Georgia activists working with Trump administration to influence elections

“It is a multiagency approach,” she said. “And there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes. I’ve been a part of some of that.”

Others at the Washington “Election Integrity Summit” first reported by ProPublica included Brad Carver of the Georgia Republican Party; Marci McCarthy, a former DeKalb Republican official who now oversees public affairs at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; and Clay Parikh, a cybersecurity expert whose expertise was used by the U.S. Department of Justice to justify seizing troves of Fulton County’s 2020 election records.

The meeting and the call recounting it offer a glimpse at how activists, once on the fringe of the conservative movement, are now trying to overhaul elections in Georgia and across the country.

For years, a network of activists has cast doubt on Georgia’s 2020 election, questioning the integrity of the state’s voting machines and the voter rolls that determine who can vote. But officials have dismissed their challenges and investigators debunked their fraud claims.

Now several are in the Trump administration, and Fulton County is firmly in their sights ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Richard Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA, said he fears that some of the administration’s recent activities surrounding elections, such as the FBI seizing Fulton’s 2020 election records, could be a pretext to interfere with the midterms.

“Donald Trump has been going quite hard at making changes in time for the midterm elections, either through federal legislation or he’s threatened through another executive order,” Hasan said.

Carver, who leads the Election Confidence Task Force within the Georgia GOP and was one of the 16 Trump electors in 2020, called Georgia “the biggest topic” at the Washington summit and expressed frustration with people in the Trump administration who are more skeptical of the president’s efforts in elections.

“We have our allies in the administration, and then we have people in the administration who don’t care about election integrity,” he said.

Kesler noted a few other prominent conservative activists attended the summit, including Cleta Mitchell of the Election Integrity Network; Trump’s former National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn; and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a prominent election skeptic.

Flynn has repeatedly called for Trump to declare a national state of emergency in time for the midterms. A draft presidential order circulated by conservative activists relies on the claim that China interfered with the 2020 election as a basis for declaring a national state of emergency that would empower the president to ban mail-in voting and voting machines. Legal experts say the order likely would be struck down by courts.

Flynn has taken his ideas to Trump before. Another plan pitched to Trump by Flynn and Byrne and attorney Sidney Powell in December 2020 would have authorized the military to seize Dominion voting machines in Georgia and other states. The president later said he regretted not doing so.

It’s not clear exactly who wrote the most recent draft executive order, but Garland Favorito, an election integrity activist on the Zoom call, appeared to take at least some credit for it, saying “we’ve worked on that for a long time.”

Favorito declined to be interviewed about his involvement and did not respond to written questions about it.

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

On the call, Kesler urged others to “get plugged in” with other efforts to influence elections ahead of the midterms.

And she expressed eagerness to see Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger locked up.

“We would love to see Brad Raffensperger taken off in handcuffs,” she said.

Kesler declined to comment about her involvement at the Washington summit, but McCarthy, a former chair of the DeKalb County GOP, posted about the event on LinkedIn. Several photos show McCarthy with attendees of the summit.

“Grateful for friendships forged through years of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, united by purpose and conviction,” McCarthy wrote. “The mission continues … and so does the fellowship.”

Credit: Curtis Compton / Curtis.Compton@

Credit: Curtis Compton / Curtis.Compton@

McCarthy, who has spread debunked election conspiracies and challenged the eligibility of thousands of voters, said it was an honor to spend time with Flynn and other “fellow patriots.”

She later deleted the post. McCarthy did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Before McCarthy, Parikh and Olsen joined the administration, they worked together in 2024 to challenge the state’s voting machines.

Raffensperger has defended the security of the state’s voting machines, saying that alleged vulnerabilities couldn’t be exploited in real-world conditions.

Credit: Ben Hendren for the AJC

Credit: Ben Hendren for the AJC

Parikh posted to social media a list of his recommended voting machines — it was blank. He also appears to be playing a direct role in investigating Fulton’s 2020 election. Parikh indicated he was working with Olsen in an interview with Talking Points Memo after the raid.

Citizen activists have spent years poring over the 2020 election results, and the Trump administration’s embrace of these election skeptics is showing results. The affidavit used to persuade a magistrate judge to sign off on a search warrant came largely from interviews with skeptics.

It cited Parikh’s analysis of the county’s 2020 tabulator tapes and other records, which led him to believe some data on the tapes were “manipulated.”

His analysis came after Kevin Moncla, a conservative researcher, asked him to do so. Moncla has previously told the AJC he submitted an extensive report outlining alleged fraud in Fulton’s 2020 election to Olsen and the Justice Department weeks before the raid, despite numerous investigations that found no evidence of wrongdoing.

Olsen, who referred the Fulton investigation to the DOJ, is a central figure in the Trump administration’s efforts to relitigate the 2020 election ahead of a crucial midterm vote.

Last year, Olsen, a lawyer, was sanctioned in federal court for making “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” in support of Republican Kari Lake’s failed legal effort to overturn her 2022 loss in the Arizona governor’s race.

Trump has never accepted his 2020 defeat. His yearslong campaign to find fraud in Fulton’s 2020 election has heated up as he’s called on Republicans to nationalize elections and approve new voter ID provisions.

Georgia lawmakers are grappling with how elections will be conducted during the midterms. State lawmakers are weighing how to comply with a self-imposed deadline to stop counting votes with QR codes by July. So far, no legislation has made headway this year. Many election officials say it’s already too late to implement a new system ahead of the midterms and that the deadline should be pushed back, which would leave Georgia with the same system that Trump and his allies have tried to oust for years.

“Georgia’s election officials are recklessly leaving the door wide-open for disruption by Trump-aligned actors or the administration,” said Marilyn Marks, the executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, a nonprofit that focuses on election security. “Trump has already talked about seizing voting machines in the past, and he has repeatedly singled out Georgia’s touchscreen system as untrustworthy.”

But some of those involved in efforts to overhaul elections have been careful about how much they reveal to the public.

In the Zoom, Carver said meetings like the ones hosted by the Georgia Constitution Party and Signal group chats are helpful because they allow information to be shared without ending up “on the front page of liberal media.”