Shenanigans

Although Americans can expect a bruising White House election on the airwaves through November 5, an equally significant but obscure White House battle is now underway in courthouses and state offices across the country.

The Republican Party has converted the voter suppression operation it clumsily tried in the last presidential election into a more polished fraudulent scheme that could mean the 2024 election won’t be over with a vote count.

Democratic political operatives, caught off guard by the sophistication of a low-profile GOP voter suppression movement, recently created Democracy Defenders, a Super PAC led by Jim Messina, President Obama’s campaign manager in 2012. Messina has raised $10 million to fight Republican efforts to deny the vote to vulnerable populations that favor Democrats.  

You probably haven’t heard too much about this in the news. The action has evolved out of the spotlight in courthouses and esoteric state offices that are lightly covered because local media that once reported on this kind of news barely exists anymore.

National political reporters tend to focus on the easy stuff – polls and speculation about who might win or lose and why. Some reporters, such as Laura Belin, an Iowa journalist who writes on The Bleeding Heartland blog, report about the nitty gritty of state and local politics. But she’s an exception to the rule.

Accurate numbers on the decline in journalists who cover local and state news are insufficient. Newspapers traditionally formed the backbone of local and state news coverage. But that coverage is largely ignored now because of the crisis facing newspapers. Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism says an average of two and a half newspapers a week closed in 2023, leaving half of the counties in the U.S. with one or no news outlet.    

As a result, malfeasance involving voter suppression or efforts to rig Electoral College votes are not front-and-center news stories in the national political media.  

“You know, not a lot of people are covering this stuff,” Messina told MSNBC. “So, we are going to be out there talking about these things and highlighting stories from the ground up.” In effect, political campaigns with questionable motives and credibility are assuming a pivotal role once played by newspapers with ties to the local community.

Nowhere is the malfeasance playing out more graphically than in Georgia, a so-called swing state where the candidates of both parties are spending much time lately.

photo by Jon Tyson

In the last presidential election, former President Donald Trump leaned hard on Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to ‘find” 11,780 votes to fraudulently declare that Trump won the state. Raffensperger, to his credit, refused.

Votebeat, a national non-profit news organization that covers voter access, reports that the Georgia State Elections Board controlled by right-wing Republicans recently adopted some curious new rules. In effect, the new rules give local officials in Georgia’s 159 counties authority to conduct “reasonable inquiries” into vote results without identifying what “reasonable” means. The ambiguity raises fears that local officials could delay or refuse certification of Electoral College votes, a process that sounds eerily like the one Trump tried to stage so he could falsely declare he won the last election.

As a journalist who prides himself on a lack of political affiliation, I don’t particularly care for the left-wing brand of journalism Rachel Maddow practices on MSNBC News. But Maddow proved her mettle to me as a real journalist with a well-reported opinion piece in last Sunday’s New York Times. She spelled out how voter suppression efforts in Georgia could upend the upcoming race for the White House.

“The point of these certification refusals may not be to falsify or flip a result,” she wrote, “but simply to prevent the emergence of one.”

Maddow explains that federal law gives a state’s governor or another designated official until December 11 to send official state election results to Washington for the Electoral College count. If that deadline is not met, the law provides for an expedited appeals process in the courts. Theoretically, the courts should resolve any problems by December 17, when the Electoral College meets. But Georgia officials have delayed or refused certification at least seven times since 2020, Maddow wrote, more than any other state. If local officials in Georgia claimed they still had “reasonable” inquiries pending by the deadline, chaos could ensue.

“If at the end of this process,” she wrote, “one or more states still do not produce results, the number of Electoral College votes required to win a majority – and therefore the presidency -- would be reduced accordingly. In other words, a candidate could win with fewer than 270 electoral votes, which is now the benchmark of victory. In a close election such as the one that is expected in just over sixty days, such malfeasance, if it survives a legal challenge mounted by Georgia Democrats, could spell the difference between victory and defeat. Local partisans in a state such as Georgia could also subvert the ideal that every vote counts in a Democracy.

Maddow and others report that the GOP has “quietly seeded state and local election boards with eager allies. Election boards across the country now include Republican officials who have not only propounded Mr. Trump’s lies about the last presidential election being stolen, Republicans supporting him have also tested how far they can go in denying certification of the vote.”

The Democrats are taking this evolving situation seriously enough to create Messina’s Democracy Defenders PAC and support his efforts to raise more than the $10 million he now has in the bank. He says he will use the money to educate voters about what’s going on and to prepare for legal challenges between November 5 and the Electoral College vote.  

Numerous factors could upend the GOP’s slick state operations. One big obstacle is the guy at the top of the ticket. GOP stalwarts, such as the Republican National Committee, have told the rank and file to support mail-in ballots, a reversal from a post position and an affirmation that mail-in voters helped President Biden win the last election.

Trump, however, repeatedly – and falsely – takes an opposite position, undermining his party. He says mail-in ballots are “totally corrupt” and “very dangerous” with no evidence that vote fraud is even a serious problem. Nevertheless, it’s hard to fathom that Trump will subvert a vote suppression process that would help him win the White House again, regardless of its legality. Tellingly, he has suddenly resolved his deep differences with Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp, who paved the way for the new rules by removing Raffensperger from the State Elections Board. Raffensperger says the new rules have created a “mess” in Georgia.

Until recently, Trump had harshly criticized Kemp for refusing to intervene and overturn President Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in the state. Trump had even endorsed Kemp’s opponent in 2022 and called him a “bad guy” and “disloyal” at an Atlanta rally earlier this month. In recent days, though, both Trump and Kemp have mended fences. Kemp took to Fox News on August 22 to express his support for Trump’s re-election. Trump thanked the Georgia governor on his Truth Social website.

Mara Gay, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, reports that Kemp, who suggested he would protect the integrity of the state’s election, and other Republicans in the state could do more. “They could,” Gay wrote, “publicly instruct all local election officials to certify election results according to George law, rather  than the rules of a rogue State Elections Board.”

Gay reports that officials in Kemp's office say they are consulting the state attorney general to determine whether the governor has the authority to address ethics complaints. 

But the posturing and shenanigans in Georgia dramatically illustrate a larger point: America can take a big step towards ending voter suppression and malfeasance once and for all by abolishing the Electoral College. Using the popular vote to determine who wins an election is a sensible and shenanigan-free way forward. 

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.