Several right-wing media figures tied to former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election have supported changes to Georgia’s election certification process that could be used to question or deny the state’s vote totals this November.

These figures include Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin; Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, an election denialist group; mother-daughter “Stop the Steal” activists Amy and Kylie Jane Kremer (the former is also a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots); and former Trump adviser and attorney Cleta Mitchell, founder of the Election Integrity Network. 

Notably, Mitchell is also a senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which — along with Tea Party Patriots — is one of the more than 100 organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025, a sprawling effort to provide a second Trump administration with policy and staffing proposals. Project 2025 is also run through with election deniers. 

Several of the outside groups pushing the changes appear to hold at least some real power in Georgia as well. In May, Fulton County election board member Julie Adams — who is reportedly affiliated with the Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network — refused to certify the primary election results. ProPublica further reported that a former board member brought one of the new rule changes forward at the “behest” of Adams, a “regional leader” in the Election Integrity Network who joined the Fulton County election board in February.

Adams isn’t the only new, hard-right election official. In May, the Georgia House speaker appointed Janelle King, a right-wing media personality, to the State Election Board, where she has supported the August rule changes. King has a history of spreading election denial conspiracy theories; in March 2021, she wrote on Facebook that “Republicans produce real proof of voter irregularities and fraud in some cases; stuff like, voting twice, voting from another state, stuff like that to name a few.”

The Georgia State Election Board’s hard-right turn

In early August, the Georgia State Election Board made changes to its certification process that would “require county election officials to make a ‘reasonable inquiry’ before certifying election results to the state,” as reported by The Associated Press. Voting rights advocates worry that the vagueness of the new rule will provide a pretext to delay or deny potential Democratic wins in November. 

Later that month, the board made an additional change providing county election officials with the authority to access “all election-related documentation” and resolve any discrepancies prior to certification — another potential avenue to sow doubt and confusion about vote totals. State Democrats have since brought a lawsuit challenging the board’s new rules. 

At a rally in Atlanta on August 3, Trump praised the Republican members of the State Election Board by name, including King, calling them “three pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” Trump’s comments appear to signal that the board’s changes could be a crucial part of his strategy to undermine confidence in the vote totals if the Republican nominee loses the state in November.

Jenny Beth Martin and Tea Party Patriots

Martin is a significant figure in the election denial movement. Her organization, Tea Party Patriots, sponsored a Trump rally in D.C. ahead of the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021, and Martin herself was outside the Capitol that day. According to Talking Points Memo, Martin “helped connect the political, legal, and activist elements of the push to keep Trump in power” and even communicated with Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff and an instrumental figure in the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Meadows faces charges in Arizona and Georgia for his role in Trump's scheme, and he is also a senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute. 

On August 10, Martin appeared on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon's War Room podcast to celebrate the Georgia State Election Board’s rule changes. 

“They are clarifying what certification means, which is very important, especially if you are on an election board and you have questions and don’t quite know that — don’t think what you’re certifying is actually the final vote,” Martin said. “They need to get it right before certification.”

Martin returned to War Room on August 27 to further praise the state board’s new policies and baselessly sow doubt about recent election results.

“These are not strange, draconian, hard things to enact,” Martin said. “Why doesn’t the left want these common sense changes to happen? That’s the real question.” 

She later added: “We need to have elections we can have faith and trust in, and that’s what these board members are trying to accomplish.”

Martin also hosts a podcast, The Jenny Beth Show, where she recently interviewed Salleigh Grubbs, the head of the Cobb County Republican Party. Grubbs gained some notoriety in right-wing media circles in 2020 after “following a truck she suspected of being used in a plot to shred evidence,” according to ProPublica. She later attended Trump’s January 6 event, and would continue to spread conspiracy theories about “irregularities in the election,” as reported in The Washington Post.   

During the September 4 interview, Martin and Grubbs discussed the new Georgia rules. State and county election officials “are there to be a check and balance,” Martin said. 

“That’s right,” Grubbs responded.

Martin added, “This is just another place to make sure that you’ve got another set of eyes and that you’re checking that everything really is what the report says it is.”

Catherine Engelbrecht and True the Vote

Martin was joined on War Room’s August 27 episode by Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote and another prominent election denialist. Engelbrecht and her business partner, Gregg Phillips, served as primary sources for 2000 Mules, a discredited conspiracy theory film from Dinesh D’Souza that falsely claimed there had been mass voter fraud in the 2020 election. In addition to participating in the film, True the Vote challenged Georgia’s 2020 election results, claiming it had obtained evidence of a mass ballot stuffing operation. When a judge later asked for the evidence, the group admitted it had none. 

Like Martin, Engelbrecht praised the Georgia State Election Board, and she was even more explicit in her baseless accusations that Democrats were attempting to rig the election system. 

“The Democrats are going to fight tooth and nail to make sure that the fraud we’ve seen coming out of Georgia over these last few years, that that remains institutionalized,” Engelbrecht said. “I applaud the State Election Board, and even more than that I applaud the people of Georgia who have fought tirelessly to try to bring elections back to some semblance of common sense in their state, and they’re doing a great job.”

“The Democrat Party is opposed for all of the obvious reasons, but I’ll state the obvious, and that is that they intend to manipulate and exploit the weaknesses wherever they can,” she added.

Cleta Mitchell and the Election Integrity Network

Prior to founding the Election Integrity Network, Mitchell served as a campaign adviser to then-President Trump while he was attempting to overturn the 2020 election. She participated in a call during which Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” more than 11,000 votes, enough to throw the election to him. A grand jury later recommended indicting Mitchell for her role in Trump’s efforts to stay in power, though prosecutors in Fulton County declined to charge her. 

Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network has issued at least two formal press releases in favor of the Georgia election changes. 

On August 13, EIN issued a statement urging the passage of new rules that would “demand accurate counts before certifying elections.” Following adoption of the new policy, EIN said the State Election Board had “stood up to left-wing pressure groups and voted to ensure vote-tallies reconcile before certification.”

Mitchell has been a vocal supporter of the Georgia election board meddling. On August 3, she celebrated Trump’s speech singling out the three State Election Board members who later voted in favor of the new rules.

Since then, Mitchell has written at least five other posts in favor of the changes or criticizing opponents of the moves — including praising Trump-aligned board member Janelle King. 

“GA State Election Board Member Janelle King is smart, tough, and conservative,” Mitchell wrote. “She stands for the rule of law and election integrity - leftists hate that. We are with you Janelle!”

Amy and Kylie Jane Kremer

Longtime tea party activist Amy Kremer helped organize the January 6, 2021, rally where Trump instructed the crowd to “fight like hell” and march to the U.S. Capitol. Her daughter, Kylie Jane, created a “Stop the Steal” Facebook group following the 2020 election that ballooned to 350,000 members over the course of a day. The duo previously founded the pro-Trump group Women for America First in 2019.

Following Joe Biden’s inauguration, Amy Kremer pushed for an “audit” of the Georgia vote totals, similar to a sham audit Trump allies pursued in Arizona. More recently, she successfully ran for a seat on the Republican National Committee in a campaign that was supported by Steve Bannon.

Both Amy and Kylie Jane Kremer have repeatedly supported the Georgia State Election Board rule changes. On August 19, Amy Kremer accused Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Attorney General Chris Carr, and Gov. Brian Kemp — all Republicans — of “standing in the way &/or running interference to stop the GA State Election Board from securing GA’s elections & investigating election fraud.”

Amy Kremer has repeatedly cast doubt on Georgia’s election systems throughout August, and responded to the Democrats’ lawsuit challenging the changes by asking Carr, “What are you going to do about this?”

Kylie Jane Kremer has similarly criticized Kemp, Raffensperger, and Carr, writing on August 3 that they’re “like the three amigos who steal elections.” On August 26, she praised Trump-aligned State Election Board member Janelle King. One day later, she urged her followers to show the board “the support they deserve as they stand strong for Georgians against attacks from Governor Kemp, SOS Brad Raffensperger, AG Chris Carr and Democrats!”

Raffensperger, who famously declined Trump’s request to “find” enough votes to overturn Georgia’s election results in 2020, has now spoken out against the State Election Board rule changes. As of late August, Kemp hadn’t publicly commented on the changes, though his office referred an ethics complaint against the pro-Trump board members to the attorney general’s office. Carr released an official opinion stating that the State Election Board can’t force him to reopen an investigation into the vote totals in Fulton County in 2020, as requested by Trump’s allies on the board.