But is it criminal?
Lindsey Graham appears to have committed a felony.
On Monday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—who, like Graham, is a Republican—told the Washington Post that Graham asked him if he could throw out all mail ballots from counties with a high rate of signature mismatch. Raffensperger later clarified that he believed Graham wanted his office to throw out valid, legally cast ballots. The senator has contested this account.
Graham’s alleged request is unseemly and corrupt. But is it criminal? In short, yes, according to multiple Georgia election law experts. If Raffensperger’s account is true, there is virtually no doubt that Graham committed a crime under Georgia law.
But nothing will happen to him as a result.
It might be tempting to dismiss Graham’s alleged interference as unscrupulous strategizing blown out of proportion. But Georgia has a sordid history of prosecuting putative voter fraud involving far more innocent conduct. Graham does not deserve a pass simply because he is a wealthy white senator.
More the opposite, I would think – because he’s a rich white senator he has far more power and opportunity to steal an election than your random citizen. It’s not more forgivable because he’s a senator, it’s much much much less so.
Your point reminds me of a ridiculous argument I had with my department as a graduate student many many years ago. They were rolling out some kind of ‘ethics in x’ module which they’d billed as something like ‘what you’re allowed to get away with’–I was disgusted that I had to explain to them that an ‘ethics in x’ module for our profession should be about how we as x’s were MORE accountable and MORE visible than ‘civilians’; we should be debating how to bring stronger ethical positions into our work, as people with influence on the wider world, what those positions should be, and how we could enact and enforce them, not talking about what our minimum standards are and what the existing law says we can and can’t get away with.
guest,
I can only say that my experience comports with yours. To some extent, I understand it — for example, the ethics exam that lawyers are required to take tests your knowledge of the ethical rules. That’s as it should be; an exam that asked “what would you do” would be trivial to pass, because (except in those rare situations where you are caught between two ethical rules) you could always answer with the most conservative answer and thus ensure a high score.
But my (required) ethics class in law school was similar: everything was focused on the rules. In fairness, I should say that the professor was trying to create the “caught between two rules” scenario by arguing that one’s duty as a zealous advocate required one to do everything that might possibly help your client, even at the expense of sacrificing your reputation and credibility etc. Arguments that “but presumably my clients, including this one, hire me for my credibility and reputation” were rejected.
That is, certainly, one point of view. But my recollection (and granted, it’s been decades now) is that there wasn’t an ethics course on offer that really tried to grapple with the actual morality of legal practice. I did have one professor who addressed it, in a non-ethics course, which is one of the many reasons why she was my favorite.
On reflection, I realise that at the time I was probably naively misunderstanding what ‘ethics in x’ is actually supposed to be about. I mean, our company has a mandatory ‘ethics in business’ training which is designed to, as you say, make sure we know what is and isn’t legal, and provide a more detailed assessment of what might be considered ‘edge cases’ or where the law might not be perfectly understandable to laypeople (‘is it considered bribery if you take a potential client to lunch?’). What I as a grad student thought ‘ethics in x’ meant was ‘how can we practice x ethically, and how can we come to consensus, as a profession, to answer this question?’
To be fair to me and other students, however, our department only started explicitly addressing the concept of ‘ethics in x’ in response to advocacy from a student group inspired by this organisation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Student/Young_Pugwash
So we were certainly asking for and expecting the latter even if we got the former; maybe we weren’t explicit enough to the department about what we wanted and expected.