Members of Georgia’s Election Board Have Been Coordinating With Cleta Mitchell’s Network
“Trump allies captured the State Election Board to keep claims of a stolen 2020 election going and tilt Georgia elections toward Republicans,” said Max Flugrath, a director at Fair Fight Action, a voting advocacy nonprofit that has closely tracked the board’s and the network’s actions.
Key points
- Mauricio Rodriguez Pons/ProPublica In the run-up to the midterms, members of Georgia’s State Election Board and much of its professional staff were coordinating with an activist group led by Cleta Mitchell, the conservative attorney who worked with President Donald Trump to try to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election.
- “The more I look into this, the more I’m realizing that the Election Integrity Network has been having an undue influence on the State Election Board, and that needs to cease,” he said in an interview, though he declined to go into specifics about personnel matters.
- “There is a significant possibility that these members will vote to terminate the Executive Director, investigators or possibly even staff members, any of which would destroy the SEB as we now know it,” Favorito wrote on Wednesday, referring to the State Election Board.
Recordings of private calls and events reviewed by ProPublica show current and former state board members working with the Election Integrity Network and allied organizations on shared priorities.
Additional details
- Two days later, she posted on social media that “Cleta Mitchell, Election Integrity expert has the right ideas” about how elections should be run.
- “I’m looking forward to changes in how the election board operates.” John Fervier has chaired the Georgia State Election Board since 2024.
- The board’s executive director, James Mills, likewise has worked closely with members of the EIN, according to five sources with knowledge of these interactions, board documents and EIN communications shared with ProPublica.
- In response, Garland Favorito, an EIN leader and head of VoterGA, called on social media for his followers to inundate state board members with messages defending Mills and other staffers associated with the group.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
Advertisement
Every article behind this summary — 1 article from 1 outlet
Get stories like this in your inbox.
Subscribe — it's freeOne free email at 6am — your topics, deduplicated, five minutes. No account, no paywall.