A longtime conspiracy theorist who filed unsuccessful legal challenges to Donald Trump's election loss has grabbed the ear of Georgia officials who will oversee this November's vote, according to a report.
Garland Favorito, who published a book in the early 2000s filled with debunked theories on the Sept. 11 attacks and John F. Kennedy's assassination, pushed for new rules later adopted by the Republican-led state election board that experts believe will inject chaos into the Georgia vote count, and CNN reported that he has close ties to officials all over the state.
“For many years he was sort of a gadfly that nobody paid attention to, and now he’s the center of attention,” said Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for Georgia’s secretary of state. “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.”
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Favorito and his nonprofit group VoterGA, which got a financial boost from Mike Flynn's America Project Inc., have hosted poll-watcher trainings, sent dubious warnings about election security to officials, and ranted against voting machines to the state board of elections, and GOP officials around the state trust his claims.
“I have a good relationship with Garland," said Deidre Holden, director of elections for Paulding County. "He is truly an advocate for his cause,” Holden told CNN when asked about Favorito. “He believes that the voting system is flawed. Some counties maybe, but I can only speak pertaining to Paulding County.”
A public records request shows Holden received dozens of emails from Favorito warning of "illegal" voting systems and promoting fundraisers for Trump's co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case, and election watchdogs say the new rules will actually cause errors during the vote-counting process.
“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 for Bartow County.
Favorito argued in a phone call that local officials have tried to cover up election fraud, citing his inability to review individual ballots from the 2020 election.
“Why have they not shown us the paper ballots?" Favorito said. "If the system is secure, they would have produced the paper ballots. If the public can’t verify what they’re telling us, that’s a threat to every voter.”
However, a spokesman for secretary of state Brad Raffensperger said Favorito's request was absurd and violated state law requiring ballots to remain under seal by counties after an election.
“You can’t just give out the ballots to people,” the spokesman said.
Favorito has been politically active for decades, and in 1998 helped organize a small rally in Washington, D.C., calling for the impeachment of Bill Clinton and also wrote a letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution accusing the Democratic president of engaging in treason and bribery with the Chinese government.”
He released “Our Nation Betrayed: Mutually Assured Destruction for America" a few years later that details his journey into conspiratorial rabbit holes and cites work form a publishing house run by what the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes as a neo-Nazi group, and he founded VoterGA in 2006 to challenge voting machines the state had started using a few years earlier.
Staffers in the Georgia Capitol building became so alarmed by his growing influence after the 2020 election that they began distributing copies of his book to senior elected officials in hopes of discrediting him, according to one staffer, but instead his conspiracy theories only gained more traction.
“If Trump wins the state, everything will be roses," said Sterling, a lifelong Republican. "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."
