The Trump supporters who took over Georgia’s election board – podcast

In the 2020 US presidential election, when the Democrats won the key swing state of Georgia, Donald Trump made attempts to interfere with the result. Trump made a phone call to Georgia’s top election official, Brad Raffensperger, in which he told him to “find 11,780 votes”.

What risk do election deniers pose this time?

In 2021, attorney Sara Tindall Ghazal became a member of the five-person Georgia state election board. “Up until then, it had actually been incredibly mundane, right?” she tells Michael Safi. “It was one of those small, obscure boards that only people who are deeply invested in elections and election law had any interest in or any involvement in.”

In the years since, Tindall Ghazal has watched as attorneys on the board were replaced by Republican activists “who did not have any background in elections and election law election procedure”.

Justin Glawe, a journalist and creator of the newsletter American Doom, has documented the growing threat to election integrity in Georgia.

“Republicans in the state legislature and throughout Georgia, in response to 2020, saw the state election board as a mechanism to employ denier-based tactics,” Glawe tells Safi. “So the first thing they did was they created a law that kicked secretary of state Brad Raffensberger off the board … and then eventually they succeeded in getting three hardcore pro-Trump election deniers seated on the board that now have a voting majority.

“And what those folks have done is they have launched investigations into unfounded allegations of fraud in the 2020 election and in other elections, and have passed some really controversial rules that this past week were pretty much deemed illegal by a pair of judges in Atlanta.”

How could election-denier officials jeopardise the presidential election in Georgia?

“I think this is a pretty easy scenario to imagine,” Glawe tells Safi. “It will start with election deniers at county election boards making unfounded allegations of fraud and irregularities – if Trump loses, this is. From there, those members can possibly vote against certifying the results of elections in those counties. They can call for investigations by local prosecutors to look into unfounded fraud allegations that could potentially hold up statewide certification, and if that is held up, that could cause the governor to miss an important deadline under federal law to get Georgia’s statewide vote tallies to Congress, which then has to certify them on January 6.”

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Photograph: Arvin Temkar/AP

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