Georgia

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Tip on Georgia School Shooting Threat Last Year Led to Suspect’s Door

      by

      The teenager charged with killing four people at his Georgia high school on Wednesday denied making an online threat, and the authorities could not prove he did. He, and now his father, face murder charges.JEFFERSON, Ga. — The threat posted online last year to “shoot up a middle school” was the kind that the authorities have become all too familiar with in the United States.After receiving tips about the threat, the authorities homed in on a 13-year-old boy in Georgia, and an investigator spoke with the teenager and his father.During the conversation in May 2023, the boy, Colt Gray, assured the investigator, from the sheriff’s office in Jackson County, Ga., that he had not made the threat. He said that he had not used Discord, the social media site where the threat was posted, in months, and that he had deleted his account.“The only thing I have is TikTok, but I just go on there and watch videos,” the teenager said, according to a transcript obtained by The New York Times.The teenager’s father, Colin Gray, confided that his son had been picked on in middle school and said that he had been teaching him about firearms and the outdoors to get him away from video games.“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do and how to use them and not use them,” the elder Mr. Gray said, adding that his son had recently shot his first deer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris defends policy stances and shares plan for office in first major interview

      by

      Kamala Harris sat for her first interview as the Democratic presidential nominee with CNN’s Dana Bash alongside her running mate, Tim Walz, on Thursday, and defended her shifts on certain policy issues over the years and her support for Joe Biden.In the interview, which was taped from Savannah, Georgia, earlier Thursday, the vice-president said her highest priority upon taking office would be to “support and strengthen the middle class” through policies including increasing the child tax credit, curtailing price gouging on everyday goods and increasing access to affordable housing – all policies that she has announced since she started campaigning for the presidency.Harris also shared how the president shared with her his decision not to continue running for re-election, a first public retelling of that moment. She said she was making breakfast with her family, including her nieces, and was just sitting down to do a puzzle when the phone rang, she said.“I asked him, are you sure? And he said yes. And that’s how I learned about it.” As far as whether she asked for his endorsement or he offered it, she said: “He was very clear that he was going to support me.”“My first thought was not about me, to be honest with you, my first thought was about him,” she said, adding that history will remember Biden’s presidency as transformative.Harris defended Biden, saying she had no regrets about supporting his re-election before his decision to leave the race, despite concerns over his age and acuity. She said serving as Biden’s vice-president has been “one of the greatest honors” of her career and that Biden has the “intelligence, commitment, judgement and disposition that the American people deserve in their president”, adding that the former president, Donald Trump, “has none of that”.She also touted the Biden administration’s work to restore the economy after the pandemic, pointing to capped insulin costs, the current inflation rate of under 3% and increases in US manufacturing jobs. “I’ll say that that’s good work,” she said. “There’s more to do, but that’s good work.”Harris explained her changes in positions on issues such as fracking and immigration by saying her “values had not changed”. On fracking, she said she made clear in the 2020 debate that she no longer supports a ban, and that as president she would not ban fracking. She added that she takes the climate crisis seriously but believes: “We can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”On immigration, Bash pointed to a moment when Harris raised her hand to indicate she believed the border should be decriminalized, asking if she still believes that. Harris said she thinks laws should be followed and enforced on immigration and noted that she is the only candidate in the race who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations.She also said she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet if she wins, though she didn’t have a specific Republican or position in mind.“I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion,” she said. “I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my cabinet who was a Republican.”She quickly cast off a question about Trump’s comments that she “happened to turn Black” in recent years: “Same old, tired playbook,” she said. “Next question, please.”The interview narrowly met a self-imposed timeline Harris set for a sit-down interview, which she promised would happen by the end of August. It comes less than two weeks before the first scheduled debate between Harris and Trump, planned for 10 September on ABC.Harris and Walz conducted the interview while on a bus tour around the Savannah, Georgia area as part of a whirlwind tour of the US since they took over the Democratic ticket.Harris has gotten criticism from across the political spectrum for not doing an on-the-record interview with the media since she started running for president. After the CNN interview was set, Republicans also criticized the joint interview with Walz and that the interview was pre-recorded and not live.Before the interview, Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance posted on Twitter/X: “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview” alongside a clip from the 2007 Miss Teen America pageant where a contestant garbled an answer about Americans not knowing geography, rambling about “like such as South Africa -and the Iraq, everywhere like such as”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWalz answered a few questions during the joint interview, though Harris largely led the campaign’s responses.Walz has faced scrutiny over misstatements and exaggerations he has made about his time in the national guard and about the specific fertility treatments his wife used. He didn’t explain in depth why he made these comments, instead saying that he speaks candidly and passionately. In one comment, he claimed he carried weapons of war in war, which he did not (he was not deployed to a war zone). He said that comment came after a school shooting and his grammar wasn’t correct. “I think people know me. They know who I am. They know where my heart is,” he said.“If it’s not this, it’s an attack on my children for showing love for me, or it’s an attack on my dog,” he said, referring to recent Republican attacks on him. “The one thing I’ll never do is I’ll never demean another service member in any way. I never have and I never will.”Bash brought up two key moments from the Democratic convention: Walz’s teenage son, Gus, crying and saying “that’s my dad” as his dad took the stage, and an image of one of Harris’s grand-nieces looking on as Harris gave her acceptance speech.Walz said his son’s reaction was “such a visceral emotional moment” that he was grateful to experience.Harris, who has not spoken much about how her win could break glass ceilings, said she was “deeply touched” by the photo and found it “very humbling” while saying: “I am running because I believe I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.”It’s unclear if Harris will start doing more media interviews as she continues on the campaign trail. As some commentators on CNN noted before the interview aired Thursday, increasing the frequency of interviews makes it less likely that each one becomes the topic of intense scrutiny and fixation like the CNN event became.Trump reacted to the interview on Truth Social, saying simply: “BORING!!!” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Harris, Before CNN Interview Runs, Presses Attack Against Trump in Georgia

      by

      Vice President Kamala Harris, who has spent the last few weeks trying to define herself and her life story for voters, turned on Thursday to describing the version of former President Donald J. Trump that she wants Americans to see, saying his candidacy represented a “full-on assault on hard-fought, hard-won freedoms and rights.”At a campaign rally in Savannah, Ga., Ms. Harris accused him of wanting to curtail abortion access, cut Social Security and Medicare, and give tax breaks to big corporations and billionaires. She said his plan for across-the-board tariffs on imported goods amounted to an unfair tax on working families.“Unlike Donald Trump, I will always put the middle-class and working-class families first,” Ms. Harris said to a crowd of thousands at a basketball arena. She added, “We’ve got some work to do, because we know Donald Trump has a very different plan.”Her audience broke into chants of “We’re not going back,” which has quickly become a favorite slogan at her rallies.Ms. Harris made her appearance hours before her first major interview since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee was set to be broadcast on CNN. She had faced rising pressure to hold an interview with a top journalist, with Republicans accusing her of hiding from tough questions.In early clips of the interview released by CNN on Thursday afternoon, Ms. Harris pledged to appoint a Republican to her cabinet and curtly rejected Mr. Trump’s recent questioning of her racial identity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 188 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Black voters in Georgia want affordable access to healthcare. Will Kamala Harris win them over?

      by

      Around 4am last Christmas Eve, Kuanita Murphy’s father suddenly became short of breath and briefly passed out. Without a medical facility nearby, Murphy had to drive him 45 miles east to Albany, Georgia, to the Phoebe Putney memorial hospital. The only hospital in their small town of Cuthbert, Georgia – Southwest Georgia regional medical center – had closed down three years earlier due to financial strain from failing infrastructure and an increase in uninsured patients.After waiting for several hours, Murphy’s dad was finally admitted at noon into a hospital room for internal bleeding and a restricted heart valve. While he eventually underwent lifesaving surgery, Murphy said that he would have received treatment faster had Cuthbert still had a hospital.“He had some pain dealing with his chest and the anxiety of not knowing exactly what was going on with him,” Murphy, the editor of Rural Leader magazine, said. “That made it worse off than it probably was, not knowing and having to wait.”Hospital closures are top of mind for Black voters throughout Georgia, since it’s one of 10 states to reject Medicaid expansion. On Wednesday, Kamala Harris launched a two-day bus tour through south Georgia that will culminate with a rally in Savannah on Thursday afternoon. “Campaigning in this part of the Peach state is critical as it represents a diverse coalition of voters, including rural, suburban and urban Georgians – with a large proportion of Black voters and working-class families,” the campaign said in a statement.Since 2013, 12 hospitals have closed down in rural and urban areas throughout the state, according to the Georgia Hospital Association. In 2022, two Wellstar Atlanta medical centers closed in the Atlanta metro area, where more than two-thirds of the 4,281 emergency room patients were Black, according to 2019 data from the private, non-profit Wellstar Health System cited by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.In Murphy’s eyes, the shuttered medical facility where she was born 49 years ago has served as a rallying cry before the upcoming presidential election. The city’s residents, she said, want to “back a candidate that is going to support Medicaid expansion, or affordable access to healthcare”.Murphy, like most residents in majority-Black Cuthbert, has long voted Democrat. Although Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020, the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so since 1992, the Republican-led state legislature has rejected expanding Medicaid coverage to more lower-income adults. The Biden-Harris administration has long urged all states to expand Medicaid – a legacy that health policy experts predict Democratic nominee Harris will continue if she becomes president.Throughout her vice-presidency, Harris has discussed the need to expand Medicaid coverage for postpartum mothers from two to 12 months after giving birth. “We also must work together to call on Congress to advance other components of our Build Back agenda, to expand Medicaid in every state,” Harris said during a speech in 2021. “People live in every state, that’s the logic.”Floundering healthcare facilities might stay open if they have received Medicaid reimbursements for patients who otherwise couldn’t pay their bills, according to health policy experts. As they gear up for state and federal elections, healthcare advocates and community organizations say they want Georgians to vote for candidates who prioritize affordable and equitable access to healthcare.Bobby Jenkins, the Cuthbert mayor, believes that the state’s hospital closures could drive voter turnout there. “That’s a way of engaging people in the electoral process to get them to understand this is a direct impact of your vote, or it could be a consequence of your lack of voting,” he said. Case in point, Jenkins said, is that Biden-Harris’s 2025 fiscal year budget includes “Medicaid-like” coverage to people in states that haven’t expanded the program. Meanwhile, Donald Trump sought to repeal Medicaid expansion and supported work requirements for people to qualify for free government healthcare during his presidency.‘Our governor said no, which is crazy’According to surveys and canvassing sessions, access to healthcare has remained the most pressing concern only behind the economy for Black and brown communities over the past two years, said Kierra Stanford, the lead community health organizer for the non-profit New Georgia Project. At ice cream teach-ins and public meetings, Stanford tells residents that hospitals could stay open if state and federal leaders expanded Medicaid. While the group is nonpartisan, they encourage voters to research candidates’ stances on healthcare.Healthcare redlining, which Stanford defined as “the deliberate managing of healthcare resources in Black communities”, has led hospital systems to divest from historically marginalized areas. “It’s an ongoing trend,” Stanford said, that “has been exacerbated by not expanding Medicaid”.In May, Stanford held a public meeting with 30 attendees in East Point, Georgia, a majority-Black city south-west of Atlanta, to discuss the connection between hospital closures and the state’s refusal to expand Medicaid. A few days later, the New Georgia Project packed the public comment period of an East Point city council meeting to share their concerns about access to healthcare.On the state level, the New Georgia Project releases a voting guide to alert voters of pressing healthcare concerns before elections. Eventually, they plan to roll out a scorecard that shows the state politicians who didn’t vote to expand Medicaid. On the national level, Stanford explains to voters: “Georgia has literally been offered the funds, but our governor said no, which is crazy.”“I try to tell people that the money that’s being taken out of your check for federal taxes,” Stanford said, “you’re paying for healthcare for people in California, for people in these other states that have expanded Medicaid.”Hospital closures hit Black rural communities the hardest, said Sherrell Byrd, executive director of Sowega Rising, a Georgia-based non-profit focused on coalition-building and rural revitalization. “When a hospital closes in rural areas, it’s much more devastating than in urban areas, because it’s like a black hole,” Byrd said. “It takes out a whole subset of the economy side of the community.”It’s common for residents to drive up to an hour or to cross state lines to access hospitals. The organization encourages rural residents to speak to their legislators about their healthcare access concerns, but Byrd said that politicians have not shared any steps they have taken to solve the issue.“That’s where people start to be frustrated, because year after year, they still don’t have hospitals,” Byrd said. “And so that’s when people become disenfranchised.”Hospital closures are top of mind for Medlyne Zamor, a Rockdale county voter who was previously unconcerned about candidates’ healthcare platforms. She didn’t see the need to expand Medicaid and thought that the state would benefit from funding other institutions. However, after a spate of hospital visits due to fibroids in 2022, Zamor met other patients who had been personally affected by the closures. Some of them had needed to wait several months to see specialists. That opened her eyes to the issue, she said: “When I saw how the hospital closures … impacted them in the community, it definitely made me shift my vote to expansion.” Now she only votes for candidates in state and federal offices who support Medicaid expansion.As a result, Zamor began volunteering at the New Georgia Project, where she hosts events to inform Georgians about the lack of access to healthcare. She also addresses the issue by phone banking, sending out email blasts to residents and writing senators. “These hospital closures, not only does it affect the nearby citizens,” Zamor said, “but also it affects the workers, and it affects the [remaining] hospitals, too.”State and federal politicians hold the power in slowing down the closures by extending healthcare coverage to lower-income adults, “relieving fragile hospitals from providing free care to uninsured patients”, said Laura Colbert, the executive director of the non-profit Georgians for a Healthy Future. “After that, state and federal leaders should work together to slow consolidation among hospitals and other investors, which can accelerate some rural hospital closures.”Congress members have stepped up to save Cuthbert’s healthcare system after its only hospital closed four years ago. The city plans to establish a new hospital after recently receiving nearly $12m in federal funding. The Randolph County Hospital Authority is currently working with an accounting firm on a feasibility study to ensure that the facility stays in the community for good. More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Democrats sue Georgia officials over election rules that could ‘invite chaos’

      by

      Democrats sued Georgia state election officials on Monday, alleging new rules that could allow local officials to delay certification of November’s presidential results were illegal.The lawsuit was filed in the superior court of Fulton county by local Georgia Democratic politicians, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic party of Georgia. It says the rules approved by the Republican-controlled Georgia state election board this month were intended to give individual county election officials the ability to delay or cancel the certification of votes.The lawsuit says the new rules “introduce substantial uncertainty in the post-election process and – if interpreted as their drafters have suggested – invite chaos by establishing new processes at odds with existing statutory duties”.The Georgia secretary of state’s office, which oversees the board, did not respond to requests for comment.Last week, the five-member Georgia election board, which includes three conservative members championed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, voted 3-2 to empower county election board members to investigate any discrepancies between the number of cast ballots and the number of voters in each precinct before certification.Such mismatches are not uncommon and are not typically evidence of fraud, according to voting rights advocates, who say that rule could permit individual board members to intentionally delay approval of the results.The board has also in recent weeks approved a separate rule that county election boards conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into any irregularities before certifying the results. The rule did not define “reasonable” or set a particular deadline for completing the inquiry.The Democrats’ lawsuit says it is established law that it is the responsibility of the judicial system, not individual county election officials, to resolve allegations of voter fraud.The former president has falsely claimed for years that the 2020 election was rigged by fraud.His infamous January 2021 phone call in which he asked Georgia’s top election official, Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to sway the outcome helped lead to Trump’s pending indictment on state charges.Voter fraud in the US is vanishingly rare, research shows.Trump faces Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, in the 5 November election. Polls show a close race, with Georgia among seven states likely to determine the outcome. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Georgia’s ours to lose’: Trump and Harris camps zero in on swing states

      by

      As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump brace themselves for what promises to be an ugly and bruising sprint to the finishing line in November, both presidential candidates’ campaigns are turning their sights back on the handful of desperately close swing states where the battle is likely to be decided.Georgia is coming into view as a critical battleground for both leaders as they struggle to gain voters’ attention in an epochal election. On Wednesday, the vice-president will travel from the White House to southern Georgia to hold her first campaign event in the state with her recently anointed running mate and former high school football coach, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.The duo will go on a bus tour of the region, attempting to reach out to diverse voting groups including rural areas where the former president is strong, as well as suburban and urban districts in Albany and Valdosta, where large Black communities are among their target demographics. On Thursday night, Harris is scheduled to cap the tour with a rally in Savannah, where she will talk to Georgians about the stakes of this election.The intense focus on Georgia by the Democratic campaign underlines that they are not resting on their laurels after what most commentators have agreed was a pitch-perfect convention in Chicago last week. Despite the pronounced bounce in popularity that Harris has enjoyed since she dramatically switched with Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket five weeks ago, the race remains essentially neck and neck.The latest poll tracker by 538 for Georgia puts Trump 0.6% ahead of Harris in Georgia, with Harris on 46.0% and Trump on 46.6%. That is bang in the middle of the margin of error – and suggests that the state is open territory for the two candidates.In Sunday’s political talkshows, Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is one of Trump’s closest surrogates, underlined the importance of Georgia to Trump’s re-election hopes. “If we don’t win Georgia, I don’t see how we get to 270,” he told CNN’s State of the Union, referring to the number of electoral college votes needed to win the presidency.Graham added that he would be accompanying Trump to what he called a “unity event” in Georgia soon. He predicted that if Trump played the right game in the state he would win.“I do believe Georgia’s ours to lose. It’s really hard for Harris to tell Georgians that we’re on the right track – they don’t believe it,” Graham said.The problem for Graham and other top Republican advisers is that Trump frequently blatantly ignores their guidance. In his most recent trip to Georgia, Trump ranted about the state’s Republican governor Brian Kemp, whom he still blames for failing to back him in his attempt to subvert the 2020 election – and whose support he now needs to prevail in November.Graham implicitly admitted to CNN the trouble that the attack on Kemp had caused but insisted: “We repaired the damage, I think, between Governor Kemp and President Trump.“He’s going to put his ground game behind President Trump and all other Republicans in Georgia.”Three days after the Democratic convention, which went off in a blaze of red, white and blue balloons and an ecstatic response from delegates, the Harris-Walz campaign is now laser-focused on that same ground game. The key is to turn the palpable surge in energy that exploded from the Chicago convention into hard work making calls and knocking on doors in Georgia and the other six battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.The chairperson of the campaign, Jen O’Malley Dillon, released new data on Sunday which she said demonstrated the positive impact of the convention throughout the battleground states. Chicago marked the biggest week so far in Harris’s nascent pitch for the White House, she said, with volunteers signing up for almost 200,000 shifts during the week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMoney also continues to pour in, with the campaign raising $540m in five weeks – a record in US presidential campaign history. About $82m of that was received during convention week.O’Malley Dillon said that it was all a sign of Harris building on her momentum: “We are taking no voters for granted and communicating relentlessly with battleground voters every single day between now and election day – all the while Trump is focused on very little beyond online tantrums.”A leading Harris surrogate, the Colorado’s Democratic governor Jared Polis, appeared on Fox News Sunday to try to convince right-leaning voters and undecided independents that they could safely back Harris. “She’s come to the middle,” Polis said, when asked about some of the more progressive policies Harris previously espoused but has since dropped – including a ban on fracking and Medicare for all.Polis added: “She’s pragmatic. She’s a tough leader. She’s the leader for the future.“She’s going to be a president for all the American people.”As the euphoria of the convention fades, Harris has already begun to face tougher questions, notably when will she expose herself to tougher questions by facing an interviewer. The Democratic candidate has so far studiously avoided a sit-down with any major news outlet.Quizzed himself about Harris’s resistance to being questioned, Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, told CNN: “As this campaign goes on, she’ll be sitting for more interviews”.“She’ll be engaging in debates,” Booker said. “I think she wants to do more.”With the battleground states all still essentially anyone’s to win, there are growing fears that Trump might be tempted to unleash another conspiracy to overturn the result should he narrowly lose in November. There are numerous indications that Trump and his Make America Great Again (Maga) supporters may be laying down the foundations of a challenge.At a rally last week in Asheboro, North Carolina, Trump said: “Our primary focus is not to get out the vote – it’s to make sure they don’t cheat, because we have all the votes you need.”Trump’s running mate, the US senator from Ohio, JD Vance, was asked by NBC News’s Meet the Press whether he believed the election would be free and fair. “I do think it’s going to be free and fair,” he replied.Then he added: “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that happens. We’re going to pursue every pathway to make sure legal ballots get counted.” More

    • 188 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Georgia election deniers helped pass new laws. Many worry it’ll lead to chaos in November

      by

      Conservative activists in Georgia have worked with prominent election deniers to pass a series of significant changes to the procedures for counting ballots in recent weeks, raising alarm about the potential for confusion and interference in the election certification process in a key swing state this fall.Since the beginning of August, the five-member state election board has adopted rules that allow local election boards to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into election results before they are certified, and to allow any local election board member “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results”. The same rule also requires local boards to reconcile any discrepancies between the total number of ballots cast and the number of voters who check in. If it can’t reconcile the numbers, the board is authorized to come up with a way to figure out which votes count and which do not.At its upcoming meeting in September, the board is also expected to approve a measure that would require local officials to hand-count ballots to check the machine tabulations. Experts have warned that hand-counts are unreliable, costly and time-consuming.Georgia law requires county officials to certify an election no later than 5pm on the Monday following election day (the deadline will be one day later this year because of a state holiday). Legal experts have noted that state law is clear about that deadline and that none of the recent rules change that.But at the same time, observers are concerned new changes are seeding the ground to give local county commissioners justifications to object to the certification of the vote.“State law clearly states the certification deadline. They can add on whatever they want, but cannot go against the existing state law that says it has to be certified by a specific date,” said Julie Houk, a voting rights attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. At the same time, she added: “What’s going to happen when they have not completed a review of those thousands of records? Are the board members going to say ‘we can’t certify’ even though it requires them to?”“What’s going to happen if certain board members or boards determine that now that we have all the records we’ve demanded, we can’t get through them in time to certify?”The changes have caused considerable alarm in one of the most competitive battleground states this presidential cycle, which is expected to be extremely close. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020 by 11,799 votes, a razor-thin margin.Georgia’s state election board, charged with making election rules consistent with Georgia law, was not really paid attention to until this year. But in recent months it has moved forward with a blitz of changes. Earlier this year, Republicans essentially forced out a member who had rebuffed proposed changes and replaced him with someone who has been more sympathetic to the changes.That new member, Rick Jeffares, has previously posted in support of Trump’s election lies, though he recently told the Guardian he believed the former president lost in Georgia in 2020. He also said that he had proposed himself for a job with the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration.The new rules enacted by the board have been shaped with input from the Republican party and a network of election denial activists. The precinct reconciliation rule adopted on Monday, for example, was presented by Bridget Thorne, a Fulton county commissioner who has run a private Telegram channel filled with election conspiracies. She said during the meeting on Monday she had worked with a number of people on the proposal, including Heather Honey, a prominent activist in the election denialism movement.Input on rules has also come from the state Republican party, the New York Times reported. Julie Adams, who is connected to a network of election deniers and has refused to certify two elections this year as a member of the Fulton county election board, has also had input on the rules, ProPublica reported.Trump has publicly praised three of the Republicans on the board who have constituted the majority to enact the new rules. During a rally earlier this month he called them “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory”.Three lawyers tied to Trump also spoke out in favor of the new rules on Monday. They included Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer at the Heritage Foundation who served on Trump’s voter fraud commission, Ken Cuccinelli, who had a top role in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump, and Harry MacDougald, who is defending former justice department official Jeffrey Clark in the Georgia criminal case dealing with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.John Fervier, the Republican chair on the board who voted against the rule, said he was also concerned about refusal to certify elections.“We’ve seen boards, or board members recently, that refused to certify because they didn’t see X, Y or Z documents. I think this just even opens the door more to that,” he said.During Monday’s meeting, those who supported the rule insisted that local county commissioners could refuse to certify an election if they did not believe the tally was accurate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“One individual board member does not have authority to overrule other board members,” Thorne said. “Board members would have the right to disagree if they wanted to disagree. But hopefully by having this process in place, everyone will be confident and go ahead and certify.MacDougald, one of the lawyers supporting the proposal, suggested that a judge could not force a majority of election board members to certify a result they believed was incorrect. “The board members have the right to vote on certification, that necessarily gives them the right to vote against it,” he said.“Unless a board member has full confidence in the administration of the election, that it was done without error, they should not certify the election,” von Spakovsky said at the meeting.Election officials have expressed concern about the new rule that prevents them from counting any ballots in a precinct if the number of voters checked in doesn’t align with the number of ballots cast. These small discrepancies often occur because of human error – a voter might check in and leave with their ballot or a voter concerned about their mail-in vote counting might decide to cast a vote in person. These small discrepancies are almost always smaller than the margin of votes and are explained in a reconciliation report to the secretary of state after the election.There also could be problems with the portion of the rule that empowers local boards to come up with a way of tabulating the votes if the discrepancy, no matter how small, can’t be explained.“Let’s say I’m at a poll that has 500 ballots. And we go through and determined one of those 500 voters should not have cast that belt for whatever reason,” said Joseph Kirk, the election director in Bartow county, Georgia, which is about an hour north-west of Atlanta. “How do we know which ballot to take out of the box? They’re anonymous.”Even if the election result is eventually certified, any discovery found during the new investigatory phase could become fodder to continue to challenge the election results. In 2020 and 2022, Trump and allies seized on human errors to falsely argue that they were only the tip of a corrupt system.The Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, an organization that represents election officials across the state, called on the board to stop making changes, warning that continuing to do so would cause confusion.“Any last-minute changes to the rules risk undermining the public’s trust in the electoral process and place undue pressure on the individuals responsible for managing the polls and administering the election,” said W Travis Doss, the group’s president and the executive director of the board of elections in Richmond county, Georgia. “This could ultimately lead to errors or delays in voting, which is the last thing anyone wants.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Lil Jon Performs ‘Turn Down for What’ at DNC, Representing Georgia

      by

      The rapper Lil Jon burst onto the floor of the Democratic convention on Tuesday night, singing a few bars of his iconic song “Turn Down for What” as delegates roared in excitement.Then he sang: “V.P. Harris … Governor Walz” to the tune of “To the window … to the wall!” from another hit, “Get Low.”His surprise appearance on the convention floor was part of an effort by Democrats to turn the staid tradition of the roll-call vote that nominated Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota into something of a party. Hosted by D.J. Cassidy, delegates were instructed to “pass the mic around the nation” as each state cast a symbolic vote for Ms. Harris accompanied by a meaningful tune. Some featured a surprise celebrity guest.(Ms. Harris is already the party’s nominee, having been chosen via a virtual vote two weeks ago. But delegates on the floor saw no need to spoil the fun.)Alabama kicked off the proceedings with “Sweet Home Alabama” rocking in the background. Colorado played a few beats from “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire — one of the band’s lead singers is from Denver.“We know how to climb mountains, and we’re going to make sure Kamala Harris and Tim Walz reach the summit,” the state’s chosen delegate said as he cast Colorado’s votes for the Democratic ticket.The opening lines of “Sirius,” the song used to introduce the legendary 1990s Chicago Bulls teams, played as Illinois cast its votes, but it was not Michael Jordan in front of the microphone: It was the state’s governor, JB Pritzker. Sean Astin, the actor from “Rudy” who played the title character, who tries to make the University of Notre Dame football team, had a cameo for the Indiana delegation.California and its governor, Gavin Newsom, closed the boisterous session, with Mr. Newsom proclaiming that he was from “the great state of Nancy Pelosi” as the San Francisco politician and former speaker of the House stood beside him.A succession of California rap songs, including “California Love” by Tupac and “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar, played in the background. Ms. Harris, who is from the state, accepted the nomination as she rallied supporters in Milwaukee.But if there was any question that Georgia Democrats lacked enthusiasm — or a taste for the spotlight — Lil Jon had the scene-stealing answer.“We’re not going back,” he sang, leading the crowd in a chant of what has become Ms. Harris’s rallying cry.Nick Corasaniti More