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 board sets the swing state’s election rules, oversees the conduct of its election officials and investigates allegations of fraud.
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. Among them: advancing the use of a controversial, error-prone software tool known as ELLY to search voter rolls for purportedly suspicious voters.
The state board’s current vice chair, Janelle King, and her predecessor, Janice Johnston, have both attended meetings of EIN or VoterGA, an aligned organization whose membership and goals significantly overlap with EIN. Johnston retired in June but still plays an active role in state election matters behind the scenes.
At an August 2025 fundraiser for VoterGA, Mitchell declared she loved Johnston and King, who were both present. “You know, we’ve worked so hard together,” Mitchell said.
At least three members of the state board’s eight-person professional staff have participated in EIN meetings, including people who handle allegations of voter fraud and misconduct by election officials.
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.
EIN’s close ties to the board and its staff have given it extraordinary influence over how elections are run in Georgia, experts said. In particular, the group has been able to enlist the board’s help in getting counties to remove voters from their rolls based on information from ELLY.
“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. “EIN was the behind-the-scenes driver spearheading these changes.”
The board’s chair, John Fervier, told ProPublica he had not known about EIN’s sway over the board or its staff, but said he’d long sensed that an outside force was shaping the board’s actions.
“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. “I’m looking forward to changes in how the election board operates.”
Fervier has called a special meeting for Friday, in part to discuss personnel matters.
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.
“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. “As most of you know, the SEB staff has made remarkable historical progress this year in … accountability for election corruption and much more. The Executive Director and staff deserve raises for amazing performances, not threats of termination.”
In interviews in late September, Johnston did not directly answer questions about her relationship to EIN. “I’m all about election integrity, wherever it comes from,” she said. She acknowledged she had remained involved with board affairs after her retirement. “It gets in your blood,” she said. Two days later, she posted on social media that “Cleta Mitchell, Election Integrity expert has the right ideas” about how elections should be run.
Johnston did not answer detailed questions about her relationship with EIN and affiliated groups.
King acknowledged she spoke about election matters with activists from EIN and VoterGA, but said they did not influence her decisions. She also said she saw no problem with EIN activists working for the board, though the staff is supposed to be independent and nonpartisan.
“As long as they are representing the SEB well, fine,” she said in an interview. “If they choose to become members of an organization in their private time, that is their choice.”
When a reporter recounted instances in which staffers had worked to advance EIN goals in their official capacity, she said she was unaware of this. “That is the first I’ve heard about it,” she responded.
Mills declined to answer questions from ProPublica about his relationship to EIN.
Mitchell did not respond directly to ProPublica but, after receiving detailed questions, put a post on X celebrating EIN’s work with the election board. “An election integrity group is working with election officials to oversee elections,” she wrote. “Wow! What a discovery!!! Pulitzer anyone?”
Favorito called the idea that the board and its staff had been working secretly with the EIN and VoterGA a “patently false conspiracy theory.”
EIN has been deeply entwined with conservatives’ efforts to reshape Georgia elections since at least 2024.
That year, ProPublica’s reporting revealed, EIN members secretly pushed a rule through the State Election Board allowing local officials to potentially delay certifying the state’s vote count. A court subsequently struck down the change, which experts had warned could enable county election boards to disrupt certifying the election if Trump had lost.
In late 2025, the board played a role in instigating the Trump administration’s unprecedented effort to reinvestigate alleged 2020 voting irregularities, formally asking the Justice Department to obtain Fulton County election records subsequently seized by the FBI. It was a move pushed by the EIN. The affidavit authorizing the raid cited Johnston and King as witnesses. The affidavit also cited a report put together by an EIN researcher compiling activists’ debunked allegations of fraud.
In recent months, EIN’s allies and participants at the state board pushed counties to use ELLY, a tool developed by an EIN member, to search voter rolls for signs of fraud and purge suspect registrants.
ELLY aggregates public data from state voter files, federal change-of-address records, tax documents, obituaries, property websites like Zillow and other sources, but doesn’t have access to personal identifiers such as Social Security numbers or full dates of birth. As a result, voting rights groups have said, ELLY often erroneously flags legitimate voters.
Nonetheless, before the midterms, the State Election Board’s investigative staff pressured Chatham County, a Democratic stronghold, to purge more than 200 registered voters that the tool identified as questionable, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
After the election, a Forsyth County election board member who is also a member of EIN submitted ELLY data questioning the validity of over 60 ballots, including four cast by people who were supposedly dead. ProPublica found that all four were, in fact, alive. The board rejected the challenges.
EIN members and state board officials have defended ELLY’s accuracy.
The EIN’s connections to the board carry additional importance in light of last week’s election results, in which Democrats wrested control of all statewide offices and the state House from Republicans. The House appoints a member to the State Election Board, opening the door to change.
Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms ran on a platform that promised a new approach to the election board.
“The State Election Board has become mired in political games, conspiracy theories, and partisan interference,” the platform stated. Bottoms’ platform pledged that she would “work with the General Assembly to eliminate the current State Election Board and replace it with a stronger, more independent election oversight structure that is insulated from partisan manipulation.”
Fervier is part of the board’s four-member Republican majority, but he has clashed repeatedly with Johnston, King and Mills and has effectively been relegated to a member of the minority at times.
Emails and communications between board members and staff obtained by ProPublica via public records requests show that Fervier and other board members who oppose steps supported by the EIN have been excluded from some board hiring decisions.
Earlier this year, Fervier publicly accused Mills of going beyond what the board had authorized in calling for the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to intervene to assess the security of the state’s voting machines.
“Activists should not control the board,” he told ProPublica. “I’m really looking forward to this meeting because I think that we’re going to address some issues that should have been addressed awhile ago.”
