A rule passed last week that bipartisan Georgia election officials say will delay the November vote count was pushed by an election denier who appears to believe in several right-wing conspiracies and who appears to have had election experience only since February.
The rule — which requires poll workers to manually count ballots at polling stations — was passed on Friday by a majority of the Georgia state election board, which opposes elections. It was introduced by Sharlene Alexander, a Donald Trump supporter and member of the Fayette County Board of Elections who was appointed to the position in February. Alexander’s Facebook page hints at a belief in election conspiracies, the Guardian has learned.
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. The board has approved several of those rules, including two that give county election officials more discretion to refuse to certify election results, in addition to Alexander’s manual counting rule.
Alexander’s lack of experience in elections underscores the recent phenomenon of unelected, inexperienced activists in Georgia’s election denial movement successfully lobbying the state election board to adopt rules advocated by conspiracy theorists. Democrats, voting rights advocates and some Republicans have said the rules not only fall outside the state election board’s authority but could lead to delays in the processing and certification of results.
“There is widespread, bipartisan opposition to these anti-voter rule changes and opposition from local election 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 Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and bipartisan county election officials from across the state, as well as former Republican governors Nathan Deal and Roy Barnes, have said the recently passed rules “destroy confidence” in Georgia’s election systems.
Raffensperger and other Georgia election officials have warned that Alexander’s rule and the two certification rules “will prolong the counting of ballots.” Those delays could be used by Trump and Republicans to cast doubt on the election results, according to representatives from Raffensperger’s office.
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Anyone can submit a rule to the state election board, but all but one of the 32 rules filed since May have come from a small but vocal group of election officials and activists who believe Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud, including Alexander. The board had not implemented a new rule since 2021, and none were introduced between September 2022 and May. Since then, Alexander and a group of election-denying officials and activists — called “petitioners” in the state election board’s lingo — have introduced 31 rules that will affect millions of Georgia voters.
The petitioners include Julie Adams, a member of the Fulton County Election Board who also works for the right-wing groups Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network, which is led by prominent national election denialist Cleta Mitchell; Michael Heekin, Adams’ Republican colleague on the Fulton County Election Board, who refused to certify the results this year; David Cross, an election denialist who has been pushing the state election board since 2020 to investigate unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud; Garland Favorito, head of the election denialist group VoterGA; David Hancock of the Gwinnett County Election Board; Bridget Thorne, a Fulton County commissioner who ran a secret Telegram channel discussing election conspiracies; and Lucia Frazier, the wife of Jason Frazier, an election denier whom Fulton County Republicans tried and failed to appoint to the county’s election board and who recently dropped a lawsuit alleging that the county had left ineligible voters on its voter rolls.
Like many county election officials in Georgia, Alexander makes her faith in elections and other right-wing conspiracies public on her personal Facebook page. Last week, she posted a claim that 53 counties in Michigan have more registered voters than citizens old enough to vote. The claim is part of a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee to purge voters from Michigan’s voter rolls — one of several lawsuits filed by Republican groups across the country alleging that voter rolls are full of ineligible voters.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson called the lawsuit “baseless” and “filled with unsubstantiated allegations,” noting that her office purged more than 700,000 voters from the voter rolls during her tenure.
Other posts by Alexander allude to belief in conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 pandemic, transphobic sentiments and fear of immigrants.
“Vote like your daughters and granddaughters [sic] opportunities to compete in sports and their right to have private spaces to dress and undress depends on it. Because it does,” reads a post Alexander shared on August 11.
Alexander did not immediately respond to questions for this story.
Under previous versions of the board, rules introduced by election denial activists were routinely rejected, said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s sole Democrat. But that began to change earlier this year, when Republicans in the Georgia Legislature appointed two new members to the board — Janelle King and Rick Jeffares — after pressure from Trump to replace the board’s former chairman, Ed Lindsey, a more moderate Republican who resisted demands from denialists.
Dr. Janice Johnston, a driving force behind much of the board’s work on behalf of the election denial movement, was appointed to her position in 2022.
Matt Mashburn, a Republican who preceded Lindsey as chairman of the state elections board, told the Guardian that the new board members were in unfamiliar territory.
“The people who are voting at this late hour to pass these new regulations seem to have no idea how to implement these new regulations and they don’t seem to care,” Mashburn said.
Bipartisan election officials across the state have asked the board to stop implementing the rules so close to the November election, with the Spalding County district attorney calling them “unfunded mandates.” But Trump has praised the trio of Johnston, King and Jeffares, calling them “pit bulls … fighting for victory” at an Atlanta rally on Aug. 3. As the crowd cheered, Johnston stood and waved.
Since then, the three, none of whom have any experience in organizing elections, have adopted a number of more rules.
In August, the board passed a rule allowing county election officials to refuse to certify results if they believe a “reasonable investigation” is necessary to investigate claims of fraud or irregularities, and another rule allowing local officials to request a virtually unlimited number of election-related documents before certifying results.
The rules were introduced by two election deniers, Adams and Salleigh Grubbs. Adams has filed a lawsuit seeking more power to refuse to certify the results with the help of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute; Grubbs is the Cobb County Republican Party chairman, whose involvement in elections stems from Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020.
That year, she chased a garbage truck she thought was carrying shredded paper ballots, The Atlantic reported. There is no evidence that paper ballots were discarded in that incident, election officials said.
Both women are members of a behind-the-scenes network of election officials and activists calling themselves the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition, the Guardian revealed. The group has coordinated on policies and messaging critical to the success of the state’s election denial movement. Johnston has been in regular contact with the group’s members and worked with them to draft at least one of the certification rules recently adopted by the state election board.
The movement’s success continued last week when the board adopted 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 likelihood of violating chain-of-custody requirements, Raffensperger said.
Alexander and others in Georgia’s election denial community believe that hand-counting ballots prevents counterfeit ballots from being scanned into voting machines — a conspiracy theory that election officials from both parties say has no basis in fact.
