Georgia Election Board hires election skeptic as investigator

The State Election Board has quietly hired an activist who has challenged the registrations of thousands of Fulton County voters and who cheered as the FBI raided a county ballot warehouse in January to be the board’s official state investigator, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned.

Jason Frazier stands out among Georgia’s election skeptics and hand-marked paper ballot proponents. Democrats have labeled him a far-right extremist and an election denier — a characterization Frazier has rejected. Critics were quick to ridicule the new hire.

“It’s shocking that an allegedly nonpartisan board would hire a political operative with a years-long record of baselessly accusing counties of wrongdoing to then turn around and ‘investigate’ these same counties,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s only Democrat. “The majority members of the State Election Board appear determined to double-down on their MAGA credentials, foment public distrust in our elections and further marginalize themselves into irrelevance.”

In his new role, Frazier is in the position to officially investigate the same election processes he has spent years criticizing as a private citizen, but the board was quiet about his hiring. Board executive director James Mills announced that the agency has hired part-time investigators during a May 14 meeting but never mentioned the new hires by name. Frazier’s name later appeared on a list of taxpayer-funded agency staffers on the board website.

The hiring was apparently so sensitive that Vice Chair Janice Johnston suggested the board could file a complaint against The Atlanta Journal-Constitution after being made aware the AJC was seeking records related to Frazier’s hiring.

“Should we file an ethics complaint? But I don’t know who to file it against, other than the, I don’t know, the AJC or an unknown leaker,” Johnston said.

Asked about who the agency’s new hires are in an email, Mills did not respond. Johnston replied to the AJC’s questions by asking who told the news organization.

The hiring of state employees, their job descriptions, salaries and other details are public record under state law. The AJC filed an open records request seeking information about Frazier’s hiring, but the board said it would take weeks to respond, citing a backlog of requests.

Frazier did not respond to a request for comment.

The Secretary of State’s office, which did release information about the hiring to the AJC, said Frazier is paid $70 an hour and started his new role on May 18.

Georgia First Amendment Foundation board member Richard T. Griffiths said the election board’s reluctance to make public the details of Frazier’s hiring is concerning.

“At a time when the public is concerned about transparency of the elections and the integrity of the elections process, the total activity of the elections board should be available to the public and that includes hirings,” he said. “If the elections board is not providing the basics that all state agencies are required to provide, what does that say to the public about whether they can trust the board to make sensitive decisions about the elections process?”

Despite joining the state workforce, Frazier has continued to repost social media posts from Republican lieutenant governor candidate Greg Dolezal and posts from a conservative researcher alleging fraud in Fulton County’s 2020 election.

Before his hiring, Frazier joined election activist Cleta Mitchell on the May 6 episode of former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast where he criticized Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, called Gov. Brian Kemp a “supposed Republican,” and again cast doubt on Fulton’s 2020 election.

“It’s been very frustrating as a Georgia resident down here. We’ve got Brad Raffensperger, who has done nothing except go around and say we have the cleanest voter rolls in the country — but not do anything to fix our elections,” he said.

Frazier has been part of a cadre of conservatives who have conspiratorial beliefs about the 2020 election and has participated in Zoom calls with members of Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, a national coalition of pro-Trump election activists.

Election integrity activists Jason Frazier and Garland Favorito pose at the scene of the Jan. 28 FBI raid on the Fulton County election hub. (Social media post)

When the FBI seized troves of Fulton County’s 2020 election records in a January raid, Frazier was there, alongside election skeptic Garland Favorito, praising the action.

“We’ve been told time and again everything was fine — don’t worry about it,” he said in a video posted to social media while standing outside the Fulton Elections hub as trucks full of 2020 election records pulled away. “Why are you investigating 2020? This happened so many years ago. You know what, if there was nothing to hide, they would have shown us years ago. Now we’re going to find out.”

The U.S. Department of Justice has yet to reveal any findings from the raid or bring any criminal charges.

The clip was later reposted by Trump’s Truth Social account. Frazier called it “an honor!” In a post on X.com last year, he said Georgia’s most populous county should be dissolved.

His rise to prominence among conservative election activists started with his effort to remove registrations from the voter rolls of Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, claiming the voters could be ineligible.

He has said he simply wants clean voter rolls to prevent election fraud. Voting rights groups and Democrats say such challenges could unjustly strip valid registrations from voter rolls. About 250,000 voter challenges were filed in 2020 and over 100,000 more since then by Frazier and other activists. County election boards dismissed the vast majority of the challenges.

In 2024, Frazier filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Fulton County violated state and federal laws by failing to routinely remove ineligible voters from its rolls — he and another vote challenger voluntarily dismissed the suit a month after filing.

The board’s two prior investigators resigned in March. Both had law enforcement backgrounds. Frazier does not, according to a copy of his resume submitted with his application and obtained by the AJC from the secretary of state’s office through the Georgia Open Records Act.

Although Frazier has found sympathetic allies in the Republican-controlled state board, in Fulton, the Democratic-controlled county commission has rejected his appointment to the county election board multiple times.

The Fulton Republican Party sued when the county rejected Frazier’s nomination in 2023. The party withdrew its lawsuit after nominating a different election board member.