The chair of Georgia’s State Election Board says an outside network of Trump allies has been steering the board he leads. “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,” John Fervier told ProPublica. He has called a special meeting for Friday, in part to take up personnel matters.
The network is the one founded by Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer who worked with Donald Trump to overturn his 2020 loss. The board decides how Georgia counts, certifies and cleans up its ballots, in a state where Black voters this month helped make Keisha Lance Bottoms the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history. A body that sets the rules for those voters now stands accused, by its own chair, of taking direction from a political group.
ProPublica, which first reported the coordination, says emails obtained through public records requests show Fervier and other members who oppose steps the network favors have been left out of some hiring decisions. The investigation also found that board members and staff promoted ELLY, a software tool for searching voter rolls, and pushed counties to act on its results. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the board’s investigators pressed Chatham County, a Democratic stronghold, to remove more than 200 voters flagged by the tool before the midterms.
The tool’s record is not good. After the election, a Forsyth County board member who belongs to the network used ELLY data to question more than 60 ballots, including four said to have been cast by dead people. ProPublica found all four voters were alive, and the county board rejected the challenges.
In late 2025 the board asked the Justice Department to obtain Fulton County’s election records, and the FBI later seized them, according to ProPublica. The affidavit behind the raid cited board members Janice Johnston and Janelle King as witnesses.
Board members deny wrongdoing. King acknowledged speaking with activists from the network and its ally VoterGA but denied they had influence: “As long as they are representing the SEB well, fine. If they choose to become members of an organization in their private time, that is their choice.” Johnston, who retired in June, said: “I’m all about election integrity, wherever it comes from.” Garland Favorito of VoterGA called the coordination claims “a patently false conspiracy theory.” Mitchell herself wrote on X: “An election integrity group is working with election officials to oversee elections. Wow! What a discovery!!! Pulitzer anyone?”
Their strongest point is that citizens may talk to officials. That is true, and it is not the finding. The question is whether people who help challenge voters were also writing the board’s agenda, and whether the board’s own chair knew it. Fervier did not. He had also disputed, in October, letters to federal officials that executive director James Mills sent over the board’s name, saying he would never have authorized them had he seen them first.
Fair Fight Action’s Max Flugrath said Trump allies “captured the State Election Board to keep claims of a stolen 2020 election going and tilt Georgia elections toward Republicans.” Bottoms’ platform promised to work with the General Assembly to eliminate the board and replace it with an independent structure, saying it “has become mired in political games, conspiracy theories, and partisan interference.”
She is right. A board that cannot tell its chair who is writing its letters should not be deciding whose names stay on the rolls. Lawmakers should take her up on it when the General Assembly convenes in January.
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