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New State Election Board Members Sow Chaos on Trump’s Behalf

From left, State Election board member Janelle King, executive director Mike Coan and member Rick Jeffares. Credit: Stanley Dunlap/Georgia Recorder

In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, the Republican-controlled Georgia General Assembly passed a 98-page monster of a bill called the “Election Integrity Act of 2021.” The bill was so repellent that the state’s Republican lieutenant governor at the time, Geoff Duncan, refused to preside over Senate debate on the measure. Once it passed and was signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp, Major League Baseball was so appalled it yanked that year’s All-Star Game from the Truist Field in Cobb County, home of the Atlanta Braves, and even Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines condemned the legislation.

Indeed, the bill was widely panned by critics as a voter suppression measure, and attracted barrels of bad ink for a range of jaw-dropping provisions, including measures that imposed tighter restrictions on most methods of voting, gave the State Election Board greater authority over local boards, and allowed individual citizens to challenge others’ right to vote.

All but lost in the 35,000-word bill, however, were changes that set the stage for the current rule-making soap opera now playing out at the State Election Board. Perhaps first and foremost, the legislation fired Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as chairman. Raffensperger had, of course, had the poor judgment to reject then incumbent President Donald J. Trump’s entreaties to overturn the results of Georgia’s presidential voting.

In addition to dumping Raffensperger, however, the new law produced a shake-up in board membership that has arguably transformed a body that once prided itself on even-handed nonpartisanship into an arm of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. At an Atlanta rally in August, Trump himself praised three new GOP appointees to the board—Rick Jeffares, Janice Johnston and Janelle King—as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”

It’s worth pausing here for a moment to suggest that this transformation of the State Election Board represents a new apex in a process that has been underway for about the last quarter of a century. For at least most of 20 th century, electioneering was a relatively straightforward process. In the last couple of decades, however, it has morphed into a 365-day-a-year grind that includes one pre-election skirmish after another, and then a never-ending series of court challenges and other tactics once the votes are counted. The general election is just a single date on the calendar, and arguably not even the most important one.

The 2000 presidential race was a key milestone in this evolution. That race—between incumbent Democratic Vice President Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, then governor of Texas—gave us the “hanging chads” on ballots in Dade County, FL, the infamous “Brooks Brothers riot” that virtually shut down a manual recounting process that might have tipped the Florida vote (and the national election) to Gore, and that arguably presaged the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Since then, Democratic and Republican political operatives alike have basically reverse- engineered the entire election process and worked to take advantage of every part of the state’s election machinery. Legislative gerrymandering has been elevated to a computer-driven art form. The 2021 “Election Integrity Act” limited the use of ballot drop boxes, imposed new voter ID requirements for securing an absentee ballot, and shortened the period for requesting an absentee ballot. New legislation passed in 2023 made it easier to challenge the legitimacy of large groups of registered voters.

Now comes the pro-Trump election board with an eleventh-hour election rule that seems guaranteed, at a minimum, to complicate and delay election night vote counting. Enacted less than 50 days before the 2024 presidential election, the new rule requires that all the ballots cast at every precinct be counted by hand by three precinct workers until all their counts match—and to determine if their manual counts match the tally from the electronic vote scanner.

Theoretically, this process might not take a great deal of time. Marilyn Marks, executive director of the non-partisan Coalition for Good Governance and a well-regarded expert on Georgia’s election system, estimates the process might take no more than 15 minutes at the average Georgia voting precinct. I crunched the numbers from the 2020 presidential election and came up with a similar estimate.

But the time required is only part of the problem. A wide range of county elections officials and voting rights activists have come out against the rule changes, arguing that they come too late in the process, will necessitate additional training and work requirements for poll workers, and impose costs that are not funded. Perhaps more significantly, Attorney General Chris Carr, himself a Republican, has signaled that the new rules may not withstand legal scrutiny.

Natalie Crawford, executive director of Georgia First, described as a “cross-partisan” nonprofit organization whose mission includes supporting election access and security, testified before the election board last month and said this: “‘The instability, injustice and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished.’

“Those are the words of James Madison,” Crawford continued, “and as a lifelong Republican I fear we are living in his worst nightmare…”

A great many Georgia voters, Democrats and many Republicans alike, no doubt agree.

Charles Hayslett is the author of the long-running troubleingodscountry.com blog. He is also the Scholar in Residence at the Center for Middle Georgia Studies at Middle Georgia State University. The views expressed in his columns are his own and are not necessarily those of the center or the university.

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