Georgia is among the states where the Republican Party is split and in turmoil. While those in the Trump camp have ousted previous leaders and fully embraced election denialism, the state’s more established Republicans — including Governor Brian Kemp — initially turned their backs on both Trump and the MAGA-dominated state party organization (though ultimately, even the governor is now “supporting the [GOP] ticket”).
After years of raising alarms about “election integrity,” in May 2024 Georgia’s Republican Committee voted to remove Brian Pritchard, the state party’s first vice chairman and an outspoken 2020 election denier, from his position after a judicial ruling two months earlier that found he had voted illegally in nine elections in 2008 and 2010.
The following are among the state GOP leaders who continue to raise doubts about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election:
- Jason Thompson | National Committeeman
Jason Thompson describes himself as a “bold voice on the Republican National Committee, serving as Chairman of Election Operations and on the Election Integrity Committee.” As cofounder of the far-right Georgia Republican Assembly and chairman of the Republican National Lawyers Association in Georgia, he’s “working to build a statewide team of election attorneys in every county to be prepared to defend the integrity of the vote.” Thompson pushed the RNC to pay the legal bills of fake electors and contributed his own money for their defense. He also claims that in 2020, he was “the only Republican attorney to win an election law case in support of President Trump against the Fulton Board of Elections.” In 2024, right-wing leaders such as Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and Jenny Martin, cofounder of Tea Party Patriots, endorsed his hard-fought campaign for national committeeman. In his campaign for that position, Thompson took credit for “shepherding” an RNC resolution promoting claims of election irregularities and the hand counting of ballots sponsored by TPUSA. He also gained points from MAGA Republicans for raising concerns about former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel before she was ousted from her leadership position and replaced by Trump’s hand-picked leaders. - Amy Kremer | National Committeewoman
Amy Kremer has been a Trump acolyte and election denier since well before the 2020 presidential election. Women for America First, a pro-Trump organization she and her daughter cofounded in 2019, secured the permit for the March to Save America rally and is part of a web of dark money groups tied to the rallies. She was also one of the most active fundraisers in the Stop the Steal movement and organized two cross-country March for Trump bus tours. Selections from Kremer’s social media posts compiled by a CNN investigation include a tweet on January 26, 2021, stating, “For those that haven’t figured it out yet… Trump won in a landslide,” and another on May 17, 2021, that read, “There was no insurrection. The only coup that happened was on November 4th.” CNN also notes that Kremer’s daughter created the Stop the Steal Facebook group the day after the election. - David Cross | Second Vice Chair
David Cross is one of many far-right extremists and election deniers elected to state party positions in the past couple of years. On his Twitter/X page he calls himself an “election activist” and has pushed hard for “human-counted paper ballots” and hand counts of all elections. Cross was also among “a small group of election deniers who… relentlessly hounded” Georgia officials into investigating endless complaints of fraud and “ballot harvesting” after the 2020 election. - Caroline Jeffords | Secretary
Aligned with the pro-Trump faction of the Georgia GOP, Caroline Jeffords was elected state party secretary in 2023 in part by touting the fact that she has been “on the front lines of the election integrity battle.” She is a plaintiff in election integrity litigation in Georgia claiming that counterfeit ballots were used in the 2020 election. - Suzi Voyles | Assistant Secretary
Suzi Voyles is a 2022 U.S. House candidate who ran on her efforts to reverse Trump’s defeat but lost in the primary. As a Fulton County poll worker in 2020, she had expressed concerns about the accuracy of the presidential vote count in Georgia. Voyles won her party position at the GOP convention in 2023, and like Jeffords, is a plaintiff in election integrity litigation claiming that counterfeit ballots were used in Georgia in the 2020 election. - Laurie McClain | Treasurer
In August 2023, just two months after Laurie McClain was elected treasurer of the state party while serving as first vice chair of the Gwinnett County GOP, she published a Facebook post expressing solidarity with Georgia’s fake electors and outrage with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for pursuing criminal charges against Trump and his allies for election interference. “The Fulton County district attorney has hijacked Georgia RICO laws to exact vengeance on patriots offering themselves up in the process of securing election integrity,” she wrote. - Salleigh Grubbs | Cobb County Chair
An “ardent” Trump supporter, Salleigh Grubbs “is one of the many GOP officials in Georgia still questioning the results of the 2020 election,” according to CNN. Her doubts about the legitimacy of the outcome led her to go to great lengths to try to expose fraud and subsequently to run for election as county chair. From that position, she has “helped shape the nominating rules and delegations selection to favor Trump’s return [and is now] on the front lines of turning out voters, monitoring the polls, and potentially challenging the results in November, in service of the man whose myth inspired [her] in the first place,” as The Atlantic put it.
Grubbs has condemned the violence of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, but on the first anniversary of the riot she and other Cobb GOP officials planned a vigil for the “J6 prisoners” and “patriots” imprisoned for their roles, according to a copy of the invitation obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Based on public outcry, the group ultimately opted to cancel the vigil. In addition, Grubbs is Cobb County chair for the Over 80K caucus of the far-right Georgia Republican Assembly, which has vilified Governor Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and other Republicans who resisted Trump’s demands that they break the law to overturn the election results in 2020. - David Shafer | Chair Emeritus
As the former chairman of the state GOP (2019–23), David Shafer is one of 16 fake electors who attempted to interfere in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. The Department of Justice subpoenaed him as part of its election interference investigation, and he has been indicted in Fulton County on eight counts, including impersonating a public officer, forgery, false statements, and attempting to file false documents. Prosecutors have rejected Shafer’s claim that he was only following the advice of Trump campaign lawyers, suggesting instead that he actually played a leadership role in organizing and facilitating the entire fake elector effort in Georgia. - Kandiss Taylor | District 1 Chair
A far-right conspiracist and election denier, Kandiss Taylor is an ardent Trump supporter and Christian Nationalist who ran in Georgia’s GOP primary for governor in 2022 and refused to concede her loss to Brian Kemp after winning only 3.4% of the vote. Oregon Public Broadcasting refers to her as “a fringe, far-right figure in Georgia with a history of making false claims about the 2020 election, voting machines, and how elections are run.” - Brad Carver | District 5 Chair
A lawyer and key player in Georgia’s GOP political establishment, Brad Carver is one of 16 fake electors who attempted to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. In 2022, the Department of Justice subpoenaed him as part of its federal election fraud investigation. In December 2020, he pushed the false narrative of election fraud in Georgia on Sean Hannity’s radio show. After then GOP State Chair David Shafer appointed him to lead the party’s Election Confidence Task Force, he issued a report concluding that the 2020 election “revealed dramatic weaknesses in Georgia’s system for conducting elections, and as a result, public confidence in the integrity of that system has been shattered.” - David Oles | District 11 Chair
David Oles is a Harvard-educated attorney who has stoked distrust of the electoral process and Dominion voting machines in Georgia. He represented True the Vote in a lawsuit seeking a hand recount of ballots based on the claim of ballot harvesting made in the debunked documentary 2000 Mules. But when True the Vote was unable to produce any evidence of ballot harvesting per court order, the superior court judge dismissed the case. - Jeff Hughes | Jackson County Chair
In the wake of the 2020 presidential election and pressure from the far-right group True the Vote, Jeff Hughes forced an investigation into 211 Jackson County voters who had cast ballots after recently changing their address, following an unsubstantiated claim that as many as 2,000 county residents with address changes could have voted illegally. In 2021, he also refused to certify the runoff election of Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock “until the 211 names were passed on to the secretary of state for further investigation.” The results were eventually certified despite his dissent. - Chris Mora | Pickens County Chair
In 2022, with the support of MAGA activists in rural Pickens County, the newly elected GOP County Chair Chris Mora filed an unsuccessful lawsuit demanding a hand recount of two outcomes of the GOP primary he questioned. Even though the primary results had already been certified in Pickens County, Mora alleged that the state’s electronic voting machines were unreliable and suggested that he should unseal the ballots and do the recount himself to determine whether incumbents Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger had actually won the primaries for governor and secretary of state, respectively. Both Republicans had withstood pressure from Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. - Mandy Robinson-Hand | Taylor County Chair
Mandy Robinson-Hand and her husband Chuck (who lost his 2024 bid for the U.S. House in the GOP primary) participated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol and were among those arrested for their roles in the insurrection. On the day of the riot, she texted friends and family members to say that she and her husband considered themselves to be “rebels,” adding “Dude im in a war.” After pleading guilty in 2023, Robinson-Hand served a 20-day prison sentence. Her husband said at a campaign event: “We were there to protest an election that was stolen from us,” and on his campaign site, he insisted that “they were nonviolent protesters who were made examples of by a two-tiered justice system” and a Department of Justice that has been a “weaponized… by the Biden administration.” - Keenan Knight | Troop County Chair
In early 2024, Keenan Knight submitted a request to the county board of commissioners to replace the use of Dominion voting machines with paper ballots. “This is a nonpartisan issue,” he said. “We’ve heard the distrust of electronic voting systems with proprietary code that cannot be audited. We’ve seen the sloppy chain of custody protocols with unlimited mailing [sic] ballots. We will get proof of the accuracy of hand-counting paper ballots.”