Ex-Georgia poll worker who fought to overturn 2020 election is running for Congress

An election conspiracy theorist who was fired from her job as a poll worker in Georgia after participating in the GOP attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s win in the state, announced on Friday she is running for Congress in a critical House district.

Susan Voyles is looking to unseat Rep. Lucy McBath, a two-term Democrat who has won twice in Georgia’s 6th District, a traditionally Republican seat in suburban Atlanta that has trended bluer since Donald Trump’s election in 2016.

“Voter integrity is very important to me,” Voyles said in an interview with One America News, the far-right cable network that has pushed unsubstantiated claims on voter fraud in the 2020 election.

“This,” she said, “after much prayer and consideration with my family, I have decided to enter into the race for the 6th Congressional District here in Georgia, which is now held by a Democrat, and I think it’s time that we get back to some common sense.”

Prior to being let go from her role, Voyles was accused of violating policies while serving as a poll worker in heavily Democratic Fulton County in 2020, including allegedly taking cellphone photos of election activities and showing ballots to a poll watcher when she should not have, according to a report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Voyles was also accused of “making misrepresentations to the public on YouTube about problems with the elections that were false and misleading,” a Fulton County spokeswoman told the AJC

Voyles, a Georgia delegate at the 2020 Republican National Convention, has been a major figure in the effort to overturn Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in the Peach State.

In November 2020, She was a critical witness in a failed lawsuit by Trump-supporting lawyer Lin Wood, in which she claimed that dozens of absentee ballots were fraudulent because they were in too “pristine” of condition.

However Gabriel Sterling, the Republican chief operating officer of the office of the Georgia Secretary of State, said “pristine” ballots are not a sign of fraud as he sought to debunk the lies that Trump and his GOP allies pushed about Georgia’s election results.

Voyles also testified at one of Trump campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s sham hearings. Giuliani held a number of hearings on the election across the country to try to prove the voter fraud lies he and Trump were pushing. Georgia’s hearing was attended almost exclusively by Republican state lawmakers, in which Giuliani baselessly claimed that ballots in Georgia were illegally cast — and used “witnesses” such a Voyles to back up his claims. Georgia Public Broadcasting reported that Giuliani’s claims at the hearing were “false, misleading or lacking actual evidence.”

Voyles has also tried to shift blame for the Capitol insurrection — which Trump helped incite with his voter fraud lies — on “antifa,” a claim that has been disproven by media fact-checkers many times over.  And she spread false election conspiracy theories, including a claim that Italy was somehow involved in an effort to steal votes from Trump

Rather than distance themselves from her after her behavior, the Georgia Republican Party instead gave Voyles a “warrior award” earlier this month at their state party convention for Voyles’ effort to overturn the 2020 election results.

Voyles would join what’s expected to be a crowded field of GOP candidates against McBath in Georgia’s 6th District.

The district has trended more and more Democratic in the last three election cycles, according to data from Daily Kos Elections.

However, few candidates have announced whether they’re running, as the district could change in the decennial redistricting process.

Republicans control both state legislative chambers and the governorship in Georgia and could potentially redraw McBath’s seat to be more favorable to GOP candidates.

Mitt Romney won the district by a 23.3-point spread in 2012. However, Trump barely carried it in 2016, winning by just 1.5 points. And in 2020, Biden swamped Trump in the seat by 11.1 points.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.