Trumpers are *still* scheming to overturn the 2020 election
In Georgia, the Big Lie has become the new Lost Cause.
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In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has once again become focused on elections. Not next year’s midterms, necessarily. Instead, he’s begun touting new “evidence” of fraud in the 2020 election.
“It was a rigged election,” Trump said on December 9. “It’s gonna come out over the next couple months too, loud and clear. Because we have all the information.”
On December 14, Trump again mentioned the supposedly forthcoming evidence.
“The election was rigged in 2020 — we have all the information, all the stuff and you’ll see it coming out,” Trump said. “It’s coming out in truckloads.”
Where will these “truckloads” of evidence come from? In one word: Georgia.
Trump has never strayed far from his lies about the 2020 election, mentioning them frequently over the years. But his recent statements — combined with developments in Georgia over the last several months — allude to something more concrete than his usual meandering rants.
Election deniers in Georgia and their allies at the Justice Department believe that ballots and other documents from the 2020 election, currently held in a Fulton County warehouse and the subject of several ongoing lawsuits, contain proof of a sprawling conspiracy of a stolen election. Earlier this month, the Justice Department sued to gain access to the materials, which would ostensibly have to be delivered to Washington DC for inspection by the truckload.
Fulton County — home to Atlanta and the state’s largest Black and Democratic voting bloc — has long been the focus of election deniers in Georgia and elsewhere, and became the focal point of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election here when he asked Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the 11,781 votes Trump needed to win the Peach State.
Having lost dozens of court cases in other states in his attempt to overturn the election, Georgia is all that Trump has left in his desperate attempt to prove the impossible.
But Trump’s comments and accompanying lawsuits aren’t simply about proving non-existent fraud in 2020; they’re part of an actual sprawling plan to sow doubt in future elections — specifically, any important elections that Republicans lose.
Currently lying at the epicenter of these efforts is Fulton County, the most important county in Georgia, which will once again play a key role in deciding the balance of power in Washington as Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff runs for reelection.
Trump’s “truckloads” of evidence could help scare the Republican base here into showing up in large numbers next year. More to the point, comments from Trump and efforts like DOJ lawsuits will amplify the unending election fraud claims that Republicans use to try to destroy American democracy from within.
What’s old is new again
Why does it matter that Trump and election denial allies continue to chase the ghosts of 2020? Because finding the smoking gun of the “rigged election” will allow them to claim that places like Fulton County — largely Democratic and largely Black — are hotbeds of election crime.
Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which has jurisdiction over election law and voting rights cases, touted the Fulton County lawsuit in an interview earlier this month with far-right personality Benny Johnson.
“Georgia this week told me to go pound sand, and is not gonna give me their voter data,” Dhillon said. “So we will sue Georgia to get that information.”
Calling election results into question may be a necessary strategy next year if Trump’s approval ratings continue their downward trajectory, the economy continues to slow, and congressional Republicans continue to fail to pass meaningful legislation that will help their working class base.
“Swing states are the big problem,” Dhillon said during her interview with Johnson.
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To help amplify the narrative of widespread election fraud, the Justice Department has tapped a network of election denial activists in Georgia who have collectively challenged the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters and spent years spreading debunked fraud claims. That same network of activists works in conjunction with a trio of Trump supporters who hold the majority on the five-seat Georgia State Election Board. Completing this circle, the DOJ has been in contact with the Trump-supporting State Election Board members on its efforts to investigate 2020.
For months, the DOJ has been probing Georgia and Fulton County based on the unsubstantiated findings of election denial activists here. Key to these efforts is Ed Martin, a former Missouri election official and MAGA true believer whose nomination for US attorney was withdrawn by Trump after even some Republicans found him unfit for office.
Since then, Martin has become Trump’s pardon attorney, and is a leader of the Justice Department’s so-called “weaponization” task force, which seeks to uncover efforts by the Biden administration to punish its political enemies.
The activists and State Election Board members, who are appointed by GOP lawmakers in the state legislature, believe that ballots, ballot envelopes, and other materials from the 2020 election currently held by Fulton County contain evidence of massive fraud. But there’s at least two big problems: First, three hand recounts of the 2020 election found that errors in Fulton County did not have any meaningful impact on the results of the election. Second, the DOJ’s lawsuit demands access to materials that Fulton County, by law, does not even have to retain.
In its lawsuit, the Justice Department cites a section of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 that requires state and local election officials to retain election records. Under the law, however, those officials are only required to retain records for 22 months following an election. As should be obvious, the 2020 election was more than 22 months ago.
Democratic Georgia state Rep. Marvin Lim made note of the discrepancy in a recent letter to the Justice Department.
“The Trump Administration’s lawsuit against Fulton County to access 2020 voting records [...] is another assertion of authority the administration doesn’t have,” Lim wrote. Citing the Civil Rights Act’s 22-month requirement — which the Justice Department noted in its own lawsuit — Lim concluded that “the Trump Administration is not entitled to these records.”
Still, winning the lawsuit is almost beside the point. The suit is just one small part of the endless investigations Republicans are pursuing based on Trump’s lies about election fraud. The election denial movement would like to see these investigations continue into next year in order to sow doubt in elections Republicans may very well lose.
In order to facilitate these investigations and future fraud claims, election deniers must be in positions of power all across the country. Once again, Georgia is ground zero for these efforts.
“Fulton County seems like the catalyst to advance the far-right’s election interference playbook: installing election deniers, weaponizing courts, and abusing federal power to attack local election administration. If their strategy succeeds, it provides a blueprint to use across the country – and puts fair elections everywhere at risk,” said Max Flugrath, spokesman for the Georgia-based voting rights advocacy organization Fair Fight.
An army of election deniers
The State Election Board’s MAGA majority of Dr. Janice Johnston, Janelle King, and Rick Jeffares have expanded the scope of the board in recent years to include specious fraud investigations and the implementation of rules favored by the election denial movement. All three are Trump supporters who have various ties to the president.
In an interview last year, Jeffares admitted to me he had tried to parlay his work on the State Election Board into a position with the second Trump administration. Around the same time, Trump praised the board for its work on his behalf, calling them “bulldogs” who were “fighting for victory.” Johnston was in the front row that day, clapping along with other Trump supporters who had come to a campaign rally in Atlanta to hear Trump speak. King is a political operative and influencer whose husband is running to be Georgia’s next secretary of state.
But the State Election Board isn’t alone in its efforts to endlessly investigate 2020 and call into question current and future election results. Across Georgia, Trump-supporting election deniers are at work as members of county election boards. That includes Fulton County.
There, Republicans are suing to have an election denial activist, Jason Frazier, placed on the Fulton County election board. Frazier has challenged the registration of hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters based on evidence that Raffensperger’s office has dismissed as incomplete. He can often be seen replying to Martin and far-right media personalities on Twitter, offering his investigative services to the DOJ and others in order to help them find proof of voter fraud.
If Frazier’s lawsuit succeeds and he’s placed on the Fulton County election board, he’ll join another election denier there, Julie Adams. Adams, who has worked for Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, has used her election board position to amplify fraud claims, demand investigations, and assert her right to refuse to certify election results she doesn’t like.
“This looks like the other side of the GOP’s map-rigging strategy. Where they can’t redraw districts, they try to embed partisan operatives who could help challenge results they don’t like. Backed by a far-right SCOTUS and a corrupted DOJ, Trump and the operatives who tried to overturn his 2020 loss seem intent on transforming American elections from fair contests into rigged outcomes,” said Flugrath.
All of this comes as a massive power struggle is underway in Georgia Republican politics. The more moderate wing of the Georgia GOP, exemplified by Gov. Brian Kemp and Raffensperger, both of whom refused to cede to Trump’s demands following the 2020 election, is up against Trump sycophants up and down the ballot.
Raffensperger will square off against Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, one of the “fake electors” who cast fraudulent ballots for Trump in 2020, to become the state’s next governor. Another Kemp and Raffensperger ally in the more moderate wing of the GOP, current Attorney General Chris Carr, is also running for governor.
But perhaps even more important is the race to replace Raffensperger as secretary of state. Raffensperger’s chief deputy, Gabriel Sterling — who infuriated MAGA when he admonished Trump for calling 2020’s results into question, warning that someone “would be killed” — is one of three Republicans in the race. Another one is Kelvin King, husband of the State Election Board’s Janelle King.
As the power struggle within the Georgia GOP has played out, similar dynamics are at play between the State Election Board, Attorney General Carr, and Raffensperger. Clearly fed up with the MAGA majority’s antics, Raffensperger has stopped sending his investigators to State Election Board meetings to discuss their findings on complaints of election law violations. By all appearances, Carr’s office has mostly ignored the State Election Board’s demands that he investigate dozens of low-level violations of election law in order to prosecute voters and election officials who made technical mistakes in recent years.
Kelvin King is unlikely to win the race for secretary of state, but his wife doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. To understand what next year might look like as Trump, his lackeys at the Justice Department, and allies like those on the State Election Board ramp up claims of fraud and pursue wild investigations, we can look at the case of an intellectually disabled man in Atlanta.
At the final State Election Board meeting of 2025, the board heard a complaint about a man who tried to vote twice in a 2022 election. The man — who investigators with Raffensperger’s office deemed suffered from an intellectual disability — filled out two absentee ballot applications. The second application was caught, meaning the vote never counted. Still, someone filed a complaint against the man and Raffensperger’s office investigated, finding that the man likely had no intent of voting twice.
After summarizing the case, Johnston asked for a motion on possible punishment for the man. The board could have chosen to simply send him a “letter of instruction” that informed him it was illegal to fill out two absentee ballots in the same election. Instead, the three MAGA members chose otherwise.
“I make a motion we send this to the attorney general’s office and just let them … ensure that there’s other issues,” King said. Johnston and Jeffares then voted with King to send the matter on to Carr for possible prosecution.
Public Notice asked King what she meant about “other issues” considering Raffensperger’s investigators had already determined the man was intellectually disabled.
“Based on what we had in the case file it was uncertain why the violation occurred,” King told me. “In those cases it’s best to allow the AG office to investigate further and confirm there was a disability present and that it was the reason for the violation.”
Technically, the man committed election fraud. In reality, he did so because of his disability. Like many of the dozens of people who committed similar acts of fraud who are the subjects of complaints heard by the State Election Board, the man made a mistake.
Mistakes were made in Fulton County in 2020, as well. Mistakes are made in every election. But at no point in recent history have those mistakes added up to a “rigged election,” as Trump claims. Still, he’ll use those mistakes to push for endless fraud investigations and politically-motivated prosecutions of Democratic election officials in order to falsely claim victory for Republicans if they lose.
Just two questions remain: will Trump’s “truckloads” of lies about election fraud be necessary, or will Republicans simply retain power in Congress by winning the midterms outright? If they don’t, will Republican voters once again choose to believe Trump’s lies about a “rigged election” in November, or will they have had enough of all the bullshit?
That’s it for this week
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I've seen this kind of behavior before -- in my college days. A group of students were lobbying hard for a certain policy change, and lost the election. Their response? "The people who voted against this are neurotic, selfish, sick and unfit to decide these things. This is one case in which democracy should just have been thrown out the window, and the administration simply decided this by fiat." You've gotta love college freshmen and their habit of saying the quiet part out loud, but the mentality is exactly the same as that of the overgrown grade school student doddering his way through his second childhood. After "The 2020 election was corrupt" comes "All elections are inherently corrupt, and we need to abolish them. From now on, your wise and benevolent king will make all decisions for you."