The election deniers relentlessly hounding Georgia officials

In December, a Texas man named Kevin Moncla emailed Georgia election board members in response to their decision not to investigate the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, over bogus election fraud claims. Moncla made a vague threat that he was willing to take things outside the bounds of his increasingly frustrated emails.

The communication alarmed members of the state election board (SEB) enough to contact federal law enforcement.

Moncla’s email was one among hundreds of communications sent by a small but aggressive group of election deniers since former president Donald Trump’s loss in Georgia in 2020 as part of a relentless pressure campaign directed at Georgia officials to investigate unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud – and to implement policies based on those claims that will affect how elections are run in Georgia.

“We can address these matters publicly or privately – but make no mistake, they will be addressed,” Moncla told members of the board in the email that prompted Georgia election officials to ask the FBI to investigate him.

Moncla is among a small group of election deniers who have relentlessly hounded the Georgia SEB and other officials on a weekly and sometimes daily basis to investigate mostly unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud. He has been joined in his pursuit of conspiratorial election fraud claims by Joe Rossi, a teacher at a technical college in Macon, and David Cross, a self-described financial adviser who is second vice-chair of the Georgia GOP. The trio have made a name for themselves in election denier circles, with their work being cited across a rightwing ecosystem of influential websites, social media accounts and even within prominent political circles.

Since November