As early voting begins this week in Georgia, there has been no word from the U.S. Justice Department as to what it intends to do about a letter received from a state official on official state stationary, requesting that it throw a monkey wrench into this year’s election process.
The letter from State Election Board executive director James Mills to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and other administration officials doesn’t specifically mention a monkey wrench, although there are a lot of technical details to monkey with.
The letter asks the Justice Department to investigate and, “where appropriate,” to intervene in several aspects of the state’s voting system. It asked that several changes be made “immediately,” and that the method of counting votes using QR codes, which is used all over the state, be banned outright. For good measure, the letter accuses Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of misleading the legislature and the public and impeding access to public records.
If Mills had raised some of the issues he cites in his letter several months ago, it might not be fair to question his motives with respect to the upcoming election. But he sent the letter on Sept. 30, two weeks before the beginning of early voting.
“We have no control over our executive director, and he does whatever the hell he wants to,” board chairman John Fervier, who has feuded with Mills, told the news website Votebeat.
For this, the board itself bears a share of the blame. It passed a resolution last month giving Mills wide discretion to ask for federal assistance on several issues. But board member Salleigh Grubbs, who voted for that resolution, told Votebeat that she agreed with Fervier that Mills’ letter “far exceeded” what he had been directed to do.
“I thought we were all on the same team,” said Grubbs, who is first vice chair of the Georgia Republican Party.
How did we get here? How did we get to a place where an unelected director of a state board takes it on himself to put out the welcome mat for a Justice Department desperate to find things wrong with the now-commenced election? How have things gotten so tangled that even people from the same wing of the same party are arguing with each other? Where is the official whom the people elected to handle elections, the secretary of state? It took quite a bit of doing to get us to this troubling place, and a good part of two legislative sessions.
In previous decades, the secretary of state sat as chair of the election board, and the board and the secretary of state’s office were expected to work in coordination with each other. As punishment for Raffensperger’s role in the 2020 election in which President Donald Trump fell short in Georgia, the General Assembly removed him as chair and made him a nonvoting member of the board in 2021. In 2024 the legislature took a second dead-horse swing and removed the secretary of state from the board altogether.
In the tidied-up legislative language attempting to justify this act of pure spite, Republican lawmakers said they wanted to restore voter confidence in the election system by guaranteeing “election integrity.” The strategy to bring this about has been to institutionalize the principle that the left hand shouldn’t know what the right hand is doing.
There are six other states where the secretary of state operates separately from the state election board or commission: Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Tennessee and West Virginia. But Georgia is the only state where the separation amounts to a divorce, the only state that has changed the way it handles elections based on a grudge.
Having lost his bid for governor in this year’s Republican primary, Raffensperger will be leaving elected office next year. The election board has already had some turnover, and will have more. But the bifurcated administrative structure which was created in the political turmoil of this decade will encourage political bad behavior and risk election disaster for as long as it’s around.
