Election outcome could pivot on which view prevails among voters
More than 10 months later, the image still startles: two Chatham County police officers carrying a slight, thin woman by her upper arms and feet from a meeting of Chatham County Board of Elections.
The woman, Beth Majeroni, who is running in Tuesday’s Republican primary election to oust four-term incumbent Ben Watson from his District 1 Senate seat, had refused to relinquish the podium during the meeting’s public-comment period and board chairman Thomas Mahoney III directed officers to remove her.
The 68-year-old Majeroni was already a well-known conservative activist locally before the election board encounter last July. But the videos and images of the row that went viral after it vaulted her to a national stage.
Stars of right-wing and conservative media flocked to interview her. A “hero and a patriot,” said Steve Bannon, host of “War Room” and a longtime ally of former President Donald Trump. A “modern-day hero,” said Stew Peters, an American alt-right internet personality.
So, it’s no surprise that the events of July 10, 2023, have been a staple in Majeroni’s campaign to unseat Watson. She has repeatedly cited them as a demonstration of her determination to “speak truth to power” to advance the interests of District 1 voters, as well as the ultra-conservative causes she champions.
But in the final weeks leading to Tuesday’s voting, Watson’s campaign, along with an Atlanta-based political action committee supporting his candidacy, have blanketed District 1 with fliers imploring voters to look at the images of Majeroni’s removal from the board meeting last year in a far different way.
Whether he succeeds could well shape the outcome in an election in which voter turnout is expected to be low.
‘Doesn’t work well with others’
The fliers distributed by Watson’s campaign and the political action committee, Peach State Values, chaired by Republican state Sen. Matt Brass of Newnan, show a now-familiar photo of Majeroni being removed from the election board’s hearing room off Eisenhower Road in south Savannah last July.
It is juxtaposed, however, with one of a statesmanlike Watson at a speaker’s lectern in the state capitol and a caption that reads, “The Difference is Conservative Leadership.”
In Watson’s rendering, the July 10 encounter with the Chatham’s election board and county police doesn’t illustrate his opponent’s determination to “speak truth to power.”
Rather, it shows she’s a wild-eyed activist who doesn’t play by the rules, prefers confrontation over compromise, and is out of step with District 1 voters — a rabble-rouser, not a 1st Amendment freedom fighter.
“I think what she has done, in the way she has represented herself, I think she has demonstrated that she does not work well with others,” the 64-year-old, four-term state senator explained during an interview last week with The Current.
‘Slap in the face’
The response to Watson’s use of the images in campaign brochures, at least from one prominent Chatham County conservative, was fast and furious.
“I’m so disgusted,” Jeanne Seaver, co-founder of Georgia’s conservative tea party movement and head of Moms Against Gambling, wrote Watson, calling his campaign’s use of the images “a slap in the face” to every woman in the district.
Majeroni believes the fliers are a sign of desperation, serving only to show “grassroots” Republican voters that she’s the candidate who will “stand up for them.” It will backfire, she predicted.
Watson defended the move.
“I used those images because she was proud of them in speeches” and said her only regret was that she was wearing a skirt. “I thought well, if she’s proud of it, then we can put it on a brochure.”
Grand jury dispute
Majeroni’s own attempts to parlay the events of last into votes on Tuesday aren’t without risk of backfiring among voters, too.
The Current covered the meeting and has conducted nearly 20 interviews with meeting attendees and city and county officials about the events leading up to, through and following that day. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters still subject to litigation.
Majeroni’s allegations from the podium, during a public-comment period focused almost entirely on demands that Chatham County replace its electronic voting machines with paper ballots, were misleading at best, the officials said.
With most of the other speakers having already voiced that demand during their allotted three minutes to address the five-member board, Majeroni chose instead to discuss a long-running grand-jury dispute with board supervisor Billy Wooten, despite posted ground rules for the public-comment period that barred discussion of about issues of a “quasi-judicial nature.”
Asked if she saw the ground rules before the meeting, Majeroni said she couldn’t comment “pending litigation.”
During the roughly 69 seconds she spoke at the hearing before deputies took her away, Majeroni said Wooten had failed to supply chain-of-custody forms for some precinct voting results in the 2022 election, as instructed by a grand jury before which Majeroni had testified.
He also had failed, she said, to provide information about the data that’s contained on the ballot’s QR code, which stores the voter’s ballot choices and is scanned by a device that helps tally the vote.
Both allegations were false or misleading, those officials knowledgeable about the grand-jury proceedings told The Current. The chain of custody forms were passed to the grand jury by election officials the day it requested them from Wooten, they said.
As for Majeroni’s allegation that Wooten had withheld QR code information, there was a months-long delay by the secretary of state’s office in responding to a request by county election officials to provide it, the officials said.
Mahoney, the election board chair, didn’t reply to requests for comment on the episode. Upon hearing Majeroni utter the words, “grand jury,” he had moved quickly to declare her “out of order” and out of compliance with the hearing’s ground rules.
Later, however, he said that he “regretted” not allowing Majeroni to finish her allotted three minutes at the podium, according to two election board members who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Immediately following the row, Majeroni said she was weighing the possibility of suing Chatham County for violating her 1st Amendment rights. To date, she hasn’t done so.
Asked why during an interview last week, she said she couldn’t comment further, citing “pending litigation.”
Extremist portrayals
As the primary campaign enters its final hours, the images from July 10, 2023, threaten to rebound on Majeroni in another way.
Watson has cited them as evidence she doesn’t “back the blue,” and the Police Benevolent Association has endorsed him because of them.
In turn, Majeroni has accused Peach State Values, the political action committee allied with Watson, of defaming her by stating that she had broken Georgia law, allegedly by seeking to push her way back into the election board hearing room after police ushered her out. She told The Current last week that she was only trying to retrieve her phone and car keys.
Then there are some of Majeroni’s responses in the media whirlwind that followed her expulsion from the board meeting. There appears to be little evidence, if any, that she disputed the extremist portrayals of Chatham County and Georgia that her interviewers drew.
The words “Gestapo in Georgia” appeared in bold letters on the screen during Majeroni’s interview with Peters, whom the Anti-Defamation League describes as an “antisemitic conspiracy theorist” who “regularly promotes anti-LGBTQ+ and white supremacist beliefs on his show and social media, and he has engaged in Holocaust denial.”
He prefaced his interview with Majeroni by calling Georgia a state “always narrowly divided between good and evil” and — with Joe Biden’s election as president in 2020 — the “heart of radical leftism in the South.”
As Bannon wound up his interview with Majeroni, he called her experience with the Chatham election board an example of “fascism in Georgia.” John Fredericks deplored the “jackboot” tactics of the board and the police.
In her interview with The Current last week, Majeroni at first said she “wasn’t aware” of those characterizations of Georgia or the election board proceedings, then said it had been almost a year since she had listened to the interviews.
Asked if she would comment on them now, she replied: “At the advice of my counsel, I’m not allowed to say any more than there is pending litigation.”