Trump Reveals Plan To Subvert Georgia’s Elections

On Saturday, Donald Trump went to Georgia to rally with his faithful. Like a washed-up Vegas performer, Trump offered his audience what they came for — his greatest hits of hate, lies and bizarre digressions.

Between praise for real dictators and admiration for fictitious serial murders, Trump managed to do a bit of business. Calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory,” Trump name-checked three members of the otherwise obscure Georgia State Election Board.

Notably, Trump did not mention that the Election Board has a total of five-members – four of whom were appointed by Republicans. Nor did he explain why he singled out three of the four. Perhaps it was because three who Trump mentioned from the stage: Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King have refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020.

Omitted by Trump was the board’s chair — an executive at Waffle House appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp (R). In a sign of the divide between them, the three Trump-approved board members recently staged a coup of sorts; they attempted to conduct business without the chair or the lone Democrat being present.

Targeting the people responsible for overseeing rules of elections has become a familiar tactic among election deniers. In 2020, Donald Trump and Ronna McDaniel tried to block the certification of election results in Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit.

The night the county voted to certify the results, the then-sitting president of the United States and the chair of the Republican National Committee called the two local Republican election officials to convince them not to sign the certification documents. Sounding like a mob boss, McDaniel was recorded telling them: “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it. … We will get you attorneys.” Trump added: “We’ll take care of that.”

When that failed, Republican officials tried to convince the two Republicans on the statewide canvassing board to reject the results from the entire state. One did his legal duty and certified Joe Biden as the winner, in the face of enormous pressure from his own party. Republicans refused to submit his name for renomination in 2021.

Since then, we have seen election deniers refuse to certify the accurate results of free and fair elections around the country. In Cochise County, Arizona, the board’s failure to certify the results led to civil lawsuits and ultimately criminal charges. In Pennsylvania, New Mexico and elsewhere this problem has grown and spread.

While not all Republicans are election deniers, all election deniers are Republicans.

Not mentioned by Trump at his rally is another proposed rule that could have even more profound impacts on elections in Georgia. The GOP-controlled Election Board wants to broaden the discretion local election officials have to review results as a part of the certification process. Rather than a ministerial role of arithmetic, the new rule would empower local election deniers to conduct their own reviews of underlying election documents. A lawsuit seeking the same results was filed earlier this year in Fulton County.

While Trump and those loyal to him bear the blame for this attack on democracy, the nature of the problem has often been misunderstood. Many in the pro-democracy movement desperately want a simple narrative in which the election officials are the heroes of the story. In this telling, hardworking election officials find themselves standing up to partisans and to protect the sanctity of our elections.

Unfortunately, the reality is much more complicated. Rolling Stone recently reported that there are more than 70 election deniers in office in key swing states. After four years of infiltration, the actual number is almost certainly in the hundreds if not thousands.

The nonpartisan desire to lift up election officials obscures a critical characteristic of these election deniers. While not all Republicans are election deniers, all election deniers are Republicans. And many Republican election officials operate along on an uncomfortable continuum between voter suppression and outright election subversion.

As we have seen in Georgia, this difference is smaller than many people want to believe, and it is converging as we approach November. While Kemp signed Joe Biden’s election certificate in 2020, he later admitted that part of what motivated his support for Georgia’s 2021 voter suppression law was the frustration he felt that Biden and other Democrats had won.

Though Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) refused to “find” 11,780 votes in 2020, he has championed legislation to allow for mass voter challenges — a tactic increasingly used by the right-wing to disenfranchise citizens. In that vein, he recently unveiled a website that allows the submission of names to be removed from the voting rolls via the internet.  

The real heroes of democracy are the voters. The people who overcome the obstacles Republicans put in their way to register to vote. The citizens who wait in long lines at polling places to cast their ballots. The voters who navigate the series of arbitrary objections to ensure their votes count.

The pro-voting, pro-democracy movement needs to spend the months ahead centering on their needs and protecting their rights. Where election officials are pro-voter, we need to support them. Where they are not, they deserve only our scorn and condemnation.