Pro-Trump Georgia Officials Plotted to Swipe Voting Data. We Caught Them
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Weeks before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Donald Trump’s legal team went to Georgia in a last-ditch effort to find election fraud. Led by lawyer Sidney Powell, the team copied data from voting machines in Coffee County. The effort represented a new front in the MAGA assault on elections, with Trump’s team colluding with friendly local election officials to pull sensitive data out of election equipment. That search has landed Trump’s team in court, with groups charging Powell and company of potentially compromising sensitive data in a failed, partisan effort to overturn the 2020 election. The illegal data breach in Coffee County is now being investigated by a district attorney looking into Republican attempts to overturn the election here. The Washington Post and CNN, among others, have reported extensively on the developments in Coffee County, which come with an undercurrent of the unknown about what exactly the purpose was for the illegal data breach.
But it turns out, Coffee County wasn’t the only Georgia county where pro-Trump forces were working to swipe election data in search of nonexistent fraud. And in Spalding County, it wasn’t Trump’s team leading the effort — it was the election officials themselves.
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Emails and contracts obtained by Rolling Stone reveal that Spalding County election officials hatched a plan to illegally obtain data from voting machines. A pair of pro-Trump members of the county election board, alongside the election supervisor, plotted to hire a third-party tech firm to copy data from voting machines, the election server, and even iPhones used by election staff. The plotted data swipe was an effort to prove Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in Georgia, and in Spalding County, the trio wanted to do it all with up to $10,000 in taxpayer dollars.
The trio aborted their plot after Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office stepped in to warn them it was illegal, but even their initial foray has drawn the attention of state-level officials. Rolling Stone has learned that the Georgia State Election Board has launched an investigation into the Spalding County officials’ actions.
“My head is spinning,” says Mike Hassinger, a representative for Raffensperger’s office. “I can see no justification, legal or otherwise, for anyone to have a third party come in and access election equipment. It sounds like they tried to commit a crime.”
The episode reveals just how deep Trump’s voter-fraud lies have penetrated the Republican Party, with even local officials tasked with election security perverting their duty to try to find voter fraud that doesn’t exist. And it reveals a danger ahead, as some of the same officials currently attempting to unwind Georgia’s 2020 election will still be in place when voters head to the polls next month — and also when Trump is likely to be back on the ballot in 2024.
IN AUGUST 2021, a pair of Spalding County officials were concerned about an upcoming Georgia effort to verify that their election system was in good order after the board discovered security issues on county equipment. A representative sent by Secretary of State Raffensperger was coming to Spalding County to test voting machines by running a simulated election. Raffensperger is a Republican, but Spalding’s election officials didn’t fully trust the state office — and they started hatching a plot of their own.
Election supervisor Kim Slaughter emailed the county attorney to ask if the board could even allow the secretary of state’s office access the equipment. “Can we legally proceed with this action?” Slaughter asked county attorney Stephanie Windham in an email from August 16, 2021.
Slaughter was joined by Ben Johnson and Roy McClain, members of the election board who, at the time, were recent additions to the board, put there by the local Republican Party. The board has administrative power over elections, handling everything from the number of voting precincts and their staff to adjudicating ballots and securing voting machines and other election equipment.
Johnson, McClain, and Slaughter did not respond to requests for comment. In emails, Slaughter claimed the effort was made on behalf of the voters of Spalding County, while Johnson, McClain and Windham claimed the illegal data breach was necessary due to a security issue involving election equipment and pending election lawsuits. The secretary of state’s office rejected both of those as a legal rationale.
The board was revamped in early 2021, shortly after a new law specific to Spalding County was passed that required board members and the election supervisor to live in the county. The law resulted in the removal of the election supervisor, a Democrat, and one Democratic board member. Two other Democrats on the board resigned in in protest of the law, also citing harassment from Trump supporters. In total, the five-member board went from a three-two Democrat-Republican split to three Republicans and two Democrats.
That includes Johnson, who posts frequently about a wide array of election and far-right conspiracy theories, including QAnon. “Election fraud is not a myth,” Johnson tweeted last February, using a hashtag that referenced a conspiracy theory about Dominion Voting Machines, which Spalding and every county in Georgia used to conduct elections. (Johnson and McClain are now the subject of an ethics complaint over a July 2021 visit to a room containing election equipment during which they were not accompanied by Democrat board members, as required by law.)
In the run-up to the state review, Johnson and McClain exchanged emails doubting Raffensperger’s office. “Letting someone do a mock election or anything similar to that is going to be questioned,” McClain wrote in an August 16, 2021, email to Johnson and other staff. “Optics!”
Ahead of the secretary of state’s visit to recertify the equipment, the pair wanted a third party to make a “forensic copy” of all data held on the county’s election equipment. According to a pair of proposed contracts obtained by Rolling Stone, this included “on-site collection” of data from the election-management server, as well as data from all 18 voting precincts in the county, poll pads, and iPhones used by election office staff. The company would then provide the data on an “encrypted hard drive” along with a report documenting everything it collected. The cost: between $5,000 and $10,000, to be paid for by Spalding County taxpayers.
Johnson and McClain used the “security issue” of logged-in devices as rationale for the illegal data breach when explaining their plans to Democratic colleagues. They, and later the county attorney, also cited a “litigation hold” as a reason that the illegal breach was necessary — the result of a pair of election-related lawsuits that named Spalding County. Neither of those reasons were legal, however, as explained by the secretary of state’s office.
To sell the illegal scheme to their Democratic colleagues, Johnson came up with a seemingly harmless comparison. “It’s basically like taking pictures of a car before you rent it and noting any damage,” Johnson wrote to skeptical Democratic board members on Aug. 16.
For their “photographer,” the two made a fateful choice: SullivanStrickler. The Atlanta-based tech firm is the same one Powell tapped in Coffee County for their data-copying operation. There, the firm’s actions are under investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is probing Trump-led Republican efforts to bolster false claims of voter fraud in an attempt to overturn the election. SullivanStrickler has not responded to questions from Rolling Stone about its operations in Spalding County and elsewhere.
On Aug. 17, SullivanStrickler sent over a pair of contracts that detailed the work it would perform. That work included copying unidentified data from iPhones used by elections office staff, as well as the “forensic copy” of election equipment described by Johnson and McClain.
“Unless anyone else has any concerns we need to move forward quickly,” Johnson said in an email that same day to his fellow board members. Johnson wanted to move forward with the contract to not “hold up” Slaughter, who was negotiating with the secretary of state’s office on a date to travel to Spalding County and recertify election equipment.
As it turns out, others did have concerns about Johnson’s plans for an election board to use taxpayer dollars to hire a third-party tech firm to make copies of sensitive voting data. It’s not clear exactly how or when, but, at some point, Raffensperger’s office learned of the board’s plans to hire SullivanStrickler and quickly stepped in to squash the operation.
“Do NOT allow an IT company to image or conduct any activity on voting equipment,” an office staffer told Slaughter on Aug. 18. “That is NOT allowed.”
Slaughter defended the attempted hiring of SullivanStrickler, saying the board “had only good and proper intentions for the voters of Spalding County when considering” the plan. Johnson then asked if the data breach would be permissible if a representative of the secretary of state was present. But it seems the admonition was enough to short-circuit the attempt.
After discovering the emails, Rolling Stone sought comment from the State Election Board, a bipartisan body — separate from Raffensperger’s office — with investigative power over elections and voting. The board says it was not aware that SullivanStrickler was at work anywhere other than Coffee County, and it had no idea about Spalding County’s attempted hiring of the firm. As a result of the emails and contracts obtained by Rolling Stone, the board is now investigating officials in Spalding County and their plan to illegally breach election equipment.
“Voting is a cornerstone of our democracy and the State Election Board is committed to protecting the integrity of our voting system,” the board writes in a statement to Rolling Stone. “The Board will investigate and respond to conduct that erodes citizen trust in our election processes.”
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