The board that writes Georgia's election rules has been working with an activist group run by Cleta Mitchell — the lawyer who was on the phone in January 2021 when Donald Trump pressed Georgia's top election official over his 2020 loss.

That's the finding of a ProPublica investigation published November 13. Recordings of private calls and events show current and former members of the State Election Board working with Mitchell's Election Integrity Network and its allies on shared goals — including pushing a voter-roll tool called ELLY that ProPublica describes as error-prone.

The board's own Republican chair doesn't defend it.

"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," board chair John Fervier told ProPublica.

Who was working with whom

Mitchell assisted Trump on that 2021 call, and she resigned from her law firm days later. She now leads the Election Integrity Network, a national group that works to tighten voting rules.

ProPublica found her group's reach went deep into the Georgia board:

• Janelle King, the board's vice chair, appointed by the Republican-led state House, has attended meetings of the network or its Georgia ally, VoterGA. She told ProPublica the activists didn't influence her decisions.
• Janice Johnston, her predecessor as vice chair, who retired from the board in June, also attended those meetings.
• At an August 2025 VoterGA fundraiser, with both women in the room, Mitchell said: "You know, we've worked so hard together."
• At least three of the board's eight professional staff have taken part in the network's meetings — including people who handle complaints about voter fraud and about misconduct by election officials.
• The board's executive director, James Mills, has worked closely with the network's members, according to five sources, board documents and network communications. He declined to answer ProPublica's questions about it.

What that partnership produced

This is not a story about who sat in on a Zoom call. ProPublica traced real actions back to it:

• A rule to delay certifying elections. In 2024, network members secretly pushed a rule through the board that could have let local officials delay certifying Georgia's vote count. A court struck it down.
• The 2020 do-over. In late 2025, the board formally asked the Justice Department to get Fulton County's 2020 election records — the records the FBI later seized in the Trump administration's effort to reinvestigate 2020.
• A voter purge in Chatham County. Before the midterms, the board's investigative staff pressured Chatham County, a Democratic stronghold, to remove more than 200 registered voters the ELLY tool had flagged, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

ELLY pulls together public data but doesn't use Social Security numbers or full birth dates, so voting rights groups say it often flags real, eligible voters by mistake.

We've already seen what that looks like. After the midterms, a Republican county board member in Forsyth County used ELLY to challenge ballots — and four of the voters he called dead turned out to be alive.

The board chair says he was kept out

Fervier is part of the board's four-member Republican majority. But he has clashed again and again with Johnston, King and Mills, and at times has been pushed into the minority, ProPublica reported. Emails obtained through public records requests indicate he and other members who opposed the network's priorities were left out of some hiring decisions.

Fervier called a special meeting for Friday, partly to discuss personnel. Garland Favorito, who leads VoterGA, urged his followers to message board members in defense of Mills and the staff. He called the idea of secret coordination a "patently false conspiracy theory."

Voters already answered

Georgia voters just elected Democrats to every statewide office and flipped the state House, ProPublica noted. Governor-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms campaigned on a promise to "eliminate the current State Election Board and replace it with a stronger, more independent" one. Her platform said the board "has become mired in political games, conspiracy theories, and partisan interference."

What the investigation found

A current and a former member of Georgia's State Election Board, its executive director and at least three of its eight staff worked with the Election Integrity Network, the group led by Trump's 2020 election lawyer Cleta Mitchell. During that partnership, the board passed a certification-delay rule a court later struck down, asked the Justice Department to go after Fulton County's 2020 records, and its staff pressed Chatham County to purge more than 200 voters flagged by an error-prone tool. The board's own Republican chair calls it "undue influence."

Source

• ProPublica, Members of Georgia's Election Board Have Been Coordinating With Cleta Mitchell's Network, November 13, 2026