before the Georgia State Board of Elections approved the rules, emails show, a Donald Trump supporter on the board asked conservative county election officials for a wish list of materials they might need.
“Thank you all for agreeing to provide input on this proposed rule for certification documents required for executives prior to certification,” wrote Dr. Janice Johnston, a member of the Georgia State Board of Elections, on May 12. “What documents and reports do you need to certify election results?”
The documents, obtained through a public records request, show specific election materials that Gwinnett County Board of Elections member David Hancock claimed he needed in order to certify the results of the May 2024 primary. The materials he cited are mirrored in two controversial rules recently passed by Johnston and two of his Trump-supporting colleagues on the state Board of Elections that give broad authority to officials like Hancock to refuse to certify election results.
Election experts and Democrats say a century of Georgia court rulings has made clear that the duty of county election officials to certify results is a “ministerial” task, not a discretionary one. Yet election deniers like Hancock, who hold certain positions as county election officials, have demanded more authority to refuse to certify — an authority that has been granted in recent weeks by Johnston and two pro-Trump Republicans on the state Board of Elections.
Democrats and election experts warn that refusing to certify the results could prevent state officials from counting the results in those counties in a timely manner — and potentially delay the results of the November presidential election. Refusing to certify also lends credence to false claims of widespread voter fraud that could help the Trump campaign in its efforts to challenge the results of the 2024 election.
With Democrats raising alarms about the denial of certification, Trump further highlighted the issue when he praised Johnston and two other Republican members of the state Board of Elections at an Aug. 3 rally in Atlanta, calling them “vicious dogs fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”
Hancock, an election denier who has repeatedly spread false information about election fraud and has weighed in on the certification issue, was appointed to his position by Gwinnett County Republicans in January. Officials like Hancock and others argue that sophisticated and detailed material from voting machines and polling sites could help show evidence of voter fraud.
Although he acknowledged that he found only a few errors in the May 2024 primary results, Hancock expressed enthusiasm for the new rules, one of which allows county election officials to refuse to certify results if they determine that a “reasonable investigation” is needed to investigate irregularities or fraud.
“I look forward to moving this process forward at the state level!” Hancock told Johnston in a May 26 email.
Emails show Johnston was corresponding with Michael Hicken and Julie Adams, Republican members of the Fulton County Board of Elections who refused to certify the results this year; Debbie Fisher, a Republican member of the Cobb County Board of Elections who also refused to certify the results; and Bridget Thorne, a denier of the election who sits on the Fulton County Board of Commissioners.
Hancock, Johnston, Thorne, Hicken and Adams did not respond to questions for this story. Fisher declined to comment.
Emails obtained Monday shed further light on the deep coordination between Johnston and election deniers who serve as county election officials, as well as Hancock’s discussions with prominent Georgia election deniers Garland Favorito, David Cross, and Elizabeth Delmas, who is associated with the Constitution Party of Georgia. The emails also show Hancock discussing voter purges with fellow Republican on the Gwinnett County Election Board, Alice Oleynik, who has refused to certify the results herself.
“This confirms what we suspected — Trump and his election-denying allies are engaged in a conspiracy to undermine Georgia’s election,” Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the left-leaning voting rights advocacy group, said in a statement.
Democrats said the emails were evidence of ongoing coordination between Georgia election officials and election denial groups like Cleta Mitchell's Election Integrity Network because Adams, a Fulton County Board of Elections member, received emails from Hancock and Johnston to an email address linked to her role in the Election Integrity Network.
“If anyone needed further proof that Donald Trump’s ‘pit bulls’ are working in concert with his 2020 election-denying lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, here it is,” Georgia Democratic Party Chairwoman and U.S. Representative Nikema Williams said in a statement. “They are intent on creating a new authority to decertify the election results if their preferred candidate loses — as Trump did in 2020.”
While Hancock continued to certify the results of the May primary, the emails show how widespread the coordinated effort to cast doubt on the election results in Georgia has become. In March, Hancock, Hicken, and Adams refused to certify the results of the presidential primary. In 2023, Fisher joined Republican election officials in several counties in refusing to certify the election results.
Adams is now suing with the help of the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute to gain more discretion to refuse to certify the results — a power granted last month thanks to two new certification rules passed by Johnston and two of her fellow Republicans on the state board of elections, Janelle King and Rick Jeffares. (Adams’s lawsuit is pending.) Those certification rules are now the subject of a lawsuit filed Monday by the Georgia Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee, which called the rules not only beyond the authority of the state board of elections but potentially in conflict with Georgia law.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, also criticized the two certification rules passed by the state Board of Elections, saying Johnston, King and Guevara engaged in “activist rulemaking” that would “undermine voter confidence and burden election workers.”
Also on Monday, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) appeared to react to calls from state Democrats to remove Johnston and pro-Trump election board members King and Jeffress, when Kemp asked Attorney General Chris Carr (R) to determine whether the governor has the authority to remove the board members.
Emails obtained by Rolling Stone American Doom also reveals the involvement of local officials in rejecting elections like Hancock in issuing the two controversial certification rules.
On May 26, Hancock presented Johnston with a list of materials he had been able to review before the ratification vote. He found only a few errors—and no clear evidence of fraud.
“So far, the errors I have found have only affected a small number of ballots,” Hancock wrote, though he asked for access to more materials.
Kathy Woolard, a Democrat and former member of the Fulton County Board of Elections, is one of several Democrats who have said that “reasonable investigation” gives election officials like Hancock too much discretion to refuse to certify the results.
“One of the problems with reasonable inquiry is that we have 159 counties that will interpret this differently,” Woolard says. Rolling Stone“There are tens of thousands of documents that cannot be reviewed in time to get certified, and part of my concern is that a reasonable investigation would involve removing documents from the building for review by people who may not even understand what they are looking at but could use that information to cast doubt on the election results.”
At the top of Hancock’s list of requirements for certification is that “the number of votes cast in each precinct shall not exceed the number of registered voters in each precinct.” That requirement forms the core of a second rule passed by the state Board of Elections in recent weeks, which requires that the number of votes cast and ballots must match before the certification process can proceed.
Election experts told ProPublica that those numbers often don’t add up because of routine machine errors at polling locations with high population density, such as in big cities where voters tend to lean Democratic. ProPublica also reported Tuesday that the rule was originally rejected because state election board members believed it ran afoul of Georgia law, a potential violation that Democrats allege in a lawsuit against the state election board filed Monday night.
The controversy over certification comes as Republicans continue to pursue voter purges in Georgia and across the country — purges that Hancock and Johnston discuss in detail in emails. Those discussions include Hancock’s claims that tens of thousands of Georgia voters are registered in other states. In the emails, Johnston takes issue with those claims, sending an email outlining 27,000 duplicate registrations that she describes as a “perfect match” because voters in multiple states have the same first, middle and last names, as well as the same birth year and some similar address information.
“Assuming this data is correct, the systemic problem is either a failure to detect duplicate records or a failure to remove duplicate records,” Johnston wrote.
At a hearing last week by the Gwinnett County Elections Commission, Hancock and Olejnik tried to remove more voters from the rolls, but Democrats on the commission voted in favor of them in some cases. Democrats on the commission said the challenges amounted to “disenfranchisement.”
In an email to Johnston on Aug. 18, Hancock called Democrats' refusal to endorse some of the challenges posed by voters in Gwinnett County a “travesty.”
This story is published in partnership with American Deatha newsletter focusing on right-wing extremism and other threats to democracy..
