CNN
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Pop into a meeting of the Board of Elections in Spalding County, Georgia, and it may appear like any other eye-glazing gathering of bureaucrats being led by a no-nonsense chair.
“We hang our political hats at the door when we come in and do the people’s work,” Board Chairman Ben Johnson said at one meeting earlier this year. “There ain’t no room for politics in elections.”
But Johnson’s stated beliefs don’t appear to be so easily left at the door. An election-conspiracy believer, Johnson has authored a social media post to “fellow insurrectionists” and proclaimed that Joe Biden “is an illegitimate president.”
On social media, he has called for banning electronic voting machines, early voting and mail-in voting; echoed debunked claims about “ballot trafficking;” and proudly posted a photo with MyPillow founder and election conspiracist Mike Lindell.
Among other actions since taking office, Johnson has voted not to renew the county’s maintenance contract with Dominion Voting Systems – a frequent target of election conspiracy theories. As chairman, Johnson will have charge of the county board’s certification of the November midterm results – and his actions and continuing claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent have raised concerns over how he and the Republican-controlled board will handle the upcoming election.
Johnson is far from the only MAGA conspiracist inside the election process in a key battleground state. In Colorado, Michigan, Nevada and elsewhere, elections officials already have seen MAGA-leaning insiders allow election equipment to be breached, spread baseless fears about voting machine and election security, or take other actions that could stoke voter distrust.
“The foxes are absolutely inside the henhouses,” Barb Byrum, clerk of Michigan’s Ingham County, told CNN.
To be sure, election regulations, long-standing rules on auditing and testing of machines, and other layers of oversight offer safeguards for the electoral process.
However, actions by insiders that cast doubt on the fairness of that process – intentionally or not – “could have an impact on whether people perceive the outcome of an election to be real or fake, which is what we…
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