Can Trump Steal the Georgia Election?

My piece out later today in The Big Picture walks through this pressing question

As most of you know, I write about once a week for The Big Picture, one of the newsletters published by my team at The Social Edge. My work there is a great complement to my daily dives here at The Status Kuo, because it allows me to go a bit wider and ask those important “big picture” questions.

My piece out later today does just that, taking on the question of Georgia and the state of its elections and electoral processes. Georgia was the focus of the Trump Campaign’s illegal efforts to throw the election in 2020, and they appear to be ground zero again in 2024.

Below is my intro from that piece, which I’m still working on. If you’re interested in reading the rest, be sure to subscribe to The Big Picture using the button below if you’re not already on our mailing list. The newsletter is absolutely free of charge (choose the right hand column when you subscribe), but we really do appreciate anyone who can donate as a paid supporter to help with our mission!

Here’s a teaser:

In a prior piece, I wrote about how an attempt by Trump and his allies to steal the 2024 election would run head first into state-level obstacles, particularly in the battleground states currently controlled by the Democrats. I predicted that their 2020 playbook, in which they sought to convince GOP-controlled state legislatures to undo the certifications of the elections in their states, wouldn’t get very far in 2024. 

That’s because under the Electoral Count Reform Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden, a state’s final, official certification is left to the governor, and there are Democratic chief executives now in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and North Carolina. Moreover, there are Democratic secretaries of state and attorneys general in most of the battlegrounds now, too. That’s all thanks to Democratic successes in the 2022 midterms, where election deniers lost across the board in the swing states.

But Georgia is a somewhat different matter. There, a radical GOP still has a grip on the state legislature. A GOP fake elector from 2020 sits as Lieutenant Governor. And importantly, the State Board of Elections is now stacked with a majority of election deniers and bad faith actors—and they now have made their move.

In today’s piece, I focus on the state of Georgia, which has become a laboratory for the Right on how to steal an election. I will briefly walk through what happened in 2020 to provide context for what is happening today. Then I’ll focus on the recent shenanigans of the State Board of Elections and how their actions seek to help Trump in November. Finally, I’ll lay out what the response to this has been and where it leaves us presently.