Georgia primary closes chapter on officials who resisted Trump in 2020

Now, Raffensperger’s successor could come from the same conservative milieu that has railed against Sterling and Raffensperger or echoed the president’s 2020 election claims, potentially handing control of state election certification to someone who has never fully accepted the 2020 results.

Amid the chaos after the 2020 election, Sterling urged Trump to condemn those threatening election workers. But when it came to messaging on the campaign trail this year, Sterling cast himself as the best candidate to defend Georgia’s voting laws and elections from Stacey Abrams and the “woke” left.

It didn’t work. Sterling got about 12% of the vote in the five-person primary. Instead, two Republicans with more distrustful views of the 2020 vote advanced to a runoff — state Rep. Tim Fleming and former DeKalb County CEO and state Rep. Vernon Jones. For some, it seemed to be less about who advanced and more about who didn’t.

“Thank you, Georgia!!! You did it!!!! You pushed out Brad Raffensperger and Gabe Sterling!!!” posted Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who backed efforts to overturn Trump’s defeat in 2020 and leads the Election Integrity Network, a conservative organization.

Three vote counts — an Election Day machine count, a hand-count audit and a machine recount — as well as investigations and lawsuits, upheld Trump’s loss. But years later, conspiratorial thinking about the long-scrutinized election lives on as the race to see who will be Georgia’s next elections chief heads toward a June runoff.

Jones, who endorsed Trump as a Democrat in 2020 and later switched to the Republican Party, has said he’ll stand by those who believe there was election fraud and that there were many “irregularities” in the election. He’s touted his attendance at a “Stop the Steal” rally and has called himself the “Black Donald Trump.”

In an interview, Fleming focused on the future rather than relitigating 2020, though he maintained there were serious “irregularities” — which are now under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice — in Fulton County.

“We can’t erase the four years of the Biden presidency, but we can work to ensure that those irregularities that we saw don’t happen again,” said Fleming, who served in senior positions in the Secretary of State’s Office when Gov. Brian Kemp held that role. “That’s what I’ve been fighting for in the Legislature.”

Voting touchscreens

A facet of many 2020 doubts stems from the use of the state’s voting equipment, manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. The company, purchased by Liberty Vote last year, became a frequent target of misinformation after the 2020 election, when skeptics falsely claimed the company’s voting equipment produced fraudulent results.

In 2024, Republican state lawmakers passed a law setting a deadline for this July to move off using QR codes printed on ballots to count votes, responding to years of pressure from activists who mistrust the technology because voters cannot directly read the computer codes tabulated by scanners.

But the Republican-controlled General Assembly never found a means by which to count votes without such barcodes, either by funding a different system or implementing an alternative tallying method. Kemp has called a special legislative session for late June and ordered lawmakers to address the mess before the November midterms.

Fleming, the chair of a House committee tasked with proposing changes to election laws, said he’s not in favor of pushing back the July deadline. Without going into details, he said lawmakers are looking at several options to bring Georgia into compliance with the self-imposed deadline.

Both Fleming and Jones have advocated for the use of the hand-marked paper ballots, a position that’s gained popularity among conservatives since Trump’s 2020 loss.

Still, a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll found only about half — 49% — of likely Republican primary voters supported such a switch. An additional 45% opposed a shift to paper ballots, and 10% didn’t know or had no opinion.

Fulton doubts live on

The race to decide the next elections chief comes as the Trump administration pursues a criminal investigation into Fulton County’s 2020 election.

In January, FBI agents seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 election records from the county. More recently, it was revealed the U.S. Department of Justice issued a grand jury subpoena demanding the identities and personal information of every Fulton election worker, both paid and volunteer, who worked that election.

Skepticism about Fulton and its elections was on full display in last week’s primary, after Georgia’s most populous county announced it would not begin reporting results until 11 p.m., hours later than most counties. The announcement of the delay came after a judge extended voting for four hours at Ison Springs Elementary School, which police put on an hourslong “soft lockdown” because of reports of a suspicious person and possible gunshots at a nearby park.

Conservatives seized on the delay and took to social media to question the Democratic stronghold’s voting. U.S. Rep. Clay Fuller said Fulton was “at it AGAIN!” The Trump-endorsed Republican said the state should take over the county.

“You can see everything as it gets reported. Everything is open as it gets reported to the public,” Fulton Elections Chair Sherri Allen said. “We cannot give any results until all results have been reported for the county.”

Freelance reporter Mark Niesse contributed to this report.