A red flashing light at the dumpster fire

It can be hard to sort out what’s news in the middle of a dumpster fire.

There were a lot of storylines stemming from former President Donald Trump’s Atlanta rally Saturday, beginning with Trump’s bitter attack on Gov. Brian Kemp, his congratulating Vladimir Putin for last week’s prisoner swap, his swipes at Georgia State University, and somewhere in there, his shots at Vice President Kamala Harris.

But in the midst of all this clickbait, something really serious happened, and it hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Trump publicly recognized three members of the State Election Board, who were sitting right in front of the speaker’s podium.

“They’re on fire. They’re doing a great job,” Trump said to cheers from the audience. He said the three board members, Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King, were “all pitbulls, fighting for honesty, transparency and integrity.”

The first line in the election board’s code of conduct states that members “shall be honest, fair, and avoid any appearance of conflict and/or impropriety.” If sitting on the front row of a major rally basking in praise from a presidential candidate doesn’t look conflicted and improper for an election board member, what does?

Here is why this is a much, much more important story than the crowd size at a couple of rallies or a self-defeating spat over the last election.

Four years ago, the election board was chaired by Secretary Of State Brad Raffensperger. The legislature stripped that job from him because he wouldn’t contradict the outcome of three recounts and “find” the votes Trump asked him for. All five current members — appointed by the governor, the House, the Senate and the Democratic and Republican parties respectively — joined the board after the 2020 election.

That puts a majority of the board — Johnston, the Republican Party appointee; Jeffares, the Senate appointee; and King, the House appointee — in the hands of people who have questioned the thrice-recounted results of the last election, and implicitly Raffensperger’s conduct. Already, because of their votes, the election board has been warned by the attorney general’s office about running afoul of the open records law and sued by a citizen’s group, causing it to walk back a controversial action.

This doesn’t appear to be just a small part of Trump’s strategy for winning Georgia. On the contrary, after his speech Saturday it looks like most of it. For all the talk there’s been about the Trump campaign losing no time in defining Harris, the candidate didn’t seem too focused on that Saturday. He mispronounced “Fani” more than he did “Kamala,” which is one indication where his mind was wandering.

If Trump had been narrowly focused on getting the most votes in Georgia this November, he wouldn’t have veered into a lengthy attack on Kemp, who has what is hands-down the best voter turnout operation in the state.

A word, incidentally, about Trump’s seemingly gratuitous swipe at Marty Kemp. For a few months there’s been a rumor, not substantial enough to make much of, that the Kemp camp was taking a look at how the state’s first lady might fare if she rather than her husband challenged U.S. Sen. John Ossoff.

Could Trump have gotten wind of the same rumor? Anything’s possible, when you’re getting advice about Georgia politics from Bill White, the former New Yorker and current Floridian who headed the failed Buckhead City movement. According to Greg Bluestein of the AJC, White, who held sway briefly in Atlanta as a sort of Northside Nigel Farage, was among those who got Trump stirred up about Kemp before the speech.

In a statement published Monday, the Georgia League of Women Voters, not exactly a fiercely partisan group, voiced its frustrations with the board over the new rules it wants to impose.

“Our State Election Board, the very body empowered to back up that guarantee (of fair elections) with rules and procedures, now seems bent on undermining it. Over-complicating an already complicated process does nothing but introduce potential failure points. Making it harder does not make it better,” the statement said.

Also, two Republicans, former U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss and former Gov. Nathan Deal, and two Democrats, former Gov. Roy Barnes and former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, have formed the Democracy Defense Project, part of a national effort to restore trust in the election process.

Saturday’s rally was a flashing light warning that these efforts haven’t come a minute too soon.