The Republican chair of a rural Georgia election board—which has the power to restrict or expand access to voting, call for audits and investigations into alleged voter fraud, and certify election results—is a QAnon-fixated election conspiracy theorist, The Daily Beast has learned.
Appointed to his position last year, Ben Johnson heads the five-member Spalding County Board of Elections and Registration, which was recently taken over by Republicans as part of broader GOP efforts across the state to secure power over elections. Johnson’s fellow board members know him as a polite and capable chair, even if they sometimes disagree with his conservative politics, current and former colleagues have said.
But his personal Twitter account tells a more complicated story.
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Since at least September 2020, Johnson has been tweeting credulously about QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory that Satan-worshiping pedophiles control Hollywood and the Democratic Party. And even as QAnon adherents have sought office nationwide, the situation in Georgia was alarming to experts and advocates focused on election integrity in the era of baseless “Stop the Steal” panic about nonexistent voter fraud.
People like Johnson “may be more willing to steal the next election if they believe that the last election was stolen (it wasn’t),” Rick Hasen, an expert on election law at the University of California-Irvine, told The Daily Beast in an email. “Second, even if these conspiracists and QAnon adherents administer elections fairly, many people will reject election results they report because these administrators have shown themselves not to be credible.”
Johnson, who is the CEO of a technology company that does IT work for the county, did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.
Evidence pointing to a bizarre fixation on QAnon is all over Johnson’s Twitter timeline. On Sept. 23, 2020, he responded to a CBS News piece about QAnon by writing, “You should ask the president ‘Who is Q?’” In October 2020, Johnson tweeted at Dilbert creator Scott Adams and the now-suspended account of former Gen. Mike Flynn: “Hate to say it but a hell of a lot of the information dropped by Q has turned out to be accurate,” Johnson wrote.
That same month, following a congressional resolution condemning QAnon, Johnson speculated that by demanding a roll call vote, Democrats “wanted the names of Q supporters” in Congress. Johnson has also posted a meme about the difference between Antifa and QAnon, which broadly paints the two as evil and good, respectively.
In December 2020, Johnson again tweeted at Adams regarding a claim that YouTube had banned election-fraud content by saying that “some of the Q sites already have a class action” lawsuit and speculating that a far-right YouTube network could “join” to fight alleged censorship. On the final day of the year, Johnson tweeted at a right-wing radio host referencing discredited election conspiracist Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, asking if Pulitzer could “work his paper Q magic.” (Pulitzer has claimed he has proprietary technology that can detect the presence of bamboo in paper, indicating that some mail-in ballots used in 2020 came from China. Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensberger, has said Pulitzer provided “no evidence” of widespread voter fraud in the state..)
Johnson has also displayed mild skepticism about Q, tweeting in December 2020, “Whether [Q is ] real or not it’s keeping otherwise unproductive people moving largely in the same direction.”
But more often he has appeared to embrace the theory. In January 2021, Johnson tweeted at a man who disparaged QAnon, writing, “More people know they have been ripped off becusae [sic] of Q and anons than would w/o it.”
In May 2021, Johnson tweeted simply, “We are all Q.”
Logan Strain, a QAnon expert previously known as Travis View and host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, told The Daily Beast that Johnson’s tweets about the conspiracy show a deep involvement in it.
Johnson “was deep into the QAnon community, knew the in-group language, and regularly read the Q Drops,” Strain said after reviewing Johnson’s tweets, adding that the Republican election official has referenced Q drops from as far back as 2018.
As chair of the elections board, Johnson has significant power. He and the board can regulate and decide matters regarding public comment at board meetings, possibly “increasing instances of far-right conspiracists” commenting at meetings, according to Xakota Espinoza, a spokesperson for Fair Fight Action, the voting rights advocacy group founded by Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
Espinoza said that early-vote locations, the number of ballot dropboxes, precinct changes and locations, voter registration challenges, hiring and training of poll workers, processing mail ballots and applications, and certifying the county’s election results all fall under the purview of the board.
Johnson’s beliefs in QAnon and other conspiracies have raised alarms with outside experts and local voting rights advocates and Democrats. But they are part of a pattern of an increasingly radicalized GOP that supports the Big Lie and related conspiracies.
Still, one of Johnson’s colleagues on the board expressed befuddlement at his apparent embrace of the most notorious conspiracy theory there is.
“I guess he’s just not who he presented himself to me to be,” Jim O’Brien, one of the two Democrats on the board, told The Daily Beast.
Since at least 2013, Johnson has been active on Twitter, posting about local GOP events and tweeting at conservative politicians while mentioning Spalding County. But in 2020, like many Republicans in the county and nationwide, he became obsessed with false claims of widespread voter fraud and mishandling of the election.
Johnson’s tweets cover myriad election conspiracies, from events that occurred in other states to his own false claims of fraud in his hometown, Griffin. A little more than a week after the 2020 election, Johnson tweeted about a bizarre post-election incident that occurred in which local Republicans rooted through a dumpster at the county elections office in search of evidence of discarded ballots. Johnson tweeted at disgraced Trump lawyer L. Lin Wood that day, saying he had “the source video for ballots found in the dumpster in Spalding County!”
When law enforcement arrived to collect this alleged evidence, they determined the envelopes did not actually contain any ballots, according to the responding agency, the Spalding County Sheriff’s Office, which did not respond to questions about the incident.
No member of the election board or the Spalding County Board of Commissioners responded to requests for comment. Nor did the Spalding County GOP, which appointed Johnson to the elections board, or the Georgia Republican Party.
In February 2021, Johnson tweeted “Election fraud is not a myth” with the #ItalyGate hashtag, referencing a debunked conspiracy theory that originated from an obscure Florida group purporting votes were changed by Italian security officials. Johnson has also claimed Raffensberger "knowingly" lied when he said there was no widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
“What I’m finding out is there’s a whole other side to him that I don’t know,” O’Brien, the Spalding County Democrat, told The Daily Beast.
Dr. Yoshunda Jones, a local voting rights advocate and business consultant in Griffin, said Johnson’s extreme beliefs are actually a feature, and not a bug, for many Republicans in the area.
“A lot of them very much do feel the same way that he does,” Jones told The Daily Beast. “They’re all mostly Big Lie supporters; a lot of them are involved with QAnon as well.”
O’Brien said there is no obvious legal recourse for removing a potential QAnon supporter from the elections board. Instead, O’Brien simply shows up to election board meetings, outnumbered.
“The private me says, ‘No he shouldn’t be in that position.’The public me is — I plan to thwart him the best that I can,” O’Brien said of Johnson. “And when I look around, I see a lot of Republican legislators that are holding down their positions and they’re conspiracy theorists, too.”
