State Election Bd Ga Pit Bull
see FULTON FUCKERY TULSI GABBARD ON RAID
MISSOURI MAFIA?
ED FUCKING MARTIN?
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The three board members — Janelle King, Rick Jeffares and Janice Johnston — comprise a majority bloc that has plowed ahead with election rules changes less than two months before early voting begins
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5 26
The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports the TrumpifiedmpifiedGeorgia ElectionBoard has quietly hired an election denier to be the board’s official state investigator, even as Trump’s grip on the state becomes less guaranteed.
Jason Frazier is a MAGA activist who has challenged the registrations of thousands of Fulton County voters and who cheered as Trump’s politicized FBI raided a county ballot warehouse in January, reports AJC writer Caleb Groves.
Critics were quick to ridicule the new hire.
“It’s shocking that an allegedly nonpartisan board would hire a political operative with a years-long record of baselessly accusing counties of wrongdoing to then turn around and ‘investigate’ these same counties,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s only Democrat. “The majority members of the State Election Board appear determined to double-down on their MAGA credentials, foment public distrust in our elections and further marginalize themselves into irrelevance.”
Frazier is now in a position to officially investigate the same election processes he has spent years criticizing as a private citizen, said AJC, but the board “was quiet about his hiring.”
Board executive director James Mills announced that the agency has hired part-time investigators during a May 14 meeting but never mentioned the new hires by name. The AJC reports Frazier’s name later appeared on a list of taxpayer-funded agency staffers on the board website.
“The hiring was apparently so sensitive that Vice Chair Janice Johnston suggested the board could file a complaint against The Atlanta Journal-Constitution after being made aware the AJC was seeking records related to Frazier’s hiring,” reports Groves.
“Should we file an ethics complaint? But I don’t know who to file it against, other than the, I don’t know, the AJC or an unknown leaker,” Johnston said.
Mills did not respond to an emailed request to identify the agency’s new hires. Rather than answer, Johnston responded to the AJC’s questions by demanding who had given the info to the press.
Georgia First Amendment Foundation board member Richard T. Griffiths said the election board’s reluctance to make public the details of Frazier’s hiring is concerning.
“At a time when the public is concerned about transparency of the elections and the integrity of the elections process, the total activity of the elections board should be available to the public and that includes hirings,” said Griffiths. “If the elections board is not providing the basics that all state agencies are required to provide, what does that say to the public about whether they can trust the board to make sensitive decisions about the elections process?”
The hiring comes at a time when President Donald Trump’s grip on many states is in question. The last time Trump lost the state of Georgia in 2020 his approval average was 46.4 percent, with Biden’s approval a modest 47 percent.
Trump’s aggregate approval in Georgia recently clicked in at a low of 37 percent.
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AN 3 26
Georgia court blocks GOP's bid to seat election deniers on Fulton County board - Alternet.org
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an 3 26
After Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to the Democratic nominee — former Vice President and ex-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden (D-Delaware) — his claim that the election was stolen from him was repeatedly debunked by numerous vote recounts. And some of the debunking came from conservative Republicans, including Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, then-U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr and then-Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.
But Trump, now 13 and one-half months into his second presidency, continues to double down on his false claim that he won the 2020 election. In January, FBI agents searched an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing 2020 election records.
In an article published on March 5, CNN reporters Tierney Sneed and Zachary Cohen describe ways in which the Georgia State Election Board helped pave the way for the FBI search.
"For most election administrators around the country," Sneed and Cohen explain, "the FBI's recent seizure of 2020 Atlanta-area ballots was shocking. But for some members of the Georgia State Election Board, the search was a welcome development. Led by the commission's vice chair, Janice Johnston — a retired obstetrician who, according to court filings, had no experience working elections prior to 2021 — the board's conservative majority has been relentlessly pursuing fraud theories about Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election."
The CNN journalists continue, "After subpoenaing some of the Fulton County election records themselves, the board invited the Justice Department's assistance last year, itself, resulting in a Trump Administration civil lawsuit in December that preceded the search warrant secured through a federal criminal probe. Johnston and another MAGA-aligned board member, former media personality Janelle King, were witnesses cited by the FBI in its application to justify seizing the records, as were other election deniers who have made frequent appearances before the board to allege a tainted 2020 result."
According to David Worley — a Democrat who formerly served on the Georgia State Election Board — Johnston objected when told she couldn't enter the Fulton County election center's inner storage room during the FBI search. Johnston didn't object to the search, but rather, wanted to get some credit for it and argued, "It's our subpoena."
Salleigh Grubbs, another Republican on the Georgia State Election Board, told CNN, "It's way past time for these matters to have been investigated." And she said it was "great" that the FBI search took place.
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AN 1 26
Atlanta Journal Constitution Senior Political columnist Patricia Murphy said the Wednesday FBI raid at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center was not about prosecuting President Donald Trump’s disproven claims of a stolen election in 2020 for the millionth time.
“Although the records they took were from the election five years ago, it’s important to understand that the raid in Fulton County is not really about the 2020 elections at all, which have long since come and gone,” said Murphy. “Instead, the raid is about the next elections — who will control them in Fulton County in 2026 and who will run them in Georgia two years after that when the 2028 presidential election takes place.”
Trump may croon that “people will soon be prosecuted” but Georgia Election Commissioner Robb Pitts said the ballots that agents seized were the same ones “counted, recounted, hand-counted, debated, litigated and fought over” after Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia.
“Despite every attempt by the president and his legal team to prove the election had been stolen from him at the time, every road led back to the same result — Trump lost and Joe Biden won,” said Murphy. “The … question at hand is who will oversee Fulton County elections in 2026.”
Currently, elections are run by the Fulton County Election Board. But Republicans in the General Assembly passed a massive new voting law that contained language giving the Georgia State Election Board the power to replace any so-called “underperforming” county election board, including Fulton County’s, with an interim leader of their choosing.
“Replacement could only happen after an audit or investigation, and the state board left Fulton’s elections in the hands of county officials in 2023 after it said the county had made “substantial improvements” to its processes during a performance review,” said Murphy.
However, Fulton County is a large, cosmopolitan and overwhelmingly blue region of an otherwise red state, so Republicans consider it a bad actor interfering with their plan for political dominance. It was just a few years ago that the county’s population singlehandedly handed Trump his nasty defeat, turning the Southern state of Georgia blue for President Joe Biden.
Trump was furious, and so were his Republican allies — who seized upon the county’s past record of long lines, late returns and slow bookkeeping, mostly due to its inordinately high population.
“On 2020, the president went further, claiming that Fulton County was a hotbed of so much nefarious activity and rampant fraud that it cost him the election, all accusations that his White House staff dismissed and multiple courts in Georgia threw out,” Murphy wrote.
:{She added that thanks to the work of the state’s majority Republican government the current majority on the State Election Board “now includes three Republican members whom Trump infamously singled out in 2024 as :{‘pit bulls:(style="background-color:#ff8000ff"):}: fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.’”}:
Two of the so-called “pit bulls” were actually with the FBI in Union City during the Wednesday raid, Murphy said.
“If this week’s raid produces enough of a pretext for the board to act in the future, the 2026 elections in Fulton County could be overseen by someone picked by the pro-Trump State Board, not by elected Fulton commissioners themselves,” Murphy warned.
Read the AJC report at this link.
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ATLANTA — Three right-wing Republicans behind a series of rules changes praised by former President Donald Trump face intensifying political pressure as the State Election Board considers new rules for ballot-counting and election certification at its Monday meeting. Georgia House Democrats prepared an urgent appeal Monday to House Speaker Jon Burns to remove his appointee to the board. Fulton County’s former elections board chief filed an ethics complaint against the trio that alleges a series of violations. And Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, blasted pending proposals up for debate by the five-member board as a last-minute “effort to impose new rulemaking” that could cause chaos.}:
Meanwhile, the trio was dealt a blow on Monday when Attorney General Chris Carr issued a formal opinion finding that the board can’t order him to reopen an investigation into Fulton County’s 2020 recount because state law doesn’t empower him to do so. The increasing scrutiny comes weeks after Trump lauded the trio at his Atlanta rally, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory” to deafening applause from thousands of supporters. The three board members — Janelle King, Rick Jeffares and Janice Johnston — comprise a majority bloc that has plowed ahead with election rules changes less than two months before early voting begins. Jeffares, meanwhile, has attracted even more attention after disclosing last week that he has floated himself for an environmental job in a second Trump administration, though he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution he never formally asked for the job.
Cathy Woolard, the former chair of Fulton’s elections board, cited Jeffares in an ethics complaint that alleged the three “have created, at minimum, the appearance that their actions are intended to advance their own political preference.” “Taken together,” she wrote to Gov. Brian Kemp, “these actions pose a serious risk of creating confusion about the rules governing the rapidly approaching election and undermining voter confidence in the integrity of Georgia’s elections.” And more than a dozen House Democrats pressed Burns in a letter to remove King, a media personality the speaker appointed earlier this year who replaced a mainstream Republican who often opposed sweeping new rules changes.
“These conflicts of interest and ethical lapses fly in the face of the work we’ve been doing in the Legislature over the last four years to regain the public’s trust,” wrote the Democrats, including Minority Whip Sam Park. “Georgians simply want to have faith that elections are conducted fairly and will reflect the will of the people. Unfortunately, these three SEB members have undermined the people’s faith.” The House speaker’s office said it hadn’t yet received the Democrats’ letter as of Monday morning. ‘Make you blush’ The three election board members have argued they aren’t playing politics. King said she’s supporting rules that will increase “election integrity” regardless of Trump’s praise. “We all know that the president says what he wants to say, right?” King said earlier this month.
“I don’t make decisions based on which side of the aisle wants me to do something. I look at the facts, I look at the evidence, I look at what’s in front of me, and I see if this is a good rule.” Jeffares called the controversy over whether he could take a job in the Trump administration a “rumor” based on a conversation he had with Republican congressional candidate Brian Jack, a former Trump aide. “I didn’t talk to anyone in the Trump administration. It’s been a hardship on us ever since Trump mentioned us at the rally,” Jeffares said in an interview. “It’s all just to make us look like criminals. I have emails and voicemail messages that would make you blush.” The three have also defended other recent votes, including approving a requirement for an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before certifying elections, which critics warned could be used as a pretext for local elections officials to reject results if Trump loses.
An AJC review showed at least 19 county election board members in Georgia have opposed certifying elections since the 2020 election, which Trump falsely claimed was “stolen.” The board could go further by passing a slate of new rules Monday, including one that would require three poll workers to count ballots on election night to make sure they match the number of ballots recorded by voting machines. Another proposal up for debate would impose a new requirement for county election boards to review information such as lists of voters by ballot type and comparisons of ballots to voter check-ins. Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, warned the changes could undermine voter confidence and burden election workers. Without naming names, he also blasted the influence of “unelected bureaucrats who have never run an election.” “Georgia voters reject this 11th hour chaos,” he said, “and so should the unelected members of the State Election Board.”}:
Read more at: https://rv-times.com/2024/08/19/trumps-pit-bulls-on-georgia-election-board-face-new-pressure/
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