America Needs Georgia Republicans to Defend Democracy Again

 

Opinion

Mara Gay

America Needs Georgia Republicans to Defend Democracy Again

 

Aug. 29, 2024, 3:01 p.m. ET

Mara Gay

By Mara Gay

Ms. Gay is a member of the editorial board.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/29/opinion/georgia-election-board-certification.html

 

Four years ago, it was a Republican official in Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whose refusal to cooperate with Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election by trying to “find” 11,780 votes helped ensure the integrity of the state’s results, and democracy itself.

 

This year, Georgia Republicans — Gov. Brian Kemp, State Attorney General Christopher Carr and Secretary of State Raffensperger — must defend democracy again. Far-right elements within their own party have gained control of the State Election Board and could make it impossible to hold a free and fair election unless other Republicans stop them.

 

Mr. Kemp, Mr. Carr and Mr. Raffensperger can demonstrate their mettle by standing up to the MAGA-captured elections board, which enacted rules several weeks ago that would allow county officials to delay election certification. Those rules, which contradict state law, could provide an opportunity for Trump-friendly officials across Georgia’s 159 counties to ensnare election results in legal challenges, disenfranchise voters and, possibly, undermine a Democratic victory in a close election.

 

Georgia Democrats have filed suit against the State Election Board, a complaint the Kamala Harris campaign has supported. Democrats in the state have also filed an ethics complaint against the three board members who enacted the rules, and they have asked Mr. Kemp to remove those members from the board. He should do so.

 

Mr. Kemp, Mr. Carr and Mr. Raffensperger have signaled they are prepared to protect the state’s election. Mr. Raffensperger said on X on Aug. 7 that state election law requires counties to certify the election results by Nov. 12. “We fully anticipate that counties will follow the law,” he wrote. This suggests he views the rules from the rogue State Election Board as illegitimate and will say so publicly.

 

Officials in the governor’s office have said they are seeking counsel from the state attorney general to determine whether the governor has the authority to address the ethics complaints. A spokeswoman for Mr. Carr noted that he refused to comply with an unrelated demand from the State Election Board this summer to open a new investigation into the 2020 election in Fulton County, where large Democratic turnout led Joe Biden to win the state. Hopefully, this is a sign that Mr. Carr would use the powers of his office to reject other outrageous behavior by the board.

 

Governor Kemp and the state’s other leading Republicans can do more. They can, for example, publicly instruct all local election boards to certify election results according to Georgia law, rather than the rules of the rogue State Election Board. They could also examine whether the board members who issued the new certification rules — Janice Johnston, Janelle King and Rick Jeffares — violated the law by doing so.

 

Mr. Kemp continues to support Mr. Trump’s bid for election and is expected to headline a fund-raising event for the former president in Atlanta on Thursday. But he, Mr. Carr and Mr. Raffensperger have all at various points shown a willingness to stand up to Mr. Trump and his allies when democracy was at stake.

 

Georgia voters are asking them to do so again.

 

“They pound on tables and shout real loud when warning voters or registration organizations that they will be prosecuted if they violate the law,” Cliff Albright, a co-founder and the executive director of the nonpartisan Black Voters Matter Fund, told me. “They need to be just as loud at warning these county boards of elections that there will be consequences if they violate the certification process.”

 

They can look to the political courage of Anita Tucker, an elections official in Forsyth County who has helped prevent thousands of lawfully registered voters from being stricken from the state’s rolls. Laws enacted since 2020 have made it easy for people in Georgia to repeatedly challenge the voting rights of their own neighbors. Ms. Tucker has fought to preserve those rights and said she has sometimes been menaced by activists confronting her in person to angrily ask her why she is refusing to strike voters from the rolls.

 

Although Mr. Trump won Forsyth County by more than 30 percentage points in 2020, the county, a once whites-only Atlanta suburb, has become more racially diverse, and politically competitive, in recent decades. That shift has made it a prime target for activists looking to challenge voters. Ms. Tucker, a Democrat, this week added her name to the lawsuit against the State Elections Board. “Am I afraid? Yes,” Ms. Tucker told me in a phone interview. But, she added, “the oath that I took says that I am going to make sure that every eligible voter has the right to vote.”

 

To protect its elections, Georgia needs a coalition of Republicans, Democrats and voting rights groups who are all committed to democracy. Companies like Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, which are headquartered in Atlanta, could also add their voices, as some have done before.

 

Mr. Kemp in particular has a responsibility to safeguard this election. It was he who signed into law the legislation that has made these chilling assaults on Georgia’s democracy possible. One of those bills, SB202, enabled mass voter challenges, reduced access to voting by drop box in Atlanta, the most populous area of the state, and made it illegal for those who aren’t poll workers to provide water and food to voters waiting in line. The legislation also led to the removal of Mr. Raffensperger from the role of chair on the State Election Board. The law allowed the Republican-controlled state legislature to appoint election deniers and extremists to the body charged with making the rules of the state’s elections.

 

The campaign to undermine democracy by targeting the certification of elections is not unique to Georgia. In the months after the 2020 election, fake electors in seven states, including Michigan and Nevada, wrongfully claimed Mr. Trump won the election. Preventing the election from being certified was the focus of the mob that took over the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

 

But in Georgia, the fight over certification rules is part of a rich history of voter suppression. In the Jim Crow era, Georgia officials were adept at using the state’s bureaucracy to limit competition and participation by Black voters as well as others who posed a threat to their political dominance, noted Robert Mickey, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. One example is the successful campaign by Gov. Eugene Talmadge to get the state legislature to pass a law requiring all Georgia voters to register again. Mr. Talmadge had been alarmed by increases in Black voter registration after the U.S. Supreme Court banned all-white Democratic primaries in 1944. As a result, more than 1.2 million Americans were removed from voter rolls in the state.

 

Mr. Mickey said diverting authority to Georgia’s 159 counties, as the election board is trying to do now, was another common tactic under Jim Crow. “Decentralization — having to go one county at a time to desegregate schools, register voters — places a huge burden on pro-democratic forces,” he said.

 

More than a half-century later, Mr. Kemp, Mr. Carr and Mr. Raffensperger have an opportunity to show America just how much Georgia has changed.

 

Mara Gay is a member of the editorial board. @MaraGay