Rigging
During the 2020 election cycle in Georgia, Donald Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state. His efforts to manipulate the electoral process failed after Raffensperger stood up to the president and defended the integrity of the election. But if the Georgia legislature has its way, Republicans could have a much easier time overturning the will of voters in future elections.
The Georgia House of Representatives passed a major power grab on Thursday on a party-line vote that would remove Raffensperger as the chair and a voting member of the state election board, which oversees the certification of elections and voting rules, and instead allow the GOP-controlled legislature to appoint a majority of the board’s members, including the chair. “This is extraordinarily dangerous,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the former election protection director of the Georgia Democratic Party. “When you’re appointing the majority of the body that you’re responsible to, it’s self-dealing.”
The state board, in turn, would have extraordinary power under the bill to take over county election boards it views as underperforming, raising the possibility that elections officials appointed by and beholden to the heavily gerrymandered Republican legislature could take over election operations in Democratic strongholds like Atlanta’s Fulton County, where Trump and his allies spread conspiracy theories about “suitcases” of ballots being counted by election officials in November after GOP poll monitors had left.
This is baaaaaaaaaaaad.
The Georgia House bill not only affects who will oversee elections, but also who gets to vote. In January, the right-wing group True the Vote challenged the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in runoff elections won by Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, based on an unreliable postal database. Only a few dozen votes were actually thrown out, but under another provision of the House bill, future challenges could find much greater success. If the bill becomes law, conservative activists would be able to challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters, and local election boards would be required to hear these challenges within 10 days or face sanctions from the state election board, which could pressure county officials to hastily remove eligible voters from the rolls or wrongly reject their ballots.
In short they’re openly rigging the system in their favor, and if it goes to the Supreme Court it will be upheld by the conservative majority.
It will be Selma 1964, or worse.
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