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An interesting yet completely predictable thing happened earlier this month: Georgia Republicans used Donald Trump’s election interference propaganda to kick democracy aside by supporting a policy that, among other things, effectively makes it legal for GOP legislators to engage in election interference.
Essentially, the Georgia State Election Board voted in favor of a policy that would give legislators the right to flat-out refuse to certify votes in the 2024 presidential race if they believe, with or without evidence, that the election process has been tampered with.
(When I say, “with or without evidence,” I’m being very generous. No allegation Trump or any other Republican has made regarding rampant voter fraud in America has ever been presented with tangible evidence. I’ll circle back to this point later.)
“I don’t know if you’ve heard but the Georgia State Election Board is in a very positive way… They’re on fire, they’re doing a great job,” Trump said at a rally in Atlanta on Aug. 3, before naming three Republican members of the board — Rick Jeffares, Dr. Janice Johnston, and Janelle King. “Three pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory,” Trump called them.
Three days later, the State Election Board met at the Georgia State Capitol. Over the course of two days, Jeffares, Johnston, and King outvoted a fourth Republican and the board’s lone Democrat to pass two rules proposed by election deniers that will go into effect immediately.
One of the rules allows pro-Trump election officials in Georgia’s 159 counties to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results. Election certification has long been a ministerial, rather than discretionary task, according to experts and judges. Now, county election officials in Georgia could hold up certification of votes that are crucial to determining which candidate wins Georgia, a state where Republicans control the legislature, the secretary of state’s office, the governor’s mansion and, now, the State Election Board, in the form of a MAGA majority.
“The State Election Board has become a MAGA government body,” says Max Flugrath, communications director for Fair Fight, the left-leaning voting rights group founded by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
Republicans would likely say Flugrath is being hyperbolic. He’s not.
A few simple and actual unassailable facts
When Donald Trump first responded to losing his bid for reelection in 2020 by throwing an extended and very public temper tantrum and embarking on possibly the most transparent propaganda campaign in modern politics, the director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Christopher Krebs, said there was no evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential race.
The Department of Justice said there was no evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential race. Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, who had been a dedicated MAGA stooge, said there was no evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential race.
Source: Anna Moneymaker / Getty
But instead of facing reality like a normal and even mildly well-adjusted person, Trump fired Krebs for telling the truth instead of backing his lie. Trump denounced Barr as a “coward who didn’t do his job” for telling the truth instead of backing his lie. Donald Trump ignored everyone who told him he was wrong, put his now-thoroughly disgraced and disbarred attorney, Rudy Giuliani, square in his pocket, and proceeded to file suits in some 60 courts of law, which only resulted in dozens of judges across lower courts, appellate courts and supreme courts finding that there was no evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential race.
Despite this, 253 key political leaders across red-state America believed or pretended to believe Trump’s lie, and, more to the point, 147 Republican legislators voted to overturn a legal election based on Trump’s lie.
The real steal that needs to be stopped
If the vast majority of Republican congressional leaders had their way and they weren’t out-voted by every Democratic legislator and a handful of Republicans who weren’t interested in holding democracy hostage to their MAGA messiah’s marching orders, Trump’s lie would have been more than a lie—it would have been legalized election interference.
Now, the thing Trump tried and fortunately failed to do on a nationwide level, he’s coming close to pulling off in Georgia, where, lest we forget, he’s currently indicted on RICO charges of—you guessed it—election interference. In the Peach State, Trump is demonstrating way more influence over state Republicans than any one Republican should have—especially one who doesn’t even reside in or represent Georgia—and he’s using that influence to push out officials who won’t back his lie.
More from Rolling Stone:
The board also voted to reopen a case in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, regarding double-counted ballots — ballot counting errors that were not nearly enough to overcome Trump’s 11,779-vote deficit to President Joe Biden in the state in 2020.
The rules rammed through last week were made possible by Trump’s personal interference in the makeup of the board. Earlier this year, as Rolling Stone reported, Trump privately lobbied Georgia Republicans to replace election board member Ed Lindsey, a relatively moderate Republican who did not broadly support election denier policies. After Lindsey resigned, he was replaced by King, a conservative media personality with no experience administering elections.
Less than three months after King took her seat on the board, the MAGA takeover produced policies that will cause “chaos” in November, Democratic board member Sara Tindall-Ghazal tells Rolling Stone.
“I think it’s important to put it all in context with what’s happened in the last month,” Tindall-Ghazal says, noting the surging support for Harris’ presidential campaign. “Yes, we’ve got some rules that are particularly egregious and threaten a smooth election process but you’ve also got some really pernicious rules that will cause chaos right at the election.”
Even now, Trump presents his absolutely baseless claims of election fraud as if they were unassailable facts that have been proven, despite the opposite being true and easily verifiable. We can all expect his delusional Trumpaganda campaign to continue in full force now that Vice President Kamala Harris is surging in the polls and drawing visibly larger crowds for her rallies than he is.
Source: The Washington Post / Getty
After all, it’s not like his voter fraud claims began in 2020—it’s his go-to whenever he loses or expects to lose. In 2016, during the GOP primaries, Trump lost the Iowa and Colorado caucuses to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. He blamed voter fraud.
“Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified,” Trump tweeted that year, to which Cruz responded, “Donald, it ain’t stealing when the voters vote against you — it is the voters reclaiming this country and reclaiming sanity.”
This, of course, was a notable departure from Cruz’s Jan.6, 2021 speech, where he said backing Trump’s evidence-less fraud claims, “For those who respect the voters, simply telling the voters, ‘Go jump in a lake, the fact that you have deep concerns is of no moment to us’ — that jeopardizes, I believe, the legitimacy of this and subsequent elections.”
(Fun fact: minutes after Cruz said this, a mob of MAGA minions attacked the U.S. Capitol.)
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In 2018, ahead of the midterm elections, when Democrats won back the House, Trump tweeted shortly before Election Day, “Law Enforcement has been strongly notified to watch closely for any ILLEGAL VOTING which may take place in Tuesday’s Election (or Early Voting). Anyone caught will be subject to the Maximum Criminal Penalties allowed by law.” The same year, Trump disbanded a voting integrity commission he launched in an effort to find evidence of widespread voter fraud. Why did he disband the commission? You guessed it again: it found zero evidence of widespread voter fraud. (He could have saved himself time by consulting virtually every study that has been done on the matter, as they all have shown that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in America.)
Trump and the GOP want to steal elections by lying about elections being stolen from them. In Georgia, and across the country, they keep coming up with policies to solve election security issues that don’t exist. They want to cheat to win while calling everyone else cheaters.
This is the true danger of Donald Trump.
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