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Tonight, President Trump is expected to give a speech about what he claims is recently declassified intelligence about election interference. He is also expected to talk about potential vulnerabilities with voting machines, which has become a favorite topic lately among people who still think he won the 2020 election and who believe that fraud continues, unchecked.

Lately, as polls show Republicans losing the House in the midterms and uncertain to hold onto the Senate, Trump has gone into an election frenzy. The administration sent letters to election officials threatening to prosecute them if noncitizens who are ineligible to vote cast ballots. It threatened to cut off federal anti-terror funds if states don’t get rid of voting machines that use QR codes. And the president keeps pushing the SAVE America Act, which ups ID requirements for voting. All of this seems designed to lay the groundwork for the argument: If we lose the midterms, it can be only because someone cheated.

Ultimately, the president has little power over elections. The place to truly advance the argument that elections can’t be trusted is in the states, where officials have authority over the building blocks of elections. Luckily for Trump, he has inspired an informal but robust ground operation. The big change since 2020 is that people who mistrust election results are highly active, particularly in swing states. The even bigger change is that some of them have risen to positions of power in those states, where they can affect voter rolls, election machines, and county tallies. Nowhere is this more true than Georgia, where I recently visited to meet some of the election skeptics who are—wait for it—now helping run elections.

On January 28, when the FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia, election hub and took hundreds of boxes of records from the 2020 election, two women who are now crucial to the future of Georgia’s elections watched the action from their cars. We have a contemporaneous record of how they felt that day because Steve Bannon called and asked them. “I’ve worked really hard to see this day coming, and it’s surreal,” Salleigh Grubbs said on the War Room podcast that day. “It’s very surreal. And it’s wonderful.

When the 2020 election happened, Grubbs worked at an industrial-fluid-systems company and read about election fraud on Facebook. Six years later, when she appeared on Bannon’s show, she was in a very different position. Grubbs is now on the State Election Board, whose members suggest rules, look into potential violations of election law, and make sure election officials are doing their jobs.

Grubbs’s appointment last year was historic, for the state and maybe also the country—not because she’s someone who doesn’t believe the results of the 2020 election, but because she was the third person with those beliefs on the five-person board, a majority who almost always voted as a bloc. Georgia is now a state where election deniers can influence who is eligible to vote, how ballots are cast and counted, and whether the vote tallies of millions of Georgians are legitimate.

On Radio Atlantic this week, we travel to Georgia, a once-red state quickly turning purple, where election skeptics are not just inside the building; they have taken over several floors, settled in, and put their feet up on the table, and now they are trying to change all of the locks.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: It’s May 19, primary day in Georgia. This Election Night party at the Renaissance Waverly in suburban Atlanta technically started half an hour ago.

[Music]

Rosin: But something is wrong. There are no balloons, no streamers, no excited fans hugging each other. The plates of antipasto are so untouched they look like a display.

The help—and I am including reporters in that—outnumber invited guests about 5 to 1. The only glimmer of light at this party comes from tiny candles flickering on every table—but given the mood—those little candles are giving “vigil.”

This is a party for Brad Raffensperger, who is currently the secretary of state and now running for Georgia governor—and who, six years ago, had a life-altering phone call with the president.

Donald Trump:  I just wanna find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.

Rosin: And even when Trump amped up the insults—

Trump: They hate the state, they hate the governor, and they hate the secretary of state. I will tell you that right now. And the only people that like you are people that will never vote for you. You know that, Brad, right?

Rosin: Raffensperger stayed calm.

Brad Raffensperger:  Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is: The data you have is wrong.

Rosin: That leaked phone call was one of the last moments when the world—if the world is American democracy propped up by free and fair elections—felt like it might hold steady. An established southern Republican calmly telling the fired-up president, No, I cannot help you find those 11,000-something votes.

Raffensperger:  We have to stand by our numbers. We believe our numbers are right.

Rosin: And No, we do not agree that you won the state of Georgia.

Raffensperger:  We believe that we do have an accurate election.

Rosin: Raffensperger was, to some, a hero of American democracy. He even won reelection as secretary of state two years after that phone call—a vote of confidence from the people of Georgia.

Now, an hour from polls closing, it seems maybe Trump was right, that not a lot of people like him. Early results show that Raffensperger has just over 14 percent of the vote.

I watch the local-TV reporters here awkwardly try and spin this lifeless party into an event worth covering.

Reporter: And they say it’s a very close-knit group and a fun group, they’ve described themselves.

Rosin: Outside this room, Raffensperger has a whole new reputation as a villain, hated by people in Georgia—and all over the country—who think the 2020 election was stolen and that elections are routinely rigged.

Mike Lindell:  These people, Raffensperger I would put him up with the worst, the biggest criminal politician that ever lived.

Paul Harrell:  Brad Raffensperger, or Ratzenberger, or however you say his last name—

Rosin: A few days before the primary, his campaign reported a “credible threat on his life.” A four-page manifesto that included a picture of him with the word boom scrawled over his face.

[Ambient event noise]

Rosin: Now it’s 9:30.

Raffensperger:  Well, good evening, everyone—

Rosin: And Raffensperger shows up at his party with his wife, Tricia. He’s tall, silver-haired, with wire-rim glasses. He moves to the front of this still-way-too-empty room.

Raffensperger:  We put on a good fight. But just remember, great quarterbacks like Tom Brady didn’t win every single game. And so sometimes, it doesn’t go your way. God bless you all. Thank you for coming.

[Applause]

Reporter: Is that it for you then? Is this it?

Raffensperger: Well, you know, life’s been good to us. You know, as long as I have Tricia, I am just doing fine.

Rosin: The defender of democracy has exited the building. Now a different kind of power is ascending.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

When Trump called Raffensperger that day in 2021, he was winging it, cobbling together rumors and stuff he saw on Twitter into a desperate script. Six years on, the operation has been professionalized. Those 2020 rumors from Georgia—that dead people voted, that drop boxes weren’t secure, that voting machines were rigged—have gelled into a semiofficial Republican strategy repeated by party leaders, packaged into legal briefs by groups like America First Legal, a conservative nonprofit founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller that’s challenging election procedures in states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.

And then this week on Truth Social, the president announced that today, at 9 p.m., he is making a special address to the nation. Early reports are that the speech is about “investigations into U.S. elections.”

Right now, polling suggests that Republicans could lose control of the House. And hanging on to the Senate is not guaranteed. In the run-up to November, the goal seems to be to seed the Trump logic from that phone call, but this time in advance: If we lose, it can only be because someone cheated.

Or—and here’s a new one—that the election was never legal to begin with. As an America First Legal brief reads, if the issues they are bringing to court don’t get resolved, quote, “it could threaten the legal validity of the election results themselves.”

In other words, if the issue is not resolved, the election results could be null and void.

Ultimately, though, the federal government has little power over elections. The place to really advance the argument that something is rotten with elections is in the states, where officials have actual authority over the ballots, the drop boxes, the voting machines—the building blocks of elections.

And here is the real, big change since 2020: People who tend to believe elections are rigged, they now have real power. They have since made their way into official positions: in advisory roles, state Senate, even onto election boards.

Which is why we traveled to Georgia during primary week, a once-red state quickly turning purple, where election skeptics are not just inside the building; they have taken over several floors, settled in, put their feet up on the table, and are now trying to change all the locks.

[Music]

Jason Frazier: I can find thousands of irregularities, in almost every election.

Salleigh Grubbs:  Well, there’s always gonna be issues, ’cause you’re always gonna have, illegal voters, apparently.

Sara Tindall Ghazal: They were talking about Satan and demons that had taken hold of this, and I’m like, “You’re talking about me, aren’t you?”

Rosin: Are you currently worried about the security of the midterms, the 2026 elections?

Grubbs: Well, in Georgia, absolutely.

Rosin: The one who’s worried—that’s Salleigh Grubbs. Grubbs grew up in a northwest suburb called Marietta, before the sprawl of Atlanta crept in.

Grubbs: I’m one of those people when I see something wrong, you know, like if somebody’s choking in a restaurant, I’m gonna be the one going over there, you know, to do the Heimlich.

Rosin: The way Grubbs sees herself, she’s always scanning for who’s in trouble, and then she jumps in.

Grubbs: You know, one day I was driving up [Interstate] 985, and it was raining, and there was this guy laying in the emergency lane, just no car, no nothing.

[Music]

Grubbs: And I’m watching all these people drive by, and nobody’s stopping. I pull over, and I’m, like, out there frantically trying to flag people down because the guy looked dead. And it blew my mind that people didn’t stop and pull over.

That’s just kind of always been my mindset: You respond to situations where something seems wrong. And so once I saw that first process of that day, I’m like, “This is not right.”

Rosin: That “process” she witnessed back in November 2020 was a hand recount of every ballot cast in Georgia’s election earlier that month. It was called for by Raffensperger in an attempt to quiet suspicion about the election.

Grubbs had never been that politically engaged. But she was active on Facebook and a frequent listener of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, she told Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf. She’d recently come across an article on a Bannon-approved site about how Democrats were cheating, trying to “flip” Trump’s landslide win in Georgia. She’d also seen videos online of people going to observe the count and being told to stand back—pandemic rules were still in place.

She and her friend Susan Knox had gone down to observe the recount at the local elections center in Cobb County, Georgia. They’d also been told to stand six feet back, which made her suspicious—What were they trying to hide? That day, she was just one in the suspicious crowd.

What happened the next day, November 20, made her really stand out. A friend called her up and said:

Grubbs: So-and-so’s at Jim Miller Park, and there’s a shredding truck there, and they’re shredding stuff.

Rosin: She grabbed her keys, jumped in her car, and raced over to the elections center. Susan Knox posted videos online of what was happening.

 Susan Knox: November the 20, Friday morning.

Grubbs: And sure enough: I pulled up, and there’s a shredding truck, and they’re wheeling out these bins—

Knox: I’m watching all of these ballots being shredded now.

Grubbs: —and sucking it up into the truck and shredding it.

Knox: Un-be-liev-able.

Rosin: Knox and Grubbs tried questioning the driver of the truck, but he ignored them. When he started driving away, they took off after him. They later sat for interviews, and Grubbs started calling it her “Thelma and Louise moment.”

Grubbs: I have to think, If everything was on the up and up, why would he hide his face?  Why wouldn’t he talk to me? And why would he try to lose us? So that was very suspicious.

Rosin: Eventually, the story made its way to Trump himself.

Trump:  They are, uh, burning their ballots, that they are shredding, shredding ballots and removing equipment.

Rosin: —who brought it up in that phone call with Raffensperger.

Trump:  And they supposedly shredded, I think they said 300 pounds of—3,000 pounds of ballots.

Rosin: Election officials in Cobb County said the truck was destroying routine election-office waste, namely empty privacy envelopes used for absentee ballots. Immediately after the 2020 election, the secretary of state’s office did a hand recount, a machine recount of all Georgia ballots, and a signature verification on absentee ballots. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation later joined them in looking into any allegations of fraud, such as ballots scanned twice or unsigned ballots. They found mistakes, but not at a scale large enough to change the results, and no evidence of coordinated fraud. The official conclusion about the shredding truck and the 2020 election in Georgia was that it was just an election.

But five years on, none of this has shifted Grubbs’s impression about what happened that day and, according to her, what keeps happening. I asked her about the truck. She answered in the same way she answers most questions these days about elections.

Grubbs: So when people start lying to cover things up, it’s like, Well, why would they do that? So they must have something to hide if they’re gonna start lying about things.

Rosin: Now, various state officials went over that story and said, That’s our standard procedure. Why doesn’t that answer the question for you?

Grubbs: No, absolutely not.

Rosin: Because?

Grubbs: Because they have no evidence in that, No. 1. No. 2, there were multiple different stories told.

Rosin: Grubbs continued to tell me the same story with the same details she told back then.

Grubbs: We called for the sheriff to come over, and they said, “Well, we don’t have jurisdiction.”

Rosin: Only, the person who talked that way five years ago was a citizen-activist who learned about so-called election fraud on Facebook. The person who is saying that now is in a very different position.

Grubbs: Good morning, everyone.  My name is Salleigh Grubbs, and first and foremost, I would like to thank Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones for his confidence in appointing me to this position. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve on the Georgia State Election Board.

Rosin: Grubbs is one of five members of the Georgia State Election Board. Which are appointed and volunteer positions—there are no term limits. The board’s job is to suggest rules, look into potential violations of election law, and make sure election officials are doing their jobs. And if they find violations, they can conduct investigations and replace county election directors. Not every state has an election board, but among those that do, Georgia’s has uniquely broad powers. Traditionally, the board works together with the secretary of state’s office to oversee the elections process, although, with Brad Raffensperger in charge, it’s not so amicable these days.

[Music]

Rosin: Grubbs’s appointment last year was historic, for the state and maybe also the country—not because she’s someone who doesn’t believe the results of the 2020 election now sitting on the Georgia State Election Board, but because she was the third person with those beliefs on a five-person board, a majority that almost always voted as a bloc. Georgia has become a state where election skeptics can influence who is eligible to vote, how ballots are cast and counted, and whether any county’s voting tallies are legit.

Although, Grubbs herself told me she doesn’t see her new status as that big of a deal.

Rosin: It’s funny because you don’t trust the government, but you’re in government now.

Grubbs: Well, I’m a volunteer, and I’m doing it because I love my state, my community, and my country. And I’m not in government per se. It’s not like I’m in government. Like, I’m not a bureaucrat.

[Music ends]

Tindall Ghazal:   Election work is incredibly granular. And I just, my brain really likes that kind of work. And it, I’m a nerd.

Rosin: This is Sara Tindall Ghazal. She’s a lawyer and the only Democrat on the State Election Board. Tindall Ghazal started her career monitoring elections in conflict zones around the world, like Liberia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria. In 2021, she was appointed by the Georgia Democratic Party to sit on the board.

Tindall Ghazal: So it was all a very granular, boring, tedious kind of work.

Rosin: Back then, the board was mostly Republican, mostly lawyers, and the atmosphere was collegial. They debated statutes, rule changes, whether the rule of lenity should apply in this case or that case (I don’t know what it means either; you can ask a lawyer friend). Most decisions were unanimous.

Rosin: What’s the first memory you have of that atmosphere changing? The very first seed of it.

Tindall Ghazal: You mean on the board? It was very specific. The GOP made a decision to have a new board member. And the first major statement that this board member made—

Dr. Janice Johnston: I call these people “vote predators.” They prey on the weak.

Tindall Ghazal: She talked about there being election predators out there, somehow stealing votes or committing fraud.

Johnston: Vulnerable voters must be protected, and vote predators should be hunted down and stopped.

Rosin: That new board member was Janice Johnston, who was appointed in 2022 by the state’s Republican Party. A retired ob-gyn who was the first on the State Election Board to start talking about widespread fraud. And then, a couple of years later, came Janelle King, a local media personality and frequent Fox News commentator.

Janelle King:  Duplicate ballots, counts not adding up, pulling ballots from stacks and creating new batches. This is not okay.

Rosin: And then, finally, a year later, No. 3. Salleigh Grubbs:

Grubbs:  This is reaching the level of insanity in the state of Georgia. And this is really a huge problem, and I appreciate you—

Rosin: In the beginning, probably it still felt a little fringe to you.

Tindall Ghazal: Oh, extremely fringe. Yeah, absolutely.

Rosin: What does it feel like now?

Tindall Ghazal: (Exhales.) Now I feel like I’m the fringe.

[Music]

Rosin: What used to be fringe is everywhere, and not just in Georgia. As the midterms get ever closer, Trump has been talking about cheating in elections more and more. And when we were on the ground in Atlanta in May, we could see the suspicion machine in action. Another version of the shredding truck being born, just in time for primary day.

Steve Bannon:  Breaking news. Georgia’s 2026 election results will be aggregated on Election Night by the secretary of state from a secret emergency bunker, which is off-limits to candidates, the public, and even to the State Election Board, which has requested access.

Rosin: That is Steve Bannon, who closely tracks on his podcast all things election-related, with a particular focus on Georgia. The scandal of the week when we were there involved the secret emergency bunker.

It’s hard to explain these things without making them seem bigger than they are, but this one goes something like this: There is a room where the secretary of state receives the official vote tallies from all the counties. They add them up and post them online.

Bannon: Hang on for a second. We’re gonna go to break. Salleigh Grubbs is with us.

Rosin: Grubbs and the other election skeptics on the State Election Board—have asked for access to the room and been denied.

Grubbs: If you remember, Steve, our secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger said, you know, Georgia’s had the cleanest elections in the country and, you know, all the things are fine. There’s nothing to see here. Well, my question is: If there’s nothing to see, if there’s no issue, then why are you trying to keep us out? Why can’t we be there if the elections are perfect?

Rosin: For Grubbs, a closed door is never just a closed door. It means something is being deliberately hidden from view. I asked her about the bunker a few weeks later when we talked.

Rosin: What happens there—do we understand this correctly?—is that the state tallies come in. It’s not a ballot-counting thing. It’s just that on computer screens, all the state tallies come in. Is that what the room is?

Grubbs: Well, I don’t know, ’cause I’ve never been there.

Rosin: Do you have any guesses about why they don’t want you there? Like, is it a tiny room? Does it have to do with practicality?

Grubbs: No, because they, I mean, they have caterers that go, they have press that goes, they have vendors that go. So I really have no clue.

Rosin: The press is not allowed in, by the way—only upstairs in a press room. They do have food brought in because they are working, like, 12 hours straight on Election Night.

But again, I am being drawn into the details. The bunker is not real. I mean, it is a real physical space known as the Election Night Reporting Room. A spokesperson for the secretary of state said that having lots of additional people there jeopardizes the process because it’s detailed work that requires a lot of focus. And I got the sense they specifically did not trust these additional people—as one person from the secretary of state’s office told us on background—“This is serious work, and these are not serious people.” A judge later ruled the secretary of state did not have to allow access to Grubbs and the other board members.

The Election Night Reporting Room is not open for anyone to walk into, but it’s not secret the way things are secret in a covert-ops thriller. Although, with words like emergency and bunker—the skeptics have made routine election work seem like a covert-ops thriller. Like, in the movie version, the person playing Raffensperger might be fudging results while eating his catered lunch.

Rosin: I mean, the other issue is that when you said, “What’s the problem with people watching?” Of course, like, when you put it that way, there’s no problem. However, there were actual problems. Like, election workers were threatened by people who didn’t believe the election results. Brad Raffensperger, whatever else you think he’s done, have received huge numbers of death threats.

Grubbs: Yeah, so have I. I have had to have gun patrol put on my house, from a death threat.

Rosin: Maybe the point is that the rhetoric has a cost. Like, using words like bunker or using words like they’re secret—

Grubbs: I didn’t come up with that.

Rosin: But it does make people mad before there’s evidence of wrongdoing. There’s suspicion of wrongdoing, and it’s fine to ask a lot of questions, but the way that suspicion comes out on podcasts or in certain kind of language then kinda whips up a fervor, which you’ll see on X, and then leads to, you know, people showing up and yelling at election workers and disrupting what has previously been a fairly, you know, routine process.

Grubbs: So you think it’s totally okay to do it behind closed doors with no accountability because someone might threaten someone?

Rosin:  No, I think it’s with accountability. There’s many people in the room—

Grubbs: Okay, who are the people?

Rosin: This is how my conversation went with Grubbs. There was always another door of suspicion to open. The idea that one could be too suspicious, that suspicion itself could be a problem, just never really landed.

In the constant stream of skepticism, it’s hard to pick out one thing that could really upend an election.

[Music]

Rosin: One good candidate might be the skeptics’ obsession with election technology and, specifically, QR codes.

Johnston:  QR codes are not constitutional. They’re not compliant with law as a voter-verifiable ballot.

Grubbs:  I’ve seen it from people on the right, on the left, in the middle that have no faith and confidence in the QR code.

King:  The utilization of QR codes for ballot tabulation faces severe legal uncertainty.

Rosin: The QR Codes are an innovation of a company that was called Dominion Voting Systems. You may remember that name from the 2020 elections. Voters cast ballots by selecting their candidates on a touch screen, and the machine prints out a piece of paper with a QR code on it. Then that QR code is scanned as an official ballot.

For election officials, this is a more accurate way to record votes. The skeptics, however, do not like that you can’t verify your vote with your own eyes. And they’ve argued that the machines are easily hackable. Dominion, now called Liberty Vote, has defended its technology in court and has repeatedly insisted that its machines are secure and that they did not alter or delete votes in 2020 as some people claimed.

But the issue keeps coming up—in Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Ohio. And reportedly, it’s a theme of the president’s speech tonight. And in Georgia, the skeptics succeeded in writing it into law.

In 2024, the state legislature passed a law saying Georgia had to dispense with QR codes by July of this year. State lawmakers argued over what exactly they should replace their system with, and over the astronomical cost of doing that. Time passed, and then election officials said they wouldn’t have time to train poll workers on any new system. So instead, legislators kicked the can down the road, extending the deadline to 2028, a red flag for election skeptics.

 Rosin: Are you currently worried about the security of the midterms, the 2026 elections?

Grubbs: Well, in Georgia, absolutely. We are still using these God-forsaken ballot-marking devices, which we don’t need. We shouldn’t be voting by QR code. And yeah, I think we have significant issues.

Rosin: Despite no evidence of fraud in 2020, QR-code paranoia keeps metastasizing. Last week, the Trump administration said all states had to transition to paper ballots or they would lose tens of millions of dollars of federal anti-terrorism funds.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, what it’s like to be an American voter in a purple place where people who don’t trust election results are running elections.

[Break]

Rosin:  We are recording this for a podcast and an article in The Atlantic. Is that okay?

John Egbert: Yes.

Rosin: Okay, great. What is your name?

Egbert: It’s John Egbert.

Rosin: And what do you do?

Egbert: I’m a police sergeant

Rosin: To be honest, I already knew what John Egbert did, because he’s easy to find online .

[Cheesy cop-drama music]

Egbert, on The First 48: So what do y’all think?

Captain Michael O’Connor, on The First 48:  Just knock on the door and hope for the best, which I don’t think is a great idea.

Rosin: He appeared on a show called The First 48, which followed around Atlanta homicide detectives doing their homicide-detective work.

The First 48 voiceover: For homicide detectives, the clock starts ticking the moment they are called.

[Cheesy cop drama music]

Rosin: He first joined the police department in 1999. His unit has investigated gang activity, murders, abductions. He once saved a puppy from a storm drain.

This version of Egbert was hard to conjure now, as we stepped over Amazon packages and a watering can into his living room, which seemed to be mostly decorated with board games and musical instruments. But we weren’t here to talk true crime anyway.

Egbert: I received a notice in the mail from Fulton County that my status as a valid voter was being challenged by someone.

Rosin: Basically, in 2023 the county sent Egbert a note saying that Egbert was going to be removed from the voter rolls if he didn’t act quickly. And he found this odd. He and his wife had been voting at the same polling location for years. He started asking around—he’s an investigator after all—and discovered that his neighbors had also gotten a letter challenging their status as valid voters. He did some more digging and found out a clerical error had been made—he lives on a street with a similar name to a major road in the city. But that was not the end of the story. The county had not flagged the error or challenged his right to vote. It was someone else.

[Music]

Egbert: I’m Sergeant John Egbert. I’m here as a Fulton County resident. I was challenged by Jason Frazier.

Rosin: Egbert and dozens of other people had to show up at a hearing to defend their right to vote. And as far as “innocent until proven guilty” goes, this challenge to his rights did not meet his smell test.

Egbert: The only reason we’re still here is because this is a bad-faith challenge. This man is trying to suppress votes. And he’s happy to suppress as many as he can for any reason he can. So thank you. That’s all I have.

Rosin: What prompted you to actually go?

Egbert: I just took such umbrage at it. I lived here, you know, at the—I can’t remember how long I had lived here at the time. I had lived in this particular spot since 2011, so it was probably, lived here for 13 or 14 years. I worked for the police department here, so not only was I angry at being victimized, but I felt that it would be particularly poignant if I got up to speak as a police officer, a member of the, you know, the law-and-order crowd. So I wanted them to hear how it was affecting me.

Rosin: Do you remember anything about the guy who challenged you?

Egbert: No, not really. He was from somewhere in the suburbs. I don’t remember where. But I don’t know anything else

Rosin: Did you feel any animosity towards him?

Egbert: Yeah, quite a bit. He’s the one who accused me, and he’s the one who was trying to keep me from voting. And I feel that he knew he was doing it not because he thought I was fraudulently voting, but because he was literally trying to stop as many people from voting in Fulton County as possible.

[Music ends]

Frazier: So yeah, we’re standing outside of a mailbox store. Essentially, it’s just a pack-and-ship location, and they’ve got a bunch of little boxes that you can get your mail delivered if you travel a lot or just wanna have some privacy.

Rosin: This is Jason Frazier, the guy who challenged Egbert’s right to vote, trained as a mechanical engineer, now semi-retired. He carries a leather folio full of documents—printouts of voter rolls, letters from the election board, whatever backs up his cause. The mailbox store where we met him is in a strip mall in a suburb called Sandy Springs: majority white, historically Republican, and still technically in Fulton County. It’s close to where Frazier lives, but very far, both geographically and spiritually, from the heart of Atlanta, a more racially diverse and solidly Democratic city.

Rosin:  This place we’re looking at, I mean, to me, it’s just a FedEx, DHL, UPS.

Frazier: Right.

Rosin: I’ve seen a million of them. Why is this relevant to your life, this place?

Frazier: Yes, yes. This is relevant because in the state of Georgia, you have to register to vote where you live. You can have your mailing address be somewhere else. And the reason that’s important is because, let’s say—we’re in Sandy Springs right now—let’s say we have a mayor race in Sandy Springs and it’s very close. I could have all of my friends from Roswell get the P.O. Box here, which is a neighboring town, and then we could easily win a race, and that’d be a whole lot cheaper than flyers or mailers or even radio.

Rosin: It is in fact not legal to register to vote at a P.O. Box, although sometimes people do it anyway, maybe because they don’t know that. Or maybe it’s their most reliable address. Or they have a specific circumstance—say, they are a judge or a survivor of domestic abuse who has some safety reason to keep their home address secret.

To be clear, Frazier has not uncovered any evidence of an intentional plot to subvert the Sandy Springs mayor race. He’s just saying it could happen. He says the Fulton County voter rolls are littered with people who are deceased, whose names are incorrect, whose addresses are wrong, whose birth years are impossible, and with people who are listed as living at P.O. Boxes like this one in Sandy Springs—all of which, to him, represent bad things that could happen. Here’s how he does his work:

Frazier: Every state’s a little bit different, but in Georgia, you can buy the entire state voter roll for $485 directly from the secretary of state’s office.

I challenged several people that, quote-unquote, “lived” in these little boxes in 2022, or maybe it was 2023, and they accepted the challenge, Fulton County admitting that nobody can fit in that little box, so they can’t be registered here.

Rosin: Frazier takes the voter roll he bought from the secretary of state and then sorts it by county and then by address. If he sees, say, 60 people at one address, he looks it up and voilà. Sometimes it’s a mailbox store, or maybe he finds someone like Egbert, with errors in his residential address. He does this by hand in Microsoft Excel and then alerts Fulton County.

By his own estimate, Frazier has made over 15,000 challenges. And he’s not alone. He’s part of a movement in Georgia that has filed more than 100,000 voter challenges since 2020, the vast majority of which—according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution—have been dismissed.

For every voter Frazier challenges, there’s a letter from the county, much like the one Egbert received back in 2023: Act now to disprove the challenge, or be removed from the voter rolls.

Frazier says he’s not trying to disenfranchise anyone. That he didn’t intend for John Egbert to have to defend his own right to vote. He told us several times that he just wants the Fulton County voter rolls to be clean—clean voter rolls and clean elections.

Rosin: I think in a pure sense everyone would agree, if I did a poll and I said, “Do you want clean elections?” 99 percent of people would say yes.

Frazier: I hope so.

Rosin: Unless they had nefarious purposes.

Frazier: Yes.

Rosin: So as a pure goal, that’s obviously a very defensible one. But do you see a cost to what you’re doing? Like, there is another side of the scale.

Frazier: Well there’s a cost to making it perfect. Absolutely, that would be incredibly costly, but there’s a cost in not doing it.

Rosin: I’m asking these questions because if math were the only consideration, that would be one thing, but there are people involved, and there’s a history of disenfranchisement—

Frazier: Oh, sure.

Rosin: —particularly in the South. I mean, when I looked at this list of people at this FedEx box—

Frazier: Yeah.

Rosin: the vast majority are Black.

Frazier: Okay.

Rosin: And so that taps into—just on your list.

Frazier: Sure, sure.

Rosin: So you can imagine someone would look at that and think, This feels like a way of trying to disenfranchise people whose lives are maybe not as stable as other people’s lives who can just have an address at a house somewhere and live at that address. I can’t accuse you of that, because, like you, I don’t have any evidence of your intentions, but I could put that pattern together.

Frazier: Yeah. And I don’t look at whether you’re male, female, if you voted Democrat, Republican. That’s not a concern of mine. And just like you had mentioned, if this is, you know, if there are more African Americans at this location, well, that might be more Black folks that live in Atlanta, but they’re voting in Sandy Springs for the wrong mayor and city council. They really wanted to vote for the Atlanta mayor. They really need to be registered where they live in Atlanta so they can make sure that they’re voting for the right people.

Rosin: Frazier has done all of this work purely as a volunteer. That’s his own $485 he’s spending on voter rolls. But as time went on, he aspired to a more official status.

[Music]

Rosin: In 2023, the Republican Party in Fulton County nominated Frazier to the county’s board of elections. It’s like the county version of the state board that Salleigh Grubbs sits on. But the Democratic majority on the county board has denied Frazier that chance—twice.

One Democrat who voted against Frazier’s appointment multiple times described him as having a, quote, “egregious record of voter suppression.” But in a world where the State Election Board is dominated by skeptics, Frazier found another way in.

Rosin: Do you have any relationship with the State Election Board?

Frazier: Funny you ask. So as of Monday, I just got hired as a part-time investigator with the State Election Board. Yesterday was orientation and getting the laptop, and don’t have the cellphone yet, but it’s coming. Got the badge.

Rosin: What does that say? “Jason Frazier state government, temporary.” Nice. Nice.

Rosin: Part-time investigator.

Frazier is one of two employed by the State Election Board. He’s tasked with looking into any complaints about people violating election rules. He had only just gotten the badge, but he was already putting it to use. Kind of.

On primary night, Frazier showed up to the Fulton County election hub with his badge clipped on and visible, though he claims he was just there as a guy observing. Producer Rosie Hughes talked to him:

Frazier:   Right now, I’ll be an individual. I was going to come here and look at some things.  People I’m talking to are telling me they’ve seen issues. But again, that’s in my personal capacity. I haven’t truly looked at things to understand how bad or good things were.

Rosin: In Georgia—especially Fulton County since 2020—there are often observers. Frazier was somewhere between civilian watchdog and official investigator.

Frazier: So  a lot of times, it’s good to look at the closing tapes to see what the counts are. It’s good to look at the opening tapes to make sure that there were zero votes on the machines before they started. It’s good to see what’s going on, if there are hiccups.  It’s just good to keep your finger on the pulse and see what’s going on. You just really never know what you’re gonna stumble into.

[Scene change]

Sherri Allen:  He was asking for documents that we would use for precertification before precertification. He was asking for all of those on Election Night.

Rosin: This is Sherri Allen, a Sandy Springs attorney who’s the chair of the Fulton County election board. Frazier is well known to the Fulton County board from his tens of thousands of challenges and attempts to join the board. Here is how she describes Frazier’s presence at the election hub that night.

Allen: At 11:02 is when the polling place was closing. During that same time, we were being asked while we were trying to collect everything from elections, we’re in the middle of trying to do all of that, and we’re being asked for documents, for all kinds of things that I think that you have to let the department and the county do their work.

There wasn’t anyone saying anything was wrong. They were just interfering, and I think that’s disruptive to ask for things while we are still trying to conduct an election.

We don’t have a large enough staff to try to have someone to just answer their questions, while at the same time, we’re focused on trying to make sure that voters can find out that night what the tally is and what it looks like.

We don’t have any problem with providing things later. You know, send us a request, all that you want. We’ll supply that. But on Election Night, let us finish doing the work.

Rosin: After all the scrutiny following the 2020 election, after all of Frazier’s complaints, Fulton County made several changes. The entire election board has turned over, and a new elections director is in charge. They also hired 16 people whose full-time job is to comb through voter rolls and make sure they are accurate. Frazier, however, doesn’t seem satisfied with that.

Frazier’s view is that it should all be automated and simple. Why, for example, couldn’t Fulton County just input commercial addresses—like the mailbox store—and automatically reject them as voter addresses? I ran that idea by Allen.

Allen: That would be very unfair if all commercial addresses are blocked, because the issue is not that you cannot use a commercial address; it just has to be that your commercial address is, quote-unquote—and the law doesn’t say this, but, quote-unquote—“where you lay your head at night.”

Let’s say I park my car in a lot, and I sleep there every night. Does that mean that I cannot use the location of where I’m sleeping every night as my address if that’s where I’m living?

Rosin: Okay, so this accounts for people who lay their heads in places that don’t immediately come to mind when you think “home”—say, the back room of a business, which is technically a commercial address, a shelter of some kind, even a parking lot.

Still, I asked again, from Frazier’s perspective: Can’t this all be done quickly and efficiently? Why can’t people who don’t belong on the voter rolls be automatically kicked off?

Allen: I think you should be very careful. And the reason I think you should be careful: Think about someone who’s unhoused and registered, let’s say, at a shelter. Well, when you’re trying to feed yourself and figure out a place to lay your head, you may not have reported to that shelter for a week or two. Well, if you have a letter there and then somehow you miss it, and you also have to try to get to Fairburn, where you don’t have bus access, to have a challenge hearing to make sure you maintain your right to vote, I think we should be very careful how all of that is handled. And poverty shouldn’t determine whether or not you should get to vote.

Rosin: If you are looking for proof of whether these local officials could have any real impact, whether a volunteer from Marietta plus an ob-gyn could spark a whole new way to unsettle the elections process, you would find it on January 28.

The day the FBI raided the Fulton County election hub, taking hundreds of boxes of records from the 2020 election. Members of the State Election Board had sent multiple subpoenas to the county requesting access to those records. Grubbs and Janice Johnston, the ob-gyn, watched the raid from their cars. Steve Bannon called, and Johnston told him the board’s fight in court was, quote, “maybe a significant part of the reason the FBI is here.” Grubbs also appeared on Bannon’s show that day, and she said something striking right as Bannon was teeing up to a commercial break.

Bannon: Salleigh we’ve had on the show many times over the years.

 Why does it take six years to get to where we are today? Why are these ballots kind of the holy grail about the 2020 election, ma’am?

Grubbs: Well, you know, Steve, it’s like I keep saying, is: If you have nothing to hide, you hide nothing.

And it has been a very long journey. And I don’t know whether you know it or not, but I’m now also on the State Election Board as well as being first vice chair of the Georgia GOP. So as you know, I’ve worked really hard to see this day coming and it’s surreal. It’s very surreal. And it’s wonderful.

Bannon: So I just want to make sure. We’re gonna go to break.

Rosin: It’s been almost six months since the FBI took those records, and so far, nothing. No announcement of a smoking gun or even a hint of a suggestion of where they might find one.

Salleigh Grubbs was happy for that moment she talked to Bannon, but now heading into the midterms, she and the skeptics are back at peak worry, about voter rolls and QR codes and bunkers and a whole host of other things.

Could any of what they’re worried about plausibly add up to fraud? After all, those QR-code voting machines are not perfect, and there was bipartisan support in Georgia for adopting a more old-fashioned pen-and-paper system.

Okay. So in 2024, experts at one D.C.-based think tank compiled a comprehensive list of instances of election fraud going back decades. The think tank came up with plenty of examples. But the total numbers represented a miniscule percentage of voters. For example, in Arizona—a state facing several lawsuits over alleged fraud—the list, which went back 25 years, came up with 36 instances of fraudulent ballots. The percentage that represents is—lemme see if I can get this right—.0000845 percent, and no election outcome was altered as a result. That think tank, by the way, was the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. authors of Project 2025.

It’s hard to speak to the motives of individual citizens who believe that fraud is ever present, easier to speak to the motives of officials in the Trump administration. Just this month, the administration has gone into an election frenzy. They sent letters to election officials threatening to prosecute them if noncitizens vote—which they legally cannot anyway. They threatened to cut off funds if states didn’t get rid of QR codes. They newly assigned 260 FBI analysts to do “records checks” on the 2020 ballots taken from Fulton County. Their deadline, by the way, is this Friday.

Of course, the president’s speech tonight reportedly about election interference and the potential vulnerabilities of voting machines, which could be yet another way to signal to voters: Don’t trust the results.

And the president keeps pushing the SAVE America Act, which ups ID the requirements for voting, the goal of all of this being—we’ll just let him say it:

Trump: But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do, and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years. We do that, we’re not gonna lose an election for 100 years.

[Music]

Rosin: By the way, Egbert, the police sergeant we talked to, got his voting rights back. It’s weird to even say that sentence, as if it’s an accomplishment. An American citizen taking a day off work to travel to a board hearing and argue to get back a fundamental right he never should have lost in the first place.

Voter rolls are not a data-validation challenge. They are lists of people. When Stephen Miller’s group files a brief declaring a voter list or a drop box or a machine invalid, if they one day succeed in declaring a state’s election results null and void—those are people whose votes are being invalidated, American citizens who may lay their heads in a parking lot or a suburban bedroom, but who all have exactly the same right to vote.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Theo Balcomb. Sam Fentress fact-checked. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists—like Tolu Olorunnipa and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez—two staff writers who do excellent reporting and writing on elections and democracy—when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.