The offices of Byrd and DeSantis did not respond to questions about their involvement with the organization.
The organization’s board is also staffed by Sharon Bemis, the president of Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, the country’s most prominent election denial organization; Julie Adams, an election denier who is both a member of the Fulton County Board of Elections in Georgia and a regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network; Janice Johnston, who recently left the MAGA-dominated Georgia State Election Board; and Michigan state house representative Ann Bollin, who has coordinated with the Election Integrity Network.
The organization’s board members did not respond to questions for this story, though Johnston and Bollin have both previously denied being election deniers. The organization’s Texas registration contains no information about its work, and the group does not appear to have a web presence.
But the presence of Johnston and Adams on the board is telling.
In Georgia, Adams has made a name for herself by pushing Trump’s conspiracies about widespread election fraud and has sued multiple times for access to voting records with the help of the Republican National Committee. She has refused to certify results without being allowed to inspect voting records.
Johnston recently left Georgia’s State Election Board for what she said were “family and personal responsibility” reasons, and her time there was marked by turmoil, partisanship, and legal battles based on false fraud claims. Under her direction, the election board pursued specious investigations of Fulton County, supported mass voter purges championed by election denial activists, and worked to effectively eliminate voting machines.
Adams and Johnston have long targeted Fulton County for supposed fraud, and gleefully celebrated when, in January, the FBI raided an elections warehouse there, seizing tens of thousands of ballots from the 2020 election. Johnston was one of the unnamed witnesses in the FBI affidavit that preceded the raid, providing information about alleged double-counted ballots to the agency that had already been investigated and proven to have had no effect on the outcome of the 2020 election.
The Justice Department briefly fought in court to keep her name hidden from public view, but described a witness in the affidavit as “a Republican-appointed member” of the State Election Board who previously “was an obstetrician,” which identified Johnston. As the raid was being carried out, Johnston went live on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast from an SUV parked nearby.
When asked about Johnston’s presence on the board of the new Musk-linked election denial organization, Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the Georgia State Election Board and Johnston’s former colleague, replied, “lol.”
“I mean this quite seriously, ‘lol.’ That’s my comment,” she tells WIRED.
And while Musk has quietly increased his political funding of Republicans, he has taken a bit of a step back from publicly discussing or posting about US politics and elections—with the exception of Talarico. His most recent post about voting is from September, when he responded to a question from Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah. “Who benefits from noncitizen voting?” Lee asked on X.
“Democrats, which is why they push for open borders and noncitizen voting!” Musk responded. “Incentives explain behavior.”
