Who gets to observe elections? A Georgia county dukes it out with its elections board

After voting this month to require a hand count of paper ballots on election day, the Trump-aligned trio of Georgia state elections board members turned their attention back to one of their favorite topics: how to keep an eye on Fulton county.

Georgia's most populous county is always on their mind. For people who still chant "stop the steal" almost four years after the 2020 election, Fulton county remains the problem. Earlier this year, the state board entered into a voluntary agreement with Fulton county to embed an external monitoring team into the election apparatus for the 2024 contest.

The agreement came after the state board reprimanded the county for potentially double counting about 3,000 ballots during a recount of the 2020 election. The mistake did not – could not – change the election result which showed that Joe Biden had won the election. Nonetheless, the county swallowed hard and ate the rebuke.

But the devil is in the details down in Georgia. Which monitoring team? Who gets to stand behind poll workers on election night looking for loose ballots and bad math?

Last week, the state election board rejected the monitoring team the county had selected, instead preferring an option primarily including people tied to the stop-the-steal movement. State board members said they would send the chairman to the county to try to negotiate, but the terms of the agreement and the late date for adjustments leaves the state board little leverage.

The Fulton county board of registration and elections had two proposals for monitoring teams before them in June. One proposal had Ryan Germany, a former staff attorney for Georgia's secretary of state, leading a team that included a monitor from the United States Election Assistance Commission, a former elections director from Augusta, the special master that had concluded the county double-counted ballots and the previous Republican chairman of the state board of elections itself. The proposal also engaged the Carter Center, an international election monitoring organization based in Atlanta.

The team would review election security, the county's chain of custody procedures, poll worker training, storing ballots, advance voting and other processes.

The other proposal, as presented by the state elections board member Dr Janice Johnston, included Salleigh Grubbs, the chairwoman of the Cobb county Republican party whose petition to permit elections directors to engage in a poorly defined investigation of discrepancies before certification, has been dubbed the Grubbs Rule and is now the subject of litigation. Others include Heather Honey, a conservative elections activist from Pennsylvania; Christine Propst, who has managed Republican poll watchers and Garland Favorito, an attorney and conspiracy theorist who has made unsubstantiated claims about counterfeit ballots used in 2020. Favorito is known for filing lawsuits to litigate the 2020 election results, one of which still remains active.

Fulton county went with the first proposal.

"Although the state election board does not have the legal authority to require monitors, we agreed as part of that resolution, as part of that reprimand, to have monitors for the 2024 general election," said Nadine Williams, Fulton county's election director, to the Fulton county commission on 4 September.

Williams cited the difference in potential cost as a factor driving the decision. She also said that Germany's team presented itself as non-partisan to the state election board, while the other team did not. In any case, Williams didn't want to try to make changes to the approved team with only weeks to go before the election.

"We would hope that what is in the best interest of Fulton county is what's the best interest of the state," said the Fulton county commissioner, Khadijah Abdul-Rahman. "But I would be remiss if I didn't say that it disturbs me that we politicize everything when we are trying to do what is right."

The county commission voted 5-2 to fund the Ryan Germany team. One of the two no votes was Bridget Thorne, a Republican election monitor who rose to prominence with the ascent of the stop-the-steal movement and maintained a secret Telegram channel for conservative elections activists. Thorne raised questions about the quality of the oversight by some of the proposed monitors, and suggested that the involvement of the Carter Center as an election monitor in Fulton county would raise questions about bias.

"I think that's why a lot of the people are kind of skeptical because it feels like we're going to have another rubber stamp," she said. "I'm not against monitors. I'm just against, perhaps, just these type of monitors ... if they're going to be hiring the ACLU and Common Cause people to come in, then that's one-sided, a left-leaning side."

Meanwhile, the three Republican appointees to the state elections board whom Trump praised by name as "pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory" rejected the county's monitoring team on Monday.

An email campaign driven by the Constitution party of Georgia, citing Favorito's advocacy, sent a thousand messages to the board asking it to reject the Ryan Germany monitors. Johnston cited the emails as a reason for concern.

She seemed to be unaware that the county had the right to reject her proposal outright when the board discussed it Monday. "There has been no mutually agreed upon monitoring team," she said. "Fulton county decided on its own to move on with the Ryan Germany team, which is disconcerting because I have received over 1,000 emails opposing the Ryan Germany team and the Carter Center ... That team is not desirable or acceptable, certainly by me."

She suggested that each board member should be allowed to appoint two members from her proposal, and that the state board name the leader of the monitoring team. "If they don't agree to it, we can consider other options."

The state board's beleaguered chairman, John Fevrier, said he intended to have a meeting with Fulton county's board to reopen negotiations.

But the Georgia attorney general, Chris Carr, reiterated to the state elections board that the agreement was voluntary, in an advisory letter sent 19 August. He also said that if the state tried to reopen the 2020 election on its own, or bucked the county board by refusing to agree to the monitors, it "appears highly likely that no monitoring team will be engaged".