Georgia group that pushes election misinformation gains influence

New rules in Georgia that some officials fear could inject chaos into November’s election have links to a controversial group that has gained outsized influence in the Peach State.

VoterGA, a nonprofit led by a computer consultant-turned-activist named Garland Favorito who has a long history of promoting debunked conspiracy theories, has made inroads with some election officials in Georgia despite his penchant for pushing election misinformation.

The new rules, proposed by followers of VoterGA and passed by the state’s Republican-held election board, include a requirement that counties hand-count ballots cast at polling places on Election Day. They also include a policy that gives partisan county election boards more leeway to delay certifying election results.

Both those rules have been challenged in court, but with less than a month to go before the election, they’ve added potential confusion into the mechanics of how votes are counted in a key battleground state.

Aside from lobbying for the passage of the rules, Favorito and his organization have relentlessly engaged in activities in recent months to try to prevent the widespread fraud they falsely believe occurred in the 2020 election. They have hosted poll-watcher trainings, messaged officials with dubious warnings about alleged election insecurities and railed against voting machines during meetings with the state board of election. The group also received a financial boost from an organization co-founded by former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The rise of Favorito and his group illustrates the way elections conspiracy theories have moved from fringe to mainstream in Georgia over the last four years, some officials say.

“For many years he was sort of a gadfly that nobody paid attention to, and now he’s the center of attention,” Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for Georgia’s secretary of state, said of Favorito. “People are listening to him… but it’s all about the underlying conspiracy theories that we have proven over and over and over again aren’t real.”

In a phone call with CNN, Favorito argued that he and his group are fighting for election integrity and that some state and local officials have sought to cover-up elections malfeasance in Georgia. As an example, he cited his inability to review ballots from the 2020 election.

“Why have they not shown us the paper ballots? If the system is secure, they would have produced the paper ballots,” Favorito said. “If the public can’t verify what they’re telling us, that’s a threat to every voter.”

State law requires that ballots be kept under seal by counties after the election, according to a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office. “You can’t just give out the ballots to people,” the spokesman said.

Favorito published a book in the early 2000’s rife with debunked theories about the September 11 attacks, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the CIA.

In a different era, Favorito might have remained on the fringes of American politics, but following the 2020 election, staffers in the Georgia Capitol building watched as his influence grew. Concerned, they began distributing copies of his book to senior elected officials around 2022 to draw attention to Favorito’s decadeslong history of peddling misinformation, according to one staffer who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity.

Favorito has also made connections with election officials around Georgia, some in Republican-leaning districts.

Deidre Holden, the director of elections for Paulding County, west of Atlanta, told CNN she believes Favorito has shared helpful information. Emails obtained by CNN through a public records request show Holden has received dozens of messages from Favorito in which he has called certain voting systems used by the state “illegal” and promoted fundraisers for people charged in the sweeping Georgia election subversion case, which he called “a direct attack on the integrity of our elections.”

“I have a good relationship with Garland. He is truly an advocate for his cause,” Holden told CNN when asked about Favorito. “He believes that the voting system is flawed,” added Holden, who later said she does not believe the system is flawed and that her county has not had issues. “Some counties maybe, but I can only speak pertaining to Paulding County.”

Other local officials have kept Favorito apprised of developments.

Emails show David Hancock, a member of Gwinnett County’s board of elections and a VoterGA Facebook group member, forwarded information to Favorito in September related to an effort to oppose the implementation of controversial new state election rules that Favorito has supported.

Some of those statewide rules were proposed to Georgia’s election board by individuals who are also members of VoterGA’s 5,000-member Facebook group and have posted on its page or shared the group’s content.  Those rules include those related to hand-counting ballots and allowing county boards to conduct inquiries before certifying results.

The rules have alarmed some election watchdogs.

“Georgia already has a tried-and-true set of elections checks-and-balances in place for their election administration process, so for us, these changes are not only unnecessary but harmful to the election process because of that timing and potential for disruption and confusion,” Megan Bellamy, vice president of law and policy at the Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit that tracks election policy, told CNN.

Some fear the rules could actually cause errors, such as poll workers miscalculating ballots during hand-counts after working long hours on election day.

“We’re just giving folks a chance to make a mistake with no true benefit to what we’re doing,” said Joseph Kirk, the election supervisor in Bartow County, in northwest Georgia.

In a September letter to the state election board, Favorito lobbied in favor of the new rules. He argued they would “restore public confidence that was lost by the catastrophic failures of the 2020 election.” He also picked a fight with the state’s association of election officials, which had opposed some of the rule changes. Favorito wrote that the association’s leadership had aligned their group “with adversaries attempting to undermine our voting rights.”

The president of that association, W. Travis Doss Jr., wrote in an email obtained by CNN that Favorito had “defamed” his group in that letter. Doss has argued that last-minute rule changes could place undue pressure on election workers.

The state election board, which has burst into the limelight this year with a new Republican majority, approved the rules, though Democrats have sued to block them. A Georgia judge signaled last week that he sees a need to clarify the new certification rule.

Favorito has boasted of his rising influence in the wake of the rules’ approval. In an online interview last week, Favorito touted the “strides we’re making in the legislative branch as well as the executive branch through the state election board.”

When asked about specific points in this story, Favorito said, “It is disgusting that CNN is more interested in attacking me than working to achieve secure and transparent elections for Georgia voters.”

Favorito has been politically active for decades, even before the launch of VoterGA.

In 1998, he helped organize a modest rally in Washington that called for the impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton, according to an article that year by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He wrote a letter to the newspaper that year in which he referenced conspiracy theories about Clinton engaging in “treason and bribery with the Chinese government.”

In the early 2000’s, Favorito released his book, “Our Nation Betrayed: Mutually Assured Destruction for America,” in which he documented what he described as his awakening. He wrote that years prior he had begun losing trust in media and many politicians, which eventually led him to conclude that society’s beliefs about some of the biggest events in modern American history were wrong.

Favorito suggested Israel had foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks and that the truth about the tragedy had been suppressed because of Israel’s influence over the American news media; that the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Robert and the death of JFK Jr. were part of bigger plots and were covered up by the news media; and that Clinton was responsible for numerous suspicious deaths.

The book reads like one man’s journey down a misinformation rabbit hole. The further one goes down such rabbit holes, the more likely they are to encounter conspiracy theories and tropes that are colored by antisemitism and hate.

In outlining Israel’s alleged influence over American media, Favorito cited work from a publishing house run by what the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes as a neo-Nazi group.

In 2006, Favorito co-founded VoterGA and filed a lawsuit with other plaintiffs over the voting machines Georgia had begun using a few years earlier. The suit argued the system was illegal because of a lack of auditable records.

“We have to be able to hold legitimate elections before we can even discuss political issues,” Garland said during a segment on CNN that year about e-voting litigation. A court dismissed Favorito’s suit and the state’s supreme court affirmed that judgement, though Georgia later adopted different voting machines that print paper ballots for added security.

Still, after Donald Trump lost the presidency, VoterGA began peddling claims that “significant evidence of fraud” existed in Georgia’s 2020 election. The group launched an effort to inspect ballots in Fulton County, home to Atlanta. A suit filed by Favorito against the county over the matter remains pending.

A statewide audit by authorities after the election found no widespread fraud. Last year, Georgia’s election board dismissed a yearslong investigation conducted by Georgia secretary of state investigators, along with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and FBI special agents, into alleged misconduct in Fulton County. That investigation concluded “there was no evidence of any type of fraud as alleged.”

Those findings have not slowed Favorito’s group. Following the 2020 race, VoterGA received an infusion of cash. The group pulled in only about $24,000 in 2020 but received about half a million dollars total in 2021 and 2022.

That haul included about $75,000 contributed by The America Project, an organization founded by former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, who has also pushed election misinformation.

Favorito and VoterGA have made connections with others in the national movement that has cast doubt on the 2020 election.

Doug Logan, who was CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the firm that oversaw the problematic review of the 2020 results in Arizona’s Maricopa County, wrote in a 2021 email obtained by American Oversight that he had been communicating with Favorito about practices for inspecting ballots.

VoterGA has also collaborated on poll-watcher trainings this month with the Election Integrity Network, a group organized by attorney Cleta Mitchell, who participated in Trump’s phone call in which he asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes for him to win the state’s electors in 2020.

Last week, Favorito joined Flynn at an event in Georgia in which VoterGA railed against voting machines and called for officials to “un-plug” the state’s elections.

The torrent of misinformation, the rule changes and the vilification of election workers has some in Georgia worried that false theories about another stolen election could proliferate in November.

But that is the point, said Sterling of the secretary of state’s office.

“If Trump wins the state, everything will be roses. If he loses the state by a small amount, which is a possibility, too, then this is just laying the foundation for the conspiracy theories of how the election got stolen this time,” Sterling said.

Sterling, a lifelong Republican, first came to national prominence in 2020 with his public and impassioned debunking of election conspiracy theories pushed by members of his own party who tried to falsely claim Trump did not lose Georgia.

He told CNN he didn’t think four years ago that so many false beliefs about elections would continue to mire his state today. But he isn’t pessimistic.

“I think we’re actually in somewhat of a better spot because now it’s not a surprise,” he said of his and his colleagues’ preparedness for a deluge of disinformation. “We know it’s coming. We can prepare for it.”

CNN’s Sean Clark contributed to this report.