A fair fight in Georgia (updated)

Or chaos everywhere

This presidential election can go three ways: Harris wins, Trump wins, or organized mischief by Trumpists breaks the electoral system and the country. 

In Georgia, right now, we have a foretaste of the chaos option.  If we understand what is going wrong there, we can do something about it.

Georgia is a sensitive state.  It is one of the swing states that will determine the outcome of the presidential election.  Democrats won its most recent statewide elections: both Georgia senators are Democrats, and Biden won the state in 2020.  But in all three cases, the margins were extremely close. 

In the United States, elections are run by the states, and in Georgia the state legislature is controlled by Republicans.  Predictably, the Georgia legislature has spent its time since 2020 making it harder for people to vote, since lower turnouts help Republicans. 

In Georgia state politics right now, the competition is between different strategies of voter suppression.  In addition to the legislative type, which generally makes it harder for people to get to the ballot box, there is also the voluntarist type, exemplified by the state's election board, which involves mischief after ballots are cast.

The election board once included the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger.  After Donald Trump lost the last presidential election, he called Raffensperger and asked him to "find" the votes he needed to claim a victory.  Raffensperger refused.  Then the Georgia state legislature removed Raffensperger from the election board.

That election board, now with a Trumpist majority, has engaged in some illegal shenanigans that could make the 2024 election in Georgia fail.  The three Trumpist members have met to change the rules of elections, which they have no authority to do, and in the absence of the other two members, which itself is a ridiculous and probably illegal procedure. 

The Trumpists on the board have changed the rules of the vote count, requiring poll workers to do things they are not trained to do and will not have time to do on election day. 

Georgia state officials rightly say that that the changes are illegal, since the election board is only supposed to enforce election law, not add new elements to it.  They also rightly point out that changes in election procedures so close to an election demonstrate bad faith. 

They are not really the good guys in the story, however.  The state officials in question are Republicans who tend to favor the legislative version of voter suppression. The voluntarist version of voter suppression is so obviously malignant that it might draw unwanted attention to the legislative version. 

And the voluntarist version is designed for chaos, which elected Republican officials don’t want. It’s a bit like elected Republicans want a football game to happen, but they want the referees to keep some of the players off the field so one team will win. The election board just want everyone in the stands to start fighting so that someone (Trump) can then stand up with a bullhorn and tell people what to do. Neither of these is good, but there is a difference between them.

In an article in The New York Times Magazine published three days after the Trump coup, I explained the big lie, and distinguished between the "gamers" and the "breakers" in the Republican Party.  The gamers are the ones who want to create rules that allow their side to win by suppressing votes -- like Georgia's elected officials.  The breakers are the ones who oppose democracy, claim that Trump won in 2020, and just want their Leader in power. 

Both gamers and breakers both exploit Trump’s big lie that he won in 2020, but in different ways. The gamers take the traditional route of suppressing Black votes, votes that Trump presented as illegitimate by his racist rhetoric about corrupt cities. The breakers go for the wackier conspiracy theories Trump also spread, using them as justification for last-minute invented procedures designed to make the system unworkable.

Trump benefits from the efforts of the gamers, although he need not be their preferred candidate.  But he himself is a breaker.  He praises the three Trumpists on Georgia's election board as "pit bulls."  They are his breakers inside the system.

In the breaker scenario, if it appears that Harris will Georgia, then the election board disruptions kick in, and Georgia then fails to counts its votes on time.  This opens the way for Donald Trump to claim that he won the state when he lost it. 

In a close election, a Georgia breakdown combined with other designed failures could mean that neither candidate gets a majority of electoral votes.  This would throw the election to the House of Representatives.

Although the Constitution provides for this course of action, many Americans will be puzzled by an outcome in which Congresschooses their president.  In the chaos scenario, it is entirely possible that Americans would elect a Democratic president, but that a Republican majority would choose the Republican candidate anyway. (The point is not a partisan one — in principle, this could go the other way as well.).

And if we only get to that procedure because of a deliberate sabotage of democracy, like the one planned in Georgia right now, then the procedure itself will hardly seem right to the average person. 

In December and January we could see all three branches of the federal government discredited — Congress by choosing someone who actually lost, the Presidency by uncertainty about who should hold the office, the Supreme Court by issuing a ruling that is political. How then does the republic go on?

Trump does not care, because he does not care about democracy or the Constitution.  But if comes to power thanks to the breakers, the system itself -- the country itself -- can end up broken.  Everyone should care about that.

What to do?  Georgia's (Republican) Governor Brian Kemp could and no doubt should fire the members election board for violating Georgia law.  Then instead of both kinds of voter suppression we would be down to the traditional kind.

Kemp is a gamer who wants not to upset the breakers.  He refused to back down to Trump four years ago, and so now Trump insults him and his family.  But Kemp perhaps calculates that he needs Trump's voters to run for Senate or for the presidency in two years.  Thus far he has done nothing.  It is possible that he is waiting for Democrats to sue and win. 

If so, this is an alarming breach of responsibility by a governor that would itself disqualify Kemp for any further office.  It is also running an incredible risk. If Kemp presides over a Georgia meltdown, he won’t have to worry about running for future office, not just because he will have no reputation, but because there might well not be offices to run for.

Americans can all do something, however.  Some of the people on the ground in Georgia who know the most about voter suppression are organized as a group called Fair Fight.  They have been hard at work dealing with every sort of effort to engineer or disrupt Georgia's elections for years.  So, if you have the time, volunteer for them.  And if you cannot do that, think about making a donation. 

Four weeks from now, what happens in Georgia might not just determine who is the next president.  It might determine whether or not we have a country.  If you can, please act.

PS I am updating to correct a couple of hasty mistakes — thanks for your patience! (7 October)