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NEWS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 19, 2023
Contact: Marilyn Marks
Coalition for Good Governance
Marilyn@uscgg.org
704 292 9802
Removal of Coffee County Board of Elections Chair Sought by
Coalition for Good Governance
ATLANTA--Coalition for Good Governance (“CGG”) a non-profit non-partisan organization which exposed Georgia’s statewide voting system breaches initiated in Coffee County, today called for the resignation of the Board of Elections and Registrations Chair, Wendell Stone. CGG filed a detailed 40 point petition, with supporting documentation, requesting that the Board of Commissioners of Coffee County and the Board of Registration and Elections seek the immediate resignation of Chairman Stone. The petition covers a broad range of allegations of improper actions in the wake of the voting system breaches, primarily related to the board's failure to respond to the breaches in a transparent manner.
“Chairman Stone has led the board since January 2023 in its continuing resistance to investigate how these breaches occurred and how they escaped any action by the Board once the members became aware of the breaches. Mr. Stone was also the Board's representative in its September 2022 deposition concerning the breaches. His sworn testimony does not appear to have been completely candid.
Mr. Stone served as Vice-Chairman during 2021 and 2022 where he had primary responsibility for maintaining accurate minutes of the Board meetings as well as being the official custodian of the records of the Board’s proceedings. Those records are materially deficient, but Chairman Stone has resisted repeated public efforts to seek complete accurate records and legal compliance with the record keeping requirements of the board's proceedings, including their closed door sessions,” said Marilyn Marks, Executive Director of CGG. “This petition, asking the two local boards to request Mr. Stone’s resignation comes only after months of attempts to urge Mr. Stone to drop his obstruction to transparency and citizens’ repeated requests for accountability.”
The January 2021 Coffee County voting system breaches were first reported in May 2022 by the Washington Post, although the Post began to reach out in March 2022 to Coffee officials to seek confirming information on the breaches they had learned of from former Election Director Misty Hampton, now under indictment in the Fulton County RICO case. “Yet Mr. Stone did not communicate the information about the breaches to the public or to the full Board of Elections. Nor did Stone contact law enforcement to investigate the breaches of the system,” Marks said, noting that law enforcement (the Georgia Bureau of Investigation) was not brought in to investigate until August 15, 2022, when the State Election Board sought GBI assistance after evidence of voting system tampering was detected.
Georgia’s statewide voting system breaches in January 2021, initiated in Coffee County, came to national attention as they play a prominent part in August’s Fulton County RICO indictments. Coalition for Good Governance’s discovery efforts, as part of their Curling v Raffensperger lawsuit concerning voting system security, exposed the massive voting system breaches. “Seeking Chairman Stone’s resignation is only one step in the accountability we demand concerning the failures of Georgia’s election administration and oversight in response to these far-ranging breaches. Much inquiry is still essential to learn who at state and county levels knew the breaches had occurred, and when they knew it,” Marks said.
Coalition for Good Governance is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on fair and transparent elections, including the protection of voters’ rights to secret ballots.
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