How Trump’s ‘pit bulls’ in Georgia gave him a powerful tool to throw out votes
At a rally in Georgia days before a crucial vote at the state’s election board, Donald Trump praised three of the board’s five members as “pit bulls fighting for victory.”
“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Georgia State Election Board is in a very positive way,” Trump said in Atlanta on August 3. “They’re on fire. They’re doing a great job.”
Those members — Rick Jeffares, Janelle King and Janice Johnston — ultimately voted for sweeping rule changes to how counties can certify election rules in a state that the former president lost by narrow margins in 2020, and where he is now criminally charged for his attempts to reverse that loss.
Election analysts predict the state could come down to even smaller vote margins in November, potentially inviting challenges from Trump-allied groups to do what Trump couldn’t in 2020, thanks to new, potentially illegal rules that could invite partisan investigations. The Democratic Party and a group of Georgia Democrats — with the support of Kamala Harris’s campaign — are now suing over the changes.
“Everyone who cares about American democracy and who wants to make sure their vote counts should be alarmed,” Georgia Democratic Representative Sam Park told The Independent.
With the first days of early voting approaching, “there’s a lot of cause for alarm,” according to Park, and there’s “a lot of fear and concern” among voters in his district who are worried about what happens to their ballots after they cast their votes.
Election workers are under an “incredible amount of undue pressure” from voter suppression threats, Park explained, and the “brazen effort in which unelected partisans have taken over the local elections boards, where elected leaders have conceded to their base, to the far right, in continuing to base changes on fear and conspiracy theories.”
The pro-Trump majority on Georgia’s election board has drawn national scrutiny for a rule that allows county boards to make “reasonable inquiries” before certifying election results.
But the rule does not define what a “reasonable inquiry” is, nor does it place any limits on how long an inquiry can last, or what documents members can demand (and then take home with them), before reconvening to certify — or reject — the results. There are 159 counties in the state, so there could end up being 159 ways that county boards interpret the changes.
The rules, critics warn, effectively bake into a clerical certification process what Trump and his allies tried to do with their spurious efforts to challenge election results in 2020.
Next month, the board will take up another rule that would require counties to perform hand recounts of ballots at the local precinct level, on election night, which opponents fear could compromise ballot integrity and open a window for legal challenges from pro-Trump groups to cast doubt on results.
“Our State Election Board exists to protect the right to vote for all Georgians, not to favor any single candidate in any election,” Georgia congresswoman and state party chair Nikema Williams said in a statement shared with The Independent.
The board is “determined to establish a new power of not certifying an election result should their preferred candidate lose — as he did in 2020,” she added. “That’s why we’re fighting back, and we will beat them in court like we will beat them at the ballot box this fall.”
State-level changes to election administration in the wake of 2020’s election denialism are a “democracy catastrophe and an ethics disaster,” according to legal scholars Norm Eisen and Richard Painter.
