The Republican election conspiracy theorist with power over elections in a Georgia county
Meet Ben Johnson, the election conspiracist who has overseen the Republican takeover of this local elections board.
Ben Johnson is a small business owner, a respected member of the local Republican party, and chair of the Spalding County Board of Elections & Registration. He is also an election conspiracy theorist, COVID denier, and an extremely online far-right denizen consuming some of the most racist, homophobic and toxic content available. I know this because I’ve spent some time in this world — his world — in the last 12 hours following the release of a story in the Guardian detailing the Republican takeover of the Spalding County elections board, Johnson’s conspiratorial beliefs, and his company’s IT work for the county.
The reason I’ve had to spend time in this world is because I asked Johnson for comment on his ties to a racist, far-right Internet troll, convicted hacker, and serial cyber-stalker who has spent at least a decade harassing journalists, laywers and activists nationwide. Not until I began reporting on Johnson did Joey Camp set his sights on me.
Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to suppress the Democrat vote by restricting minority voting access and other Jim Crow-era measures. GOP legislatures introduced more than 200 laws last year to achieve these goals — a white backlash for making Donald Trump the first incumbent president to lose since George H.W. Bush almost 30 years ago. So far this year they’ve introduced at least 30 more laws aimed at restricting voting or allowing Republican-controlled governments to overturn elections, according to the Voting Rights Lab.
Considering all this, it’s no surprise that Johnson refused to speak to me other than calling me “fake news” at an election board meeting a few weeks back. He knows what his party has done in Spalding County: under the guise of transparency, the region’s two Republican representatives got a law passed that requires a secret vote by the county’s (mostly White) judges to choose the fifth and deciding member of the election board. Johnson resigned his position atop the Spalding County GOP to take his seat at the head of the board, where he joined another vocal Republican who has campaigned for one of the GOP reps who introduced the bill that changed the election board from a mostly Black Democrat one to a mostly White Republican one. None of these people would talk to me for my story. But it’s not really necessary for them to do so.
We know why they did all this. Donald Trump has told us why they’re doing all this: if Republicans control the apparatus of elections, they can control the outcome of elections. Just last night — as if we needed anymore evidence — Trump released a statement saying former vice president Mike Pence “could have overturned” the 2020 election. He should have, Trump of course meant.
When the leader of the party says to do something, you do it. And Spalding County is just a microcosm of what’s happening across the country.
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Johnson’s beliefs are well-documented on his Facebook page which, like a surprising number of local officials, is completely public. He subscribes to a wide array of globalist conspiracy theories, all while having Elon Musk as his profile picture and posting about the servers he’s erecting to mine for bitcoin. Keep in mind, Johnson’s company has won the primary contract to run maintenance and troubleshooting on the entire county’s computer equipment, servers, clouds and software since at least 2015. This contract makes Johnson’s company tens of thousands of dollars each month, according to invoices I’ve obtained.
He is an anti-government conspiracy theorist whose company makes him a lot of money directly from the government and who now sits on a government board where he can spew his false beliefs. In December, Johnson claimed at an election board meeting that a judge in Georgia had deemed software from Dominion Voting Systems — used by every county in the state — was “illegal.” There’s no basis for this statement. I looked up the court case Johnson was talking about and found that the judge in the case hasn’t ruled on anything because it’s not even set to go to trial until December. Johnson believes falsehoods and is willing to use his government position to advocate for policies that support those lies. This is who he is, we know, because he does all this publicly. But it’s what Johnson is likely doing in private that should be of even more concern to the people of Spalding County.
As I dug into this story I reached out to Johnson and many other government officials in the county for comment. When it became apparent that he wouldn’t speak to me, I wrote Johnson a tough but fair email explaining that my story in the Guardian would not reflect well on him or his business. A few hours later, I received a call from a nervous-sounding man who wanted to talk to me about the crimes he said I’d committed. This was Joey Camp, the far-right troll and racist who plies his trade in some of the darkest and most extreme corners of the internet.
Camp had evidence that I had extorted, threatened and even blackmailed people throughout my career as a journalist. In fact he had 45 megabytes of my emails proving these crimes — and they were currently in the hands of a prosecutor who was deciding when to charge me. They were obtained via a “civil court subpoena,” he said. All of it, lies. But he went on, asking about my dogs and my wife, the home we purchased in 2020, and my work outside of journalism as a private investigative researcher working with public records. All, easily obtained with a quick background check done through myriad online services, and by scouring my and my wife’s social media.
This is what it’s like to work as a reporter covering election issues in 2022, I suppose. I’m not concerned for me — Camp is relatively harmless outside the dark corners of the far-right Internet — but for the citizens of Spalding County: If Johnson has contacts with people like Camp, that means he operates in those grim, violent, paranoid and racist corners of the web. I reached out to Johnson last night for comment on his ties to Camp. Instead of receiving a response from Johnson, I began receiving messages across various platforms. On Gab, Camp’s lone outlet after being banned from mainstream social media, his supporters hurled homophobic and anti-semitic epithets at me. Camp had resumed his harassment campaign against me after not having mentioned me for weeks. That’s either highly coincidental timing or something closer to the truth: Ben Johnson, small business owner, respected Republican, and government elections official, has personal ties to one of the worst people you can imagine.
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The first photo in this post is from my rundown hotel in Griffin, where I traveled to in order to attend a Spalding County elections board meeting. Thanks to all who have signed up for this newsletter and all the readers who have been here from the beginning, covering the border back in Texas. If you enjoy what you’ve read here, please sign up to receive Where Do We Go From Here in your inbox. As 2022 heats up, Georgia is once again in the national political spotlight. I’ve begun digging into other voter suppression efforts here and let’s just say that there’s a lot more where this story about Ben Johnson came from. Stay tuned.