Sara Tindall Ghazal was scouring her closet as 8pm approached on Wednesday night. She was preparing for her first appearance on cable news, something she has avoided her entire career.
In fact, Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the Georgia state election board (SEB), has shunned media attention and appearances since she was appointed to the board in 2021. Back then, even as Georgia became the focal point of former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and as rightwing media and a nationwide network of election denial activists homed in on the state, Tindall Ghazal kept to herself, quietly carrying out her duties in previously obscure meetings of the board.
But after two days of public board meetings last week in which her Republican counterparts on the board adopted myriad rules at the behest of some of those very election denier activists, Tindall Ghazal’s cable news debut had become unavoidable.
“The makeup of this board has changed from being a board that followed the rule of law and made decisions based on what state and federal law required, and what was best for running elections, to one that is being driven by far-rightwing narratives,” she said.
For more than 16 hours on 6 and 7 August, Tindall Ghazal had sat with her fellow board members, all Republicans, and listened to speakers complain that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump – and propose rules that would prevent that from happening again in November but that Tindall Ghazal said will “cause chaos” in November.
They include a rule that gives local election officials more power to refuse to certify election results, and another that provides more complicated procedures for voters filling out absentee ballots, as well as constant video surveillance at ballot drop box sites. Tindall Ghazal also voted against reopening a case pushed by election deniers that claims results in 2020 in Fulton county were flipped to benefit Joe Biden.
Voting with her in dissent was John Fervier, a Republican and the board chair. Voting for the rules and investigation into Fulton county were a trio of Republicans who were praised by Trump at a recent campaign rally in Atlanta. All three have expressed beliefs in widespread election fraud that even conservative groups have said does not exist.
“It’s an iterative process,” Tindall Ghazal said of the SEB’s descent into election denialism. “The narratives exist already and are deeply embedded in the minds of some of the board members and certainly much of the audience and petitioners, and everything that is done in the meetings is done to perpetuate those narratives.”
Just as Tindall Ghazal’s Republican colleagues voted to reopen the case against Fulton county, Trump was already promoting the decision on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“The Attorney General of Georgia MUST get moving on this,” Trump wrote. “So must Governor Kemp, and the Secretary of State.”
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Despite Trump’s Truth Social post, nothing has changed in the Fulton county case. Following his loss in 2020, the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, ordered an audit of votes in Fulton, the state’s most populous county and home to heavily Democratic Atlanta.
The audit found 345 more votes for Trump than had been counted during the election. But that didn’t change the fact that Biden had received 243,000 more votes than Trump in Fulton county, the audit confirmed.
Still, election deniers like those who have successfully pressured the board in recent years to investigate claims of voter fraud have insisted that the case needs further attention. Last week, they got a major win, when the pro-Trump trio of SEB members Janelle King, Rick Jeffares and Janice Johnston sent the case to the attorney general for a new investigation.
“We take election integrity very seriously, and we will apply the constitution, the law and the facts as we have always done,” a spokesperson for the Georgia attorney general, Chris Carr, a Republican, told the Associated Press.
The SEB also passed rules that Tindall Ghazal said were “far outside our authority as a rule-making body”. Of the rules passed last week, Tindall Ghazal says the most problematic is one that allows for county election board members in Georgia’s 159 counties to refuse to certify results – which courts have largely ruled is a “ministerial” task not up to the discretion of local election officials – if a “reasonable inquiry” can be conducted into allegations of election fraud or errors.
“Reasonable inquiry is about as uncertain a standard as I can think of,” Tindall Ghazal said.
Several Democratic members of the state legislature spoke out against the rule, as did voting rights groups. Former chair of the Fulton county board of elections Cathy Woolard, a Democrat, said that the certification rule will invite scores of lawsuits challenging the ability of county election board members to use their discretion to hold up certification of election results.
“It’s hard for me to imagine the sheer volume of lawsuits that will be filed to challenge the process, the rules, the disregard for the rule of law,” Woolard said.
In voting with Tindall Ghazal against the certification rule, Fervier, a political appointee of the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, previewed the legal fight ahead over certification.
“Please make sure the votes are in the record for any potential future litigation,” Fervier said at the meeting.
At a recent Trump rally in Atlanta, Johnston stood and waved to the crowd as they applauded her, King and Jeffares for “fighting for victory”, as Trump himself put it.
“They’re on fire, they’re doing a great job,” Trump said, naming the three of them but not Fervier.
“Three pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”
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After a second, eight-hour day on the dais on 7 August, Tindall Ghazal said she needed “some protein” before preparing for her first major television interview. Her hair was already sorted: close-cropped in a growing-out buzz from losing her hair to chemotherapy treatments for stage two breast cancer.
Tindall Ghazal received her cancer diagnosis during a meeting of the state election board in October, then had a mastectomy the following month. The episode was “transformative”, she said, proving that she had a strong network of family and friends to support her. Undergoing the procedure and chemo, Tindall Ghazal never missed an election board meeting.
“I don’t do well when I have too much time on my hands, so having the board work kept my mind busy on something that I care deeply about.,” Tindall Ghazal said.
An eighth-generation Georgian and attorney, Tindall Ghazal has monitored elections and peace talks for former president Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center in Syria, Rwanda and Liberia, where she met her husband, Patrick, in 1998. After leaving the Carter Center, Tindall Ghazal became the director of voter protection for the Democratic party of Georgia.
In 2021, Georgia Democrats appointed her to the SEB. At the time, she knew she’d be the only Democrat – but she also had faith that Republicans on the board would work for the benefit of all Georgians. For a time, Tindall Ghazal says, that was the case. Republicans had appointed relative moderates to the board.
Since 2021, three moderate Republican appointees have been replaced by King, Johnston and Jeffares. Johnston has been receptive to complaints and calls for investigations from election denial activists, the Guardian found in March; Jeffares has openly posted about his belief in Trump’s election lies, although he told the Guardian that he believed Trump legitimately lost in Georgia in 2020. King, a conservative media personality with no experience managing elections, is married to Kelvin King, who ran against the former football star Herschel Walker in the Republican primary in 2022 but lost. (Walker went on to lose to Raphael Warnock in the general election.) King hosts a podcast and appears on a political panel at a TV station in Atlanta, but has no experience administering elections, nor does Jeffares.
Leftwing groups like Fair Fight Action, which was founded by the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a Democrat, said the trio of Johnston, King and Jeffares had been chosen for their roles on the board not because of their experience administering elections, but because of their fealty to Trump.
“The state election board has become a Maga government body, with three new members likely chosen not because they have elections experience, but because they’re seen as loyalists who will defer to Trump’s 2020 election fraud lies,” Fair Fight’s communications director, Max Flugrath, said in a statement.
As non-elected officials hearing complaints about elections, ballots and other minutiae of the election process, the SEB was a relatively obscure government body whose meetings have not typically provided scenes of great political theater. But that changed in 2020, when the SEB became the focus of election denial activists’ attempts to prove the election was stolen from Trump. Now the board’s meetings have garnered greater attention from a nationwide network of election deniers, Georgia’s political press, voting rights advocacy groups and left-leaning watchdogs.
Trump’s mention of King, Johnston and Jeffares put an even bigger spotlight on the previously obscure body. Johnston, who attended Trump’s rally and waved at the cheering crowd, did not return a request for comment, but King said that while she did not attend the rally, if she had, she was well within her rights to “attend any Republican event freely as I would expect [Tindall Ghazal] to do the same if she wishes”. Jeffares also didn’t attend the rally, he said. In a lengthy conversation with the Guardian, Jeffares, a Trump supporter, said he believed Trump lost fair and square in Georgia in 2020, but repeatedly expressed belief in possible election fraud taking place in the state, especially in Fulton county.
Jeffares said he wasn’t watching Trump’s rally in Atlanta when the ex-president mentioned his name. He heard about it several days later.
“It makes me mad that we’ve been labeled” as election deniers, Jeffares said. “I didn’t even watch it, but when I heard he mentioned our name, you know my first thought was? Damn, we’re in trouble now.”
But Jeffares’ concern over Trump’s mentioning of the board’s work didn’t stop him from saying he’d be open to a position in a second Trump administration. In a conversation with the Guardian, Jeffares said he proposed himself as a candidate for a regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency. The proposal came during a conversation with a former Trump campaign adviser, Brian Jack, who is running for a US congressional seat in November. Jeffares, who runs a company that deals with sewage and wastewater projects, helped Jack with his campaign, he said.
“I said if y’all can’t figure out who you want to be the EPA director for the south-east, I’d like to have it,” Jeffares said. “That’s all I said.”
With a Democratic ticket marked by surging enthusiasm following the replacement of Biden as candidate with Kamala Harris, Georgia’s status as a swing state has once again become a focal point of both Republican and Democratic campaign strategy. As the state election board continues to implement rules that will affect how Georgia’s elections are run – and is dominated by pro-Trump Republicans who hold the majority – the focus on Tindall Ghazal and her work on the board may be about to get a lot bigger.
“All I know is this is where we are, and I am just trying to stop a disaster,” she said.
• This article was amended on 13 August 2024. Tindall Ghazal met her husband in 1998, not 2018 as was originally reported.
