Things Get Messy in Georgia After Election Board Director Writes Letter to Todd Blanche

Georgia Election Board Employee Allegedly Goes Rogue, Requests Federal Intervention

Last week, a letter surfaced from the Georgia Election Board, signed by board executive director James Mills, requesting that the federal government intervene in his state’s election. Addressed to attorney general Todd Blanche and cc-ing Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, the letter asked that the agencies get involved with and oversee numerous aspects of Georgia’s 2026 election.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office denounced the letter. “People who are serious about election security don’t inject chaos in the eleventh hour,” a Raffensperger spokesperson told MS NOW.

Then, over the weekend, the story got weirder: Members of the state election board alleged that Mills never was authorized by the board to send the letter, and was essentially using his position to freelance ahead of the election.

“We have no control over our executive director, and he does whatever the hell he wants to,” the chair of the board, John Fervier, told reporter Jessica Huseman, who broke that aspect of the story for Votebeat.

The five-member Georgia Election Board, readers may remember, was restructured in 2023 to provide Republicans with a significant majority. President Trump has praised various members of that majority, who have entertained conspiracy theories about the way in which the state conducts its elections. A year before the DOJ launched its own investigation of the 2020 election in Fulton County, the Georgia Election Board ordered its own.

Fervier, the chair who accused Mills of freelancing, is a Republican but has frequently clashed with his three Republican colleagues on the board and instead voted with its sole Democrat. He’s also clashed — sometimes very publicly — with Mills, who was hired by the board but is not on the board.

Another Republican member of the board also expressed displeasure with Mills to Votebeat’s Huseman, saying that, though this letter may have been inspired by a resolution the board voted on that urged Raffensperger’s office to begin software updates for voting machines and empowered Mills to seek federal help around those updates, Mills’ requests to the DOJ and DHS went far beyond that. That member, Salleigh Grubbs, also said board members were not given a chance to review Mills’ letter.

“In private enterprise, if I told an employee I wanted to see something before it goes and he did this, we’d be having a very different conversation,” Grubbs said. “I thought we were all on the same team.”

This mess is kind of funny, but also very serious. More broadly, this is the kind of thing we should expect heading into the midterms — an official, and perhaps not even an important official, acting on their own to encourage the Trump administration to get involved in an election and take sweeping action. The DOJ and DHS have not yet responded in any public way to Mills, but the administration has valorized similar figures who have gone rogue, such as former Mesa County, Colorado Clerk Tina Peters. Requests like Mills’ give the DOJ material to spin into whatever narrative it wants.

Bolsonaro’s Son Is on the Cusp of Becoming Brazil’s President

Flavio Bolsonaro, son of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, came in first place in the country’s presidential election Sunday with 47% of the vote, beating President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had 45%. Because neither candidate cleared 50%, the race will now go to a runoff on Oct. 25.

• Jair Bolsonaro, of course, was at the center of a Jan. 6-like auto-coup attempt after Lula beat him in 2022. The younger Bolsonaro has framed his campaign around revenge for his father and his associates, who were handed jail sentences.
• The right has been ascendant in Latin America, with reactionary candidates winning several elections in a row. Many explicitly align themselves with Donald Trump.
• Runoff systems, such as the one in Brazil, have sometimes blunted the rise of far-right factions. I’ll be watching to see if that happens here.
• Brazil is often compared to America in that it more successfully addressed a very similar auto-coup, prosecuting the former president behind it. Should Flavio Bolsonaro win election, that contrast will become less clear cut.

Tabs

• After a young Haitian man living in Springfield, Ohio, threw himself in front of a truck, seemingly distraught about being given an ankle monitor as the Trump administration moves to eject Haitian immigrants from the country, The Atlantic examines the impact on the town and on the trucker who hit him.
• Democratic state officials are preparing emergency plans for federal agents at the polls, following the Trump administration’s many efforts to dodge when asked directly about whether that was the plan, the Washington Sun reports.

Man of the Hour

It’s Senator John Kennedy (R-LA), the Harvard- and Oxford-educated scholar who nonetheless invites frequent comparisons to Foghorn Leghorn with his over-the-top, folksy schtick. He is exploring a run for president in 2028, he says — presumably against Trump’s anointed successor. Good luck, John.