A closer race, and troubling questions about those supervising it

When the newly-reconstituted Georgia State Election Board held a surprise meeting July 12 to push along new election rules, it was enough to prompt a warning from Attorney General Chris Carr and a lawsuit brought by a watchdog group.

To be perfectly honest about it, however, all this happened after the presidential debate in Atlanta, when Donald Trump’s margin in the state appeared to be moving from within the margin of error to a solid lead. It didn’t appear likely that Georgia would play the pivotal role this year that it did in 2020. The board’s actions, even if highly questionable, didn’t seem as critical as they would have four years ago.

Now look.

Two days after American Oversight, an election watchdog group, filed suit against the board for violating the Georgia Open Meetings Act, President Joe Biden dropped out and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. By the end of last week, according to vote.org, a nonpartisan group that promotes voter registration, there were 100,000 new voters in the nation, with Georgia third behind Texas and Florida in registrations for the week. Younger voters made up 84 percent of the total.

Even more than the tightening in the polls and the Harris campaign’s huge fundraising calls, this represents a significant change. Not all these new voters are going to turn out to be for Harris, but enough will be to make this a much closer state in November than it would have been.

This puts the activities of the new board in a deeply troubling light.

In June, Rolling Stone magazine published a lengthy story quoting sources saying the Trump campaign had chosen Georgia as the laboratory for taking control of the election apparatus in every state. The story made the fantastic claim that Trump’s lawyers plan to challenge the results in Georgia, even if Trump carries the state.

“You can’t let the left get away with it just because their cheating did not work,” one lawyer told the magazine.

The election board, which meets again Tuesday afternoon, has done nothing so far to reduce any concerns Rolling Stone raised about whether it intends to preside over an election that is fair to both sides. (In that Tuesday meeting, which took place online, the board walked back the rules passed in the June 12 meeting.)

The changes which have been made since the 2020 election have all been enacted in the name of ballot “security,” and yet no Democrats can feel more secure that their votes will be counted this year, and only a few Republicans will believe the results if Harris pulls an upset in the state.

The way the election board and state election officials conduct themselves over the next few months could determine whether this year’s election in Georgia ends in bloodshed. If that sounds overblown, consider the mob that showed up at Atlanta election worker Ruby Freeman’s house on the same day others were rioting in Washington and take it up a few notches. There are too many plausible scenarios for either side to commit violence against the other to take the possibility lightly.

The new rules make it likely there will be a huge increase in voter challenges, resulting in chaos at local election offices and the possibility of election night delays slipping from hours into days. There is also a very real possibility of some county election boards refusing to certify their election results, raising the possibility of months of post-election turmoil.

Three of the four members of the election board have said they either don’t accept or have doubts about whether Biden carried Georgia in 2020, which puts them at odds with the Republican governor who appointed them and the Republican secretary of state with whom they are supposed to be working closely. However they come down on the last election, all of them have a solemn responsibility to conduct an election that isn’t a laboratory for testing anything but the will of the voters.