Trump Is Preparing To Challenge The Election. Georgia Could Be The Focal Point.

Trump and the RNC have organized their operation around challenging the results of the 2024 election. New Georgia Election Board rule changes give them a dangerous tool for disrupting certification.

Donald Trump at an Arizona rally - August 23, 2024 (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)

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Days after Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment for the plot to overturn the 2020 election, Donald Trump made a self-incriminating statement that Americans should be paying attention to.

In an interview that aired on Sunday, Trump told Fox News, “Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you have every right to do it, you get indicted…”

Not only could these words be used against him in his election interference trial, but they’re also a warning of what’s to come in the 2024 election.

Trump believes that he is above the law and that he has every right to corruptly interfere in elections. This was showcased in 2020 when Trump launched a multifaceted plot to steal the election, and there are indications that Trump and his allies are gearing up to try again this year.

Trump’s rhetoric and political operation have been organized around challenging the results of the 2024 election.

The Trump Campaign and the Republican Party have notably not been primarily focused on organizing a robust ground game. Instead of focusing only on get-out-the-vote efforts and recruiting doorknockers, they’ve focused on building out an apparatus to challenge the election.

The Trump Campaign and the Republican National Committee are deploying over 100,000 poll watchers and lawyers to swing states to monitor vote counting. This is part of the RNC’s “Election Integrity” unit, pushing election denialism in the name of integrity. You would think those 100,000 people would be better served as canvassers to reach voters, but it’s increasingly clear Trump and his allies believe they should prioritize efforts to challenge the result rather than win fair and square.

These actions are coupled with Trump’s repeated assertion that “We don’t need the votes,” claiming he has enough votes. “Don’t worry about voting. The voting — we got plenty of votes,” Trump has told rallygoers.

Trump’s words and actions read, to me, like a candidate who is going to rely on his efforts to overturn the election and who believes he could pull it off this time.

This comes as Republican states have launched a systemic effort to purge voter rolls. Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced he has purged over 1 million voters since 2021. Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, and Ohio have also announced voter roll purges.

Aside from classic voter suppression tactics, Trump allies have taken on new approaches that arose in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection. Trump’s first attempt to overturn the 2020 election spotlighted key vulnerabilities in our election system, and since then, he and his allies have sought to exploit those holes in our processes.

One example of this is the Republican effort to target how elections are certified and the roles of local election officials. Georgia went the furthest in this endeavor, making a rule change that could prove to be the deciding factor in the 2024 election.

Let’s dive in.

How Georgia’s Rule Changes Could Impact The Election

Georgia State Election Board (CNN)

Earlier this year, Trump allies pressured one of the more moderate Republicans on the five-member Georgia State Election Board, Edward Lindsey, to resign. Speaker of the Georgia House Jon Burns (R) appointed his replacement, Janelle King, a right-wing media personality and Trump loyalist. The now 3-2 MAGA majority board could then make any changes they wanted.

The newly empowered majority began issuing new rules in collaboration with right-wing election conspiracy theory groups like the Election Research Institute.

Last month, the Georgia Election Board issued two rules that could prove decisive in impacting the outcome of the 2024 election. The new rules empower local election officials in any of Georgia’s 159 counties to question the vote counts, potentially delaying certification and throwing the results into uncertainty.

One of the rules empowers county election boards to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before the certification of the results. The second rule allows county election board members “to examine all election-related documentation created during the conduct of elections.” Both are intentionally vague, granting local election officials the authority to question the results of an election with no evidence, conduct an investigation, and delay or potentially block certification.

These rule changes turn the usually routine role of a vote counter and certifier into an investigator. Any single partisan official could now declare a baseless suspicion they deem reasonable and then conduct an inquiry into vote counts in any of Georgia’s many counties.

Georgia has a mandatory election certification deadline of November 12, so this rule change could very well throw results into disarray beyond that date.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, one of the key Republicans in 2020 who spoke out forcefully against Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, released a statement in mid-August criticizing these new rules. Raffensperger lambasted the changes as “11th-hour chaos” that undermines key provisions of Georgia election law:

“These misguided, last-minute changes from unelected bureaucrats who have never run an election and seem to reject the advice of anyone who ever has could cause serious problems in an election that otherwise will be secure and accurate.”

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who also opposed Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has asked his attorney general if he has the legal authority to remove members of this election board. This is worth watching.

The Democratic National Committee and Georgia Democrats have since filed a lawsuit against the Georgia State Election Board, seeking to overturn these new rules. The Harris Campaign has joined the lawsuit, further showcasing the importance of Georgia’s maneuverings.

At an Atlanta rally in early August, Donald Trump went out of his way to praise the Georgia Election Board members who passed the rule changes:

“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. Three members: Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King. Three people, they’re all pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory. They’re fighting.”

Trump then had Janice Johnston, who was in the crowd, stand up to receive uproarious applause from rallygoers. Trump clearly sees these Georgia rule changes as key to a potential effort to overturn a Kamala Harris victory. And for good reason.

In August, Nick Corasaniti, who has been reporting on the Republican effort to target the electoral process for years at The New York Times, published an in-depth piece that spotlighted this effort titled “How a Far-Right Takeover of Georgia’s Election Board Could Swing the Election.”

In an episode of The Daily, Corasaniti spoke about how these rule changes could result in a “nightmare scenario” where the election comes down to Georgia and Harris is winning by a slim margin, but Trump allies use these new rules to delay certification past the state and federal deadlines. It’s worth outlining what he suggested in full:

“So this would exactly be the nightmare scenario that, you know, Democrats and election officials are concerned about across the country. So, local election officials in Georgia have to certify the election by November 12. Now, with these new rules in place, imagine a county or two in Georgia, and it doesn't even have to be Fulton County or a county that would make it determinative. It could just be any county - raise their hand saying, ‘I've got evidence of fraud, or even I have concerns, and I need to investigate this fraud.’ They continued their investigation and blew past that deadline. We're into our kind of first legal gray area here.

And now we're getting media attention. And now the Trump campaign and Republican allies are making this a story and a political story. And it creates this kind of movement similar to what we saw in 2020. But I think what everyone has to remember about 2020 is there was a real vacuum of evidence. So what these laws and these local officials would be doing is creating at least that veneer of evidence. So now we're heading towards December 11th, which is the federal deadline to certify slates of electors to the Electoral College. And if we're still in this gray area, you could see a Secretary of State or a governor saying, ‘Well, the election's not certified. I don't know what I can do here. Hmm.’

And missing that deadline furthers the political legitimacy of the doubts being spread by right-wing allies. And then we're in a pretty precarious position heading into Congress' certification of the Electoral College, which happens on January 6. Now there's pretext for, say, multiple Senators or members of the House to say, ‘Well, there's evidence of fraud in Georgia, and who knows if that's all that we know about. You know, there could be more.’ And it becomes, again, this political movement using these like veneers of, of evidence to possibly throw into question the results in Congress.

And that's how it could spiral to a really dangerous place. But it has to miss all of these checkpoints and lawsuits and places where courts could come in to get to that.”

Those checkpoints and lawsuits are what Democrats have been preparing for. Democrats have hired hundreds of lawyers, ready to challenge any post-election efforts to overturn the 2024 election. The problem is, if those cases make it up to the Supreme Court, we don’t know exactly how they’d rule this time around. After the right-wing majority overturned Roe v. Wade and issued their truly authoritarian presidential immunity ruling, all bets are off.

While the bipartisan Electoral Count Reform Act made key changes that increased the threshold for each chamber of Congress to object to electors and clarified that the Vice President’s role is purely administrative and they can’t choose to decertify electors, it still leaves the selection of electors to the states. It’s unclear how this new law would handle a state that doesn’t submit electors at all. Would it be thrown to the House? Possibly. Only time will tell.

Could Republicans in Congress use a Georgia result objection as a means to challenge other results? The domino effect here could be dangerous. While we’re definitely in a better position to rebuff an effort similar to the 2020 election plot, Trump and his allies have also spent years preparing to give it another go.

We have to be vigilant, and most importantly, voters have to turn out in such overwhelming numbers and win as many battleground states as possible so that it’s indisputable and we don’t have a reality where the election could hinge on a state like Georgia.

Once again, it’s up to us to prevent the “nightmare scenario."