Trump-loving election officials push forward with changes that could spark 'chaos': report

Georgia election officials are pushing forward with changes to the rules just weeks before early voting begins.

The Georgia State Election Board has drawn widespread criticism – and public praise from Donald Trump – for tinkering with the rules governing certification of ballot results in the key battleground state where the former president and his allies have been indicted over efforts to overturn his 2020 loss, reported CNN.

“They’re not taking the advice of attorneys, they’re not taking the advice of election administrators — who are really critical in this whole calculus — and they’re certainly not listening to anybody who doesn’t think that the elections are rigged,” said Sarah Tindall Ghazal, the only Democrat on the board.

Ghazal and the board's GOP chair John Fervier voted against rules authorizing partisans serving on local election boards to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying election results and other controversial changes.

“We can’t be doing this at the last minute because it creates chaos," Ghazal said, "and chaos undermines confidence in our elections, full stop."

The Republican-led state legislature removed GOP secretary of state Brad Raffensperger as head of the board after he refused Trump's request to "find" the exact number of votes he needed to overcome Joe Biden's 2020 total, and GOP Gov. Brian Kemp appointed Fervier, a longtime Waffle House executive and political independent, to oversee the board.

“It’s a relatively young board,” Janice Johnston, a retired obstetrician and election conspiracy theorist who joined it in 2022. “Now I’m second in seniority, which is shocking because it’s just been a couple of years.

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Johnston attended the Trump rally last month in Atlanta where he praised her and two other GOP board members, former state senator Rick Jeffares and conservative media personality Janelle King, who shrugged off criticism of the board's changes and an ethics complaint filed by Democratic elected officials.

“I don’t care because I know we haven’t done anything wrong,” King told CNN. “This is a method of trying to weaken the Republican side by making it seem like we’re out here trying to steal elections. There’s no win for me to steal the election for anybody.”

King insisted that she doesn't believe the 2020 election was stolen but claimed the changes she approved were necessary to ensure the results of this year's election, which pits Trump against Vice President Kamala Harris, were accurate.

“The concerns around these rules creating chaos, I do not see that happening at all," said King, who was appointed by by Georgia House speaker Jon Burns in May and is the newest member of the board.

Jeffares spread false claims about the 2020 election on social media and was appointed by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who served as one of Trump's fake electors, and ignited controversy by floating his own name for a political appointment in a future Trump administration, but he did not respond to an interview request from CNN.

“We are having a partisan split on every single issue," said Cathy Woolard, a Democrat and former chair of the Fulton County Board of Elections. "Election boards should be very predictable, plodding, not partisan. We should be boring.”

Woolard and a Democratic state senator filed an ethics complaint against the GOP majority on the state election board, and a statewide association of election workers wrote an open letter asking them to stop passing rule changes so close to the election, which kicks off with early voting Oct. 15.

"I think they’ve done enough to cause chaos in election training in 159 counties," Woolard said. "They have created openings for people to say they have a reason not to certify an election.”