How Janice Johnston is ‘laying the groundwork for chaos’ in Georgia’s elections

One evening last month, a new Twitter account popped up purporting to represent the Georgia state board of elections.

The account emerged at a curious moment. The five-person volunteer board was coming under increased scrutiny for pushing through new rules that could lead to confusion and, possibly, delays in certifying election results this fall.

"Greetings to all Georgia citizens from a member of the State Election Board!" the account's first message said.

"The State Election Board is committed to the General Assembly's mission of ensuring that elections in Georgia are free and fair, but also legal, uniform, orderly, honest, and trusted." The post was signed: "Thanks, Dr. Jan."

The author was Janice Johnston, a member of the board who was appointed by the state Republican party in 2022. The next morning, she emailed her fellow board members and their staff and explained that she had taken it upon herself to create the Twitter account , as well as accounts on Facebook and Instagram.

"I thought it would be great to have a presence on social media that would facilitate our effort to communicate with the public," she wrote, in an email that has not previously been made public. "As we approach this election cycle, we have the opportunity to provide clear and accurate information to the public and demonstrate transparency."

"If there is opposition to this, please let me know."

John Fervier, the board's chair, responded shortly after, listing 10 bullet points explaining why he believed her actions were wrong and said that he had never been consulted.

"For a social media site to be set up in the name of the Georgia State Election Board and the Chairman of the Board and the Executive Director to not know about it is astonishing to me and shows a serious disregard for our positions," he wrote. Fervier noted that the account had already spread false information, claiming that the election board oversees elections in Georgia. Each of the state's 159 counties runs its elections, which are overseen by the Georgia secretary of state, a statewide elected official. The board is charged with rule-making and has the power to investigate elections under state law.

Johnston would later change the Twitter handle to make it clear she was only speaking on her own behalf.

Her attempt to speak on behalf of the board came a little over a month after she and two other Republicans attempted to have a last-minute meeting without two other members – a move that may have violated the state's open-records law. It underscored how Johnston, a retired OB-GYN, has undergone a meteoric rise from being a citizen activist to one of the most powerful people on the state's board of elections.

Johnston's influence over the board represents one of the biggest successes of the election-denial movement in the United States. Called to action by doubts about the 2020 election results, activists have thrown themselves into monitoring election offices and, in some cases, seeking positions of power as election administrators or election board members. The influence that Johnston now wields on a powerful board in a battleground state illustrates how far that strategy can go.

Working with input from a network of activists who doubt the 2020 election across the state, Johnston has emerged as the leader of a three-member Republican bloc that has pushed through rules aimed at giving local election officials more power to hold up certification.

The new rules allow any local election board member to conduct "reasonable inquiry" and allow local election officials to request vast amounts of documentation and information before an election is certified. They also require election officials to explain and reconcile any discrepancy between the number of voters checked in and the number of ballots cast in a precinct before the vote is certified. There is considerable concern that these new rules could cause severe delays in the certification.

"Johnston seems to be the one really running Georgia's election board – she's secretly coordinating with Maga election deniers to change our election rules, giving them the power to veto our votes," said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the CEO of Fair Fight, a voting rights group. Recent reporting by the Guardian and Rolling Stone has shown Johnston in communication with a network of activists who have questioned the 2020 election and sought more power over election rules.

"By giving extremists who are all in on Trump's 2020 election lies the power to block the certification of votes, she's laying the groundwork for election chaos in 2024."

Johnston did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this story.

A rise to power Johnston arrived at the state election board in early 2022 a relatively unknown figure.

She had served as a poll worker, and after the 2020 election, she began regularly showing up at meetings of the Fulton county commission and its election board in Atlanta. She expressed concern over the county's contract with Happy Faces, a temp agency the county relied on to staff its election office and other government roles. There were false claims at the time that Stacey Abrams, the prominent Democratic gubernatorial candidate, had a financial stake in Happy Faces.

Johnston repeated the false claim, saying: "Happy Faces temp agency was and still is financially connected with Democrat political activist Stacey Abrams which according to Ms Abrams is technically legal, but in my opinion is unethical and unacceptable. It places our election process at risk of partisan and questionable hiring practices."

She said the company had been "charged with double scanning thousands of ballots" and "inadequate management of voter rolls and voter residency requirements" and was missing "thousands of chain of custody documents of absentee ballots".

The claim about missing chain-of-custody documents in Fulton county – circulating among those seeking to overturn the 2020 election at the time – has been debunked .

Johnston then spoke at an August 2021 Fulton county commissioner's meeting, again suggesting that something had gone amiss in the November 2020 election. "Is there any one of you who can positively state who falsified the tally sheets in the last November election audit? Was it a Happy Face's employees? Or was it Fulton county employees?" she said .

In October 2021, she suggested at another Fulton county commissioners meeting that an effort to hire poll technicians could be a plot to sway the election. "Is this just a deceptive 11th-hour attempt to get outsiders in to our elections? Are poll technicians just repackaged Elections Group [an elections consultancy] operatives or ACLU activists? Or vote-at-home fake consultants?" she said .

Later, as a member of the state election board, she would continue to suggest that something had been amiss with the 2020 election (the results were affirmed by two different recounts ). During a May meeting, she suggested that there could be more than 17,000 ballots missing in Fulton county because images of the ballots had not been provided.

Charlene McGowan, a lawyer for the secretary of state's office, said unequivocally that there were no missing ballots: "We have the paper ballots. The paper ballots exist. There's no 17,000 missing ballots." Johnston was unpersuaded. She later filed a motion to have the secretary of state either deduct the 17,000 ballots – larger than Biden's margin in Georgia – from the certified vote total or investigate what happened. The motion failed.

In 2021, Bob Ellis, a Republican on the Fulton county commission, nominated Johnston to serve on a taskforce to investigate elections in Fulton county. By that time, it was clear that Johnston was becoming a part of a community of activists closely monitoring elections. In December of 2021, the Fulton county Republican party featured Johnston in a photo with other activists raising a toast after filing challenges against voters. The challenges, which have been made easier by a series of legal changes Georgia Republicans passed, have not uncovered significant fraud.

In January of 2022, the Georgia Republican party nominated Johnston to fill its seat on the Georgia election board. In a brief write-up covering her nomination , the Atlanta Journal-Constitution described her as a "Fulton elections critic" and noted she had appeared regularly at county meetings "calling for the firing of the county's elections director, criticizing the job performance of temporary election workers and repeating unsubstantiated allegations of 'falsified tally sheets' during an audit".

"She has served as a poll worker, poll watcher and absentee ballot monitor. She has been monitoring as a citizen the meetings of the state election board. She is retired now from her medical practice and has full time to devote to this important responsibility," David Shafer, then the chair of the Georgia Republican party, said when she was named to the board. Shafer now faces criminal charges as part of the racketeering case filed against Trump and allies in connection with efforts to overturn the election.

During her first meeting as an election board member in March of 2022, Johnston introduced herself and explained her interest in elections.

"I started as a citizen who had some free time and wanted to volunteer. My interest and curiosity was working as a poll watcher, monitor, observer in absentee ballot processing. This experience was followed by participation in as many aspects of the election process as I could do from the grass-roots level," she said. "These interests then broadened to understanding the larger picture of elections processing, operations and conduct. Naturally, this led to a study of elections law, election systems and oversight of our elections."

She noted she was a retired doctor, and went on to compare the administration of elections to practicing medicine, saying both required "fair, ethical, legal and orderly conduct" and treating everyone the same.

She ended by previewing what her interests on the board would be: "maintenance for security and outside contracts, absentee voting safeguards security, and working toward the same requirements as in-person voting; vulnerable elector advocacy and protection; protection of election department from outside influences, money or manpower, partisan or private, direct or indirect; ballot security and voting systems".

Helen Butler, a longtime voting activist in Georgia who regularly attends election board meetings in the state, said she had never heard of Johnston until after the 2020 election.

"She tries to exert a lot of influence and, I think, with the two other Republicans on there, they've become a mighty force," said Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda, which regularly monitors election board meetings at the state level and across the state. "They're catering to the election deniers when in fact I really believe they just don't know the process, have never worked the process, and really don't care about the process."

A network of election deniers As an election board member, Johnston is a connection between election deniers and a powerful government body.

In November 2023, David Hancock, a member of the Gwinnett county election board, emailed Johnston to introduce himself. Hancock has posted on Facebook questioning the 2020 election and shared deceptive and debunked videos purporting to show fraud in Fulton county. "I met you briefly a few months ago at one of your meetings), and I am working with some people that you know on various integrity projects," he wrote.

In May, Johnston emailed Hancock to ask what materials he would need to certify an election, according to records obtained by Rolling Stone and American Doom. The email came as Johnston and other Republicans on the board were pushing new rules that allowed local officials to undertake an undefined "reasonable inquiry" before certifying elections and allowed them unlimited access to documents.

Johnston has also corresponded with Julie Adams and Michael Heekin, two Fulton county election commissioners who have refused to certify elections, according to Rolling Stone and American Doom. Adams is the regional coordinator for south-eastern states for the Election Integrity Network, a group focused on local election offices founded by Cleta Mitchell. She was represented by a pro-Trump group in a lawsuit seeking to give her more power over certification (the suit was recently dismissed on technical grounds).

During her time on the Georgia state board of elections, Johnston has defended election conspiracists. Last year, for example, she objected to the state board's effort to force rightwing organization True the Vote to produce evidence to back up allegations of ballot fraud.

"Are we really going to put someone in jail because they did not respond to our questions? Is this designed to intimidate anyone who might consider filing an election complaint?" she wrote to the other board members in November of last year in an email obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight and provided to the Guardian. She asked the board to record her dissenting vote. True the Vote eventually conceded that it did not have evidence to back up its claims.

In January of this year, she emailed fellow board members saying she wanted to send a list of people suspected to be registered in more than one place to counties, according to more emails obtained by American Oversight and shared with the Guardian. She had obtained the list from an anonymous email account, Totes Legit Votes , which had been submitting complaints of illegally registered voters that had been debunked. Johnston said she had had the list authenticated by someone else – she did not say who – and wanted to ask the counties to investigate.

Sara Tindall Ghazal, the Georgia Democratic party's appointee to the board, wrote back, objecting to contacting the counties: "If you have not yet consulted with the [secretary of state's] office on this issue, I believe that reaching out to counties directly is premature, particularly as any information from an anonymous third party is necessarily far less robust than data available to the secretary of state."

'A power grab' Despite her connections to activists in the state, it wasn't until recently that Johnston amassed influence on the board.

Last year, she supported an unsuccessful effort to have the state board investigate Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, over his handling of the 2020 election. In February of this year, the board voted down her proposal to end no-excuse absentee voting in the state.

In May, the state election board, including Johnston, also voted down a proposed rule that would have required local officials to reconcile minor discrepancies.

"Just last year, there were three lawyers on the five-member state election board, plus a retired judge as the chair. Board meetings and votes were generally by the book, and Dr Johnston was often outvoted by her fellow members," said Kristin Nabers, the state director of All Voting Is Local, a voting rights group. "However, after a sustained pressure campaign, three of the board members were removed or quit, creating an opportunity for a power grab by election deniers."

Johnston's influence started to grow after Republicans pressured Edward Lindsey, a Republican on the board, to resign. He did so in May, and was replaced by Janelle King, a conservative media personality and former deputy director of the Georgia Republican party.

Josh McKoon, the chair of the Georgia Republican party, was clear about the significance of the new majority. "I believe when we look back on Nov 5, 2024, we're going to say getting to that 3-2 election-integrity-minded majority on the state election board made sure that we had the level playing field to win this election," he said at the party's convention in May, according to the New York Times .

The board's new majority, including Johnston, voted in August to ask the attorney general to reopen its inquiry into Fulton county's handling of the 2020 election (the attorney general declined). It also passed the new rules empowering local election officials to delay certification, and is poised to pass a measure on Friday requiring counties to hand-count ballots to check machine-vote totals.

Johnston has received public praise from Donald Trump, who named her, King and Rick Jeffares – the other member of the GOP bloc – at a rally earlier this month. "They're on fire. They're doing a great job. Three members. Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King. Three people, all pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory," he said during a rally in Atlanta in August.