Exclusive: Inside the Georgia election law meltdown

How the awful new rules got written and rewritten over electeds’ objections

Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.

Election polls are coming in fast and thick, and this week, they’re more messing with our heads than offering any useful data points. In fact, every poll feels like a dispatch from an alternate universe, with no way to know what’s actually happening.

Today, a CNN poll put the vice president one point ahead of Trump, while Quinnipiac gave the former president the lead, only to have Ipsos/Reuters put Harris six points ahead. Both Quinnipiac and Ipsos are rated 2.8/3 stars by 538. What gives?

States are also baffling. Harris is supposedly five points up in Pennsylvania, according to MassINC Polling Group (2.8 stars), but Emerson (2.9 stars) says it’s even.

It’s enough to make you want to stop looking at polls entirely, but if that’s not feasible, at least ease your anxiety by laughing at Kyrsten Sinema’s sad last grasp at relevance and the replies that followed.

And now time for tonight’s newsletter, featuring an inside scoop on the chaos that’s unfolding in Georgia, where the once-mundane election board has become a threat to American democracy.

Note: We have once again leapfrogged Roger Stone in the Substack rankings! There are so many other odious newsletters that we need to surpass as we build the progressive media sphere, and to make that as doable as possible for people, I’ve extended the 20% off offer (in honor of my toddler’s birthday!) another two days.

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Sara Tindall Ghazal has spent much of her career working to protect and expand the right to vote in her home state of Georgia, so she’s used to dealing with disingenuous partisan chicanery. And yet, even in a state with regular mass voter purges and reduced dropboxes, Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democratic member of the Georgia Board of Elections, has never had to deal with anything close to what she’s watching and experiencing right now.

“I expected that my peers on the election board would be as concerned [as I am] about making sure that we're following election law, and somehow that's just not the case,” Tindall Ghazal told Progress Report earlier this week. 

I first got to know Tindall Ghazal when she ran for state legislature, a campaign that she nearly won. She was nominated to the Board of Elections soon thereafter, and on Monday, we reconnected after yet another tense public meeting that saw tempers flare between her and a newer Republican member who has been ignoring all legal recommendations and state laws.

“When I first started [at the board], we were just all attorneys. We were all very serious about making sure that we're supporting the counties, applying the law evenhandedly to voters and to counties,” Tindall Ghazal told me on Monday night. “It's really just in the last couple of months that things have flipped entirely. I'm still kind of flabbergasted that these folks are willing to completely toss aside the official opinions of the state attorney general.”

Read on for a definitive guide to what the hell is happening in Georgia and why it could cause us big problems

Progress Report: Can you walk me through all the big changes wrought by the new Board of Elections?

The first rule change was just a definitional change, which added a definition of “certification” that included the term “reasonable inquiry.” Changing a definition does not have any legal obligations. On the other hand, what you're doing is you're inserting uncertainty, because what does reasonable inquiry even mean? 

On the heels of that, there was a second change, which requires counties to meet at three o’clock on Friday [after Election Day], which is just stupid because that's within the period in which voters can still cure their ballots if they were rejected or if they had a provisional ballot. It's also before the deadline for military and overseas voters, yet it requires a level of investigation that is not authorized by statute.

So what does certification really mean?

It requires an examination of the numbered list of voters and a line-by-line comparison to make sure that only nobody voted twice. Now, obviously that analysis is done, but that is not part of the certification process, because the certification process is a simple mass exercise. 

Certification is looking at the number of voters who checked in, looking at the number of ballots cast, and looking at the number of votes that were tabulated, and making sure they’re in descending order — that nothing exceeds the number of voters who checked in, and the number of ballots tabulated doesn't exceed the number of votes that were cast. 

The canvas process is supposed to make sure the count is accurate, and then the certification is just saying, “yes, we've done all these double-checks to make sure that the math is right.” It is not a “has anybody voted twice? Are there irregularities or all of the forms signed?” situation.  This rule that they passed makes it a much more freewheeling process that looks at anything that they want to look at.

Has there ever been an issue with this stuff, or is it all just a way to interfere with counting and let them question the results?

No. They say it's been a problem — Janice Johnston sat up there in the middle of the meeting and said, “Sometimes it might be appropriate to not count the ballots from a particular scanner.” There is literally no circumstance I can imagine in which that is true. And the only party that has the authority to make that determination is a court of law. A county board does not have the authority to do that, and she is sitting up there instructing county boards to do that.

Do you try to dissuade them from making these changes before meetings?

We don't converse very much anymore. We show up at the meetings. On occasion, we will share resources or emails, but there is no conversation that really happens in these board meetings at this point. It’s exhausting. It really is.

Are you at least past the combat, or are they going to pull more of this?

We have another one on October 8, I think. I think we’ll mostly be hearing cases, but I think there are probably some more bold changes as well.

Do they even tell you ahead of time at this point?

I know in advance what's going to happen, because we have to publish an agenda. The problem is that they kept making changes to the agenda this time, which was problematic. I think it's going to be another hot mess.

Do they just constantly change it?

One of the petitions that we heard today was added to the agenda on Friday, and it was because the three members overrode the decision of the chair not to hear that particular petition.

On Friday, they passed the hand-counting paper ballots rule over the objections of state officials.

The problem is that this is being passed once voting has already started. All of the counties have hired their poll workers. They've trained their poll workers. They have not paid them for this extra work. And they were advised by the secretary of state’s office not to do it. We were begged not to do it by county election supervisors, by county boards, and we were told by the attorney general's office that this exceeds our authority. But we did it anyway.

The AG and secretary of state published public letters about why these changes violate the constitution; did you hear from them more behind the scenes? 

They don't show up anymore. The attorney general’s office did not have a representative at either the meeting on Friday or at the meeting today, and neither did the secretary of state. If I were in their shoes, I would probably do the same thing, because why bother showing up when your opinion is completely discarded? It’s an intense level of disrespect. 

Hand-counting paper ballots may sound like a decent idea to the uninitiated, but it’s actually a horrible idea, right?

The biggest problem is the last minute nature of their rule-making. Once the counties have already done their hiring, they've already done their training, they've already have their plans in place, and now they have to add this task when they weren't planning on it. It creates opportunities for problems, because it's not like you can just count them once and you're done — they have to count them three times. That count has to match all three times, and be done by three different people. 

Which becomes exponentially risky.

There are at least three additional sets of hands that are handling ballots. Next to the memory cards where the vote totals are, this is the only document that you have to confirm the results of the election, and now all of a sudden you're getting all of these hands on them. Plus, in any race within a half percent margin, the candidates have the right to request a recount, and they have to be rescanned through tabulators. Having those ballots handled again makes it more likely that they're going to jam in the scanners. 

It’s about the opportunity for a huge problem at the polling place on election night, and the delay that's going to cause for some counties in uploading their vote totals. Many counties don't have the capacity, they don't have the staffing to have somebody else take the memory cards back to the election headquarters. They have to wait until they're done with all of this.

And all of this is being approved even though the Republican AG says it’s unconstitutional. Is this going to be settled in the courtroom?

I don't know anything for certain, but that would certainly be my suspicion. 

What does this do to voter confidence?

Voters should be confident that in the work of the counties, that they're going to make sure that their votes count and they're counted properly. They should support their county election workers, and if they need more help, they should say what they need. Voters should not feel like this is going to impact their ability to vote or the right for their vote to be counted. They need to be prepared to push back against narratives that something went wrong and they need to rely on trusted sources of information coming from the county and the state.

The governor, AG, and secretary of state have come out hard against what’s happening — do the legislators who appointed these people just not care?

They don't seem to care. Our lieutenant governor was recently informed that he's not going to be prosecuted for having been a fake elector in 2020, so that's good context

Are you sick of this? Are you going to peace out after the election?

Yeah, I'm not making any commitments at this point either way.

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