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AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Alvin the Beagle Helped Usher In a Democratic SenateSenator Raphael Warnock was sworn in this week as Georgia’s first Black senator, and he arrived with a canny canine assist.Senator Raphael Warnock and Alvin the beagle during the production of his campaign ad.Credit…Warnock for GeorgiaPublished More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney GeneralTrying to find another avenue to push his baseless election claims, Donald Trump considered installing a loyalist, and had the men make their cases to him.Jeffrey Clark, who led the Justice Department’s civil division, had been working with President Donald J. Trump to devise ways to cast doubt on the election results.Credit…Susan Walsh/Associated PressJan. 22, 2021Updated 8:50 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?The answer was unanimous. They would resign.Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.The previously unknown chapter was the culmination of the president’s long-running effort to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda. He also pressed Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels, including one who would look into Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of election equipment that Mr. Trump’s allies had falsely said was working with Venezuela to flip votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.This account of the department’s final days under Mr. Trump’s leadership is based on interviews with four former Trump administration officials who asked not to be named because of fear of retaliation.Mr. Clark said that this account contained inaccuracies but did not specify, adding that he could not discuss any conversations with Mr. Trump or Justice Department lawyers. “Senior Justice Department lawyers, not uncommonly, provide legal advice to the White House as part of our duties,” he said. “All my official communications were consistent with law.”Mr. Clark also noted that he was the lead signatory on a Justice Department request last month asking a federal judge to reject a lawsuit that sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the election.Mr. Trump declined to comment. An adviser said that Mr. Trump has consistently argued that the justice system should investigate “rampant election fraud that has plagued our system for years.”The adviser added that “any assertion to the contrary is false and being driven by those who wish to keep the system broken.”A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did Mr. Rosen. When Mr. Trump said on Dec. 14 that Attorney General William P. Barr was leaving the department, some officials thought that he might allow Mr. Rosen a short reprieve before pressing him about voter fraud. After all, Mr. Barr would be around for another week.Instead, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Rosen to the Oval Office the next day. He wanted the Justice Department to file legal briefs supporting his allies’ lawsuits seeking to overturn his election loss. And he urged Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate not only unfounded accusations of widespread voter fraud, but also Dominion, the voting machines firm.(Dominion has sued the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who inserted those accusations into four federal lawsuits about voter irregularities that were all dismissed.)Mr. Rosen refused. He maintained that he would make decisions based on the facts and the law, and he reiterated what Mr. Barr had privately told Mr. Trump: The department had investigated voting irregularities and found no evidence of widespread fraud.But Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen after the meeting — in phone calls and in person. He repeatedly said that he did not understand why the Justice Department had not found evidence that supported conspiracy theories about the election that some of his personal lawyers had espoused. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.As Mr. Rosen and the deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed back, they were unaware that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and had told the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the election results.Election workers performing a recount in Atlanta in November. Mr. Trump focused on Georgia’s election outcome after he lost the state.Credit…Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Trump quickly embraced Mr. Clark, who had been appointed the acting head of the civil division in September and was also the head of the department’s environmental and natural resources division.As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.As Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might not be tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.That conversation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden’s win there.Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy with the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.Unwilling to step down without a fight, Mr. Rosen said that he needed to hear straight from Mr. Trump and worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that evening.Mr. Clark asked Mr. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen, the acting attorney general.Credit…Ting Shen for The New York TimesEven as Mr. Clark’s pronouncement was sinking in, stunning news broke out of Georgia: State officials had recorded an hourlong call, published by The Washington Post, during which Mr. Trump pressured them to manufacture enough votes to declare him the victor. As the fallout from the recording ricocheted through Washington, the president’s desperate bid to change the outcome in Georgia came into sharp focus.Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed ahead, informing Steven Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, about Mr. Clark’s latest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a late-afternoon call with the department’s remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark’s efforts to replace Mr. Rosen.Mr. Rosen planned to soon head to the White House to discuss his fate, Mr. Donoghue told the group. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, they all agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.The Clark plan, the officials concluded, would seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of law. For hours, they anxiously messaged and called one another as they awaited Mr. Rosen’s fate.Around 6 p.m., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark present their arguments to him.Mr. Cipollone advised the president not to fire Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel advised Mr. Trump that he and the department’s remaining top officials would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone at the department.Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.Mr. Rosen and his deputies concluded they had weathered the turmoil. Once Congress certified Mr. Biden’s victory, there would be little for them to do until they left along with Mr. Trump in two weeks.They began to exhale days later as the Electoral College certification at the Capitol got underway. And then they received word: The building had been breached.Maggie Haberman More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyGeorgia Certifies Senate Victories of Warnock and OssoffThe certification by the secretary of state paves the way for Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock to be sworn in as senators.The Rev. Raphael Warnock, left, and Jon Ossoff thanked the crowd at a rally last month in Columbus, Ga.Credit…Audra Melton for The New York TimesJan. 19, 2021Updated 6:07 p.m. ETATLANTA — Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on Tuesday certified the runoff election victories of Senators-elect Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, setting in motion the formal legal process that will seat the two Democrats and give their party control of the U.S. Senate for the first time since 2015.The swearing-in of Mr. Ossoff, Mr. Warnock and Alex Padilla, who will fill the California Senate seat left vacant by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, will create a 50-50 tie in the Senate, giving Democrats de facto control of the chamber because the tiebreaking vote will be held by Ms. Harris. She will be sworn in as vice president on Wednesday, and the three new Democratic senators are expected to be sworn in on Wednesday afternoon.Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who like Mr. Raffensperger is a Republican, also signed off on the certification of the races. Gabriel Sterling, a top official in Mr. Raffensperger’s office, noted on Twitter last week that a representative of Georgia state government must then go to Washington to hand the certification documents over to the secretary of the Senate.Despite a flurry of recent drama and unfounded allegations of voter fraud in Georgia, there was little doubt that Mr. Raffensperger would eventually certify the results of the Jan. 5 contests in which Mr. Ossoff defeated David Perdue, a one-term Republican senator, and Mr. Warnock beat Kelly Loeffler, a Republican who was appointed to the Senate seat by Mr. Kemp in December 2019.The margins in both races were outside the half-percentage point threshold that allows the trailing candidate to demand a statewide recount under Georgia law. With about 4.4 million ballots cast, Mr. Ossoff won his race by about 55,000 votes, giving him a 1.22 percent lead, and Mr. Warnock won by about 93,000 votes, giving him a 2.08 percent lead, according to the secretary of state’s website.Those results stood in contrast to those of the Nov. 3 presidential election, in which Mr. Biden defeated Mr. Trump by a narrower margin that was well within the threshold, allowing Mr. Trump to demand a recount.The recount in the presidential race showed that Mr. Trump had indeed lost by about 12,000 votes. But that did not stop the president and his allies from continuing to vigorously press the unfounded allegation that he was the victim of a rigged election.That false narrative, which Mr. Trump pursued in failed court cases and in campaign appearances, quite likely ended up helping the two Democratic Senate candidates by depressing turnout in Georgia among those supporters of the president who saw no reason to vote in an electoral system that he was constantly maligning as untrustworthy.The two Senate races presented a rare and remarkable drama in American politics, given Mr. Trump’s recalcitrance, Mr. Biden’s triumph and the effect that control of the Senate would most likely have on Mr. Biden’s initial policy agenda. Outside money poured into Georgia, making for the most expensive Senate races in U.S. history. Mr. Trump flew to the state and held big, well-attended rallies for Mr. Perdue and Ms. Loeffler. But his message of support was often overtaken by his compulsion to air grievances about his own election.The two Democrats vowed to strengthen the Affordable Care Act, support police reform and overhaul the national response to the coronavirus pandemic. The two Republicans darkly warned that Democratic victories would hasten a dangerous national slide into radical socialism.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyRaphael Warnock and the Legacy of Racial TyrannyHis victory in the Georgia Senate runoff made history, and also echoed it.Mr. Wegman is a member of the editorial board.Jan. 17, 2021Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesLost in the horror and mayhem of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was another momentous event that happened barely 12 hours earlier and hundreds of miles away: the election to the Senate of the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, the first Black Democratic senator from the South in the nation’s history.Mr. Warnock’s triumph, along with that of Jon Ossoff, who won the other Georgia runoff on that Tuesday night, gave Democrats the Senate majority they lost in 2014, and full control of Congress for the first time in a decade.That was the salient political fact, at least before the insurrection began. But the proximity of those two events — the election of a Black man to the Senate followed hard on by the violent ransacking of the Capitol by an overwhelmingly white mob — rang loudly with echoes of the past.A little more than 150 years ago, on the afternoon of Feb. 25, 1870, America’s first Black senator, Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican from Mississippi, sat on the floor of the Senate preparing to take his oath of office.“There was not an inch of standing or sitting room in the galleries, so densely were they packed,” this newspaper reported in the following day’s edition. “To say that the interest was intense gives but a faint idea of the feeling which prevailed throughout the entire proceeding.”Hiram Rhodes RevelsCredit…Library of CongressRevels was, like Mr. Warnock, a preacher, ordained by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He had been raised in North Carolina and served as a chaplain to a Black regiment during the Civil War. He was elected to the Mississippi State Senate in 1869, part of a wave of Black lawmakers who took office throughout the South during Reconstruction.In 1870, the State Legislature chose Revels to fill one of Mississippi’s two U.S. Senate seats, both of which had been abandoned several years earlier, when the state seceded. It was a bold and unapologetic statement that Black Americans — Black men, anyway — were the political equals of whites, and were entitled to hold office alongside them.But the wounds of the Civil War were still fresh, and Southern whites were furious at being forced to share power with the people they had so recently enslaved. Before Revels could raise his right hand, the objections began raining down. George Vickers, a Democrat from Maryland, argued that Revels was ineligible to serve because the Constitution requires a senator to have been an American citizen for at least nine years. According to the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, Black people could never be citizens. While the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, effectively negated that ruling, Vickers contended — with a dose of birtherism that would make Donald Trump proud — Revels had therefore only been a citizen for two years.Revels’s backers argued that he was in fact a lifelong citizen of the United States, because he was born to free Black parents.After more objections and heated debate, the efforts to block Revels’s admission were voted down by the antislavery Republicans who dominated the Senate. “When the Vice-President uttered the words, ‘The Senator elect will now advance and take the oath,’ a pin might have been heard drop,” The Times wrote. “Mr. Revels showed no embarrassment whatever, and his demeanor was as dignified as could be expected under the circumstances. The abuse which had been poured upon him and on his race during the last two days might well have shaken the nerves of any one.”Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts spoke up in Mr. Revels’s defense. “All men are created equal, says the great Declaration,” he said, but “the Declaration was only half established by Independence. The greatest duty remained behind. In assuring the equal rights of all we complete the work.”The rioters incited by President Trump and Republicans to storm the seat of the federal government on Jan. 6 did not have Mr. Warnock’s name on their lips. They didn’t have to. In their eagerness to destroy American democracy rather than share it, they showed themselves to be the inheritors of a long tradition of rebellion against a new world order: a genuine, multiracial democracy.Reconstruction was the first attempt to make that world order a reality, and it succeeded remarkably for a few years, as evidenced by the election of leaders like Hiram Revels. But it soon collapsed as the federal government gave up and pulled troops out of the South, leaving Black people at the mercy of vengeful state governments intent on re-establishing white supremacy.In the Jim Crow era that followed, millions of Black Americans were erased from American political life. They may have technically counted as five-fifths of a person, rather than three-fifths as the Constitution had originally set out, but they were no more able to participate in their own governance than their enslaved forebears had been. Those who tried to take part faced everything from poll taxes and literacy tests to campaigns of terrorism and state-sanctioned murder. By the first decades of the 20th century, Black voter registration had fallen into the low single digits across much of the South.That racist, anti-democratic regime was brought down only by the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century, led at its apex by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Historians often refer to this time as a second Reconstruction, because it wasn’t until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the United States could claim to be anything resembling a true representative democracy. But this second Reconstruction, like the first, faced reactionary backlash from the start. That backlash has found expression primarily in the Republican Party, which had by then abandoned its abolitionist roots — from Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy to Ronald Reagan’s race-baiting dog whistles to the openly racist campaign and presidency of Donald Trump.If Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016, following the eight-year tenure of the nation’s first Black president, was a symbolic assault on the ideal of a multiracial democracy, the riot he incited at the Capitol on Jan. 6 made that assault literal.There will be no new Jim Crow regime, but the effort to preserve white political domination continues. Republican lawmakers have been working for years to make it harder, if not impossible, for Black voters — who vote roughly 9 to 1 for Democrats — to register and cast their ballots. While no state caved to the outrageous pressure from Mr. Trump to reject its popular vote in favor of Joe Biden and give its electors to him, many states are already debating legislation to cut back access to voting and to strengthen voter ID requirements, both of which would hurt Black voters disproportionately.Those voters were critical to the Democrats’ victories in Georgia, and their showing up despite the obstacles placed in their way has ensured that Mr. Warnock and Mr. Ossoff will be sworn in over the coming days. But it is clearer than ever that as America approaches 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the nation’s work of assuring equal rights for all is far from complete. As in 1870, the greatest duty still remains before us.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAtlanta Prosecutor Appears to Move Closer to Trump InquiryThe Fulton County district attorney is weighing an inquiry into possible election interference and is said to be considering hiring an outside counsel.President Trump made several calls to Georgia officials that raised alarms about election interference.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesRichard Fausset and Jan. 15, 2021Updated 8:21 p.m. ETATLANTA — Prosecutors in Georgia appear increasingly likely to open a criminal investigation of President Trump over his attempts to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 election, an inquiry into offenses that would be beyond his federal pardon power.The new Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, is already weighing whether to proceed, and among the options she is considering is the hiring of a special assistant from outside to oversee the investigation, according to people familiar with her office’s deliberations.At the same time, David Worley, the lone Democrat on Georgia’s five-member election board, said this week that he would ask the board to make a referral to the Fulton County district attorney by next month. Among the matters he will ask prosecutors to investigate is a phone call Mr. Trump made in which he pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn the state’s election results.Jeff DiSantis, a district attorney spokesman, said the office had not taken any action to hire outside counsel and declined to comment further on the case.Some veteran Georgia prosecutors said they believed Mr. Trump had clearly violated state law.“If you took the fact out that he is the president of the United States and look at the conduct of the call, it tracks the communication you might see in any drug case or organized crime case,” said Michael J. Moore, the former United States attorney for the Middle District of Georgia. “It’s full of threatening undertone and strong-arm tactics.”He said he believed there had been “a clear attempt to influence the conduct of the secretary of state, and to commit election fraud, or to solicit the commission of election fraud.”The White House declined to comment.Mr. Worley said in an interview that if no investigation had been announced by Feb. 10, the day of the election board’s next scheduled meeting he would make a motion for the board to refer the matter of Mr. Trump’s phone calls to Ms. Willis’s office. Mr. Worley, a lawyer, believes that such a referral should, under Georgia law, automatically prompt an investigation.If the board declines to make a referral, Mr. Worley said he would ask Ms. Willis’s office himself to start an inquiry.Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, is one of the members of the board and has said that he might have a conflict of interest in the matter, as Mr. Trump called him to exert pressure. That could lead him to recuse himself from any decisions on a referral by the board.Mr. Worley said he would introduce the motion based on an outside complaint filed with the state election board by John F. Banzhaf III, a George Washington University law professor.Mr. Banzhaf and other legal experts say Mr. Trump’s calls may run afoul of at least three state criminal laws. One is criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, which can be either a felony or a misdemeanor.There is also a related conspiracy charge, which can be prosecuted either as a misdemeanor or a felony. A third law, a misdemeanor offense, bars “intentional interference” with another person’s “performance of election duties.”“My feeling based on listening to the phone call is that they probably will see if they can get it past a grand jury,” said Joshua Morrison, a former senior assistant district attorney in Fulton County who once worked closely with Ms. Willis. “It seems clearly there was a crime committed.”He noted that Fulton County, which encompasses much of Atlanta, is not friendly territory for Mr. Trump if he were to face a grand jury there. The inquiry, if it comes to pass, would be the second known criminal investigation of Mr. Trump outside of federal pardon power. He is already facing a criminal fraud inquiry into his finances by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. Even Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, does not have the power to pardon at the state level, though it’s not assured that he would issue a pardon anyway, given his frayed relationship with Mr. Trump. Nonetheless, in Georgia, pardons are handled by a state board.The question of whether or not to charge the nation’s 45th president would present a unique challenge for any district attorney. Ms. Willis, who took office only days ago, is a seasoned prosecutor not unaccustomed to the limelight and criticism. A graduate of Howard University and the Emory University School of Law in the Atlanta area, she is the first woman, and the second African-American, to hold the job of top prosecutor in Fulton County, Georgia’s most populous, with more than one million residents.Ms. Willis, 49, is known for the leading role she played in the 2015 convictions of 11 educators in a standardized-test cheating scandal that rocked Atlanta’s public school system. She is taking office at a time when Atlanta, like other big cities, is seeing a rise in crime.She must also deal with the high-profile fatal shooting of a Black man, Rayshard Brooks, by a white police officer in June 2020 and has said she will take a fresh look at charges brought against the officer by her predecessor.Several calls by Mr. Trump to Georgia Republicans have raised alarms about election interference. In early December, he called Mr. Kemp to pressure him to call a special legislative session to overturn his election loss. Later that month, Mr. Trump called a state investigator and pressed the official to “find the fraud,” according to those with knowledge of the call.The pressure campaign culminated in a Jan. 2 call by Mr. Trump to Mr. Raffensperger. “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Mr. Trump said on the call, during which Mr. Raffensperger and his aides dismissed the president’s baseless claims of fraud. After the Jan. 2 call, a complaint was sent to the election board by Mr. Banzhaf. (Three of his law students once brought a complaint that forced former Vice President Spiro Agnew to pay back to the state of Maryland money he had received as kickbacks.) Mr. Banzhaf has subsequently supplemented his complaint to incorporate the call made to the Georgia election investigator.The complaint was also sent to Ms. Willis, and to Chris Carr, the Republican attorney general; a spokesperson for Mr. Carr could not be reached Friday.Of the three Republicans on the board besides Mr. Raffensperger, one of them, Rebecca N. Sullivan, did not return a phone call, and another, Anh Le, declined to comment. The third, T. Matthew Mashburn, said that it would be inappropriate for him to comment on how he would vote before the motion was presented.However, Mr. Mashburn also said that he was troubled by some of the language Mr. Trump had used in his phone call to Mr. Raffensperger. Mr. Mashburn noted, in particular, a moment when the president told Mr. Raffensperger, “There’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”“The use of the word ‘recalculate’ is very dangerous ground to tread,” Mr. Mashburn said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
Dear Fight to Vote readers,
Welcome back! I’m Sam Levine, the voting rights reporter here at Guardian US. I’ll be taking over this newsletter from the stalwart Ankita Rao.
After the attack on the US capitol last week it’s easy to forget that Georgia’s nationally-watched Senate runoff races were just a little over a week ago. While it’s difficult right now to think about anything other than what’s going on in Washington, I wanted to begin 2021 by looking at how democracy can work, rather than how it can fall apart. I saw this firsthand in Georgia, where grassroots groups organized to mobilize unlikely voters and worked to overcome severe voting barriers in Georgia, a state that has become an epicenter of voter suppression.
Methodical organizing
I spent the Monday before election day with canvassers from Georgia Stand-Up, one of several civic action groups that spent the weeks before the election getting out the vote. Our day began in a chilly church parking lot in Atlanta, where canvassers, equipped with Dunkin’ coffee and Bojangles chicken biscuits, quickly piled into vans, which were then dispatched into different neighborhoods.
Sam Levine
(@srl)
An army of canvassers with Georgia Stand Up gets ready to go out one day before the senate runoffs here. Their goal is to hit 6,078 doors today, which would put them at 100,000 doors statewide pic.twitter.com/6tWG3oU9Rn
January 4, 2021
I followed along with one group as they went into a neighborhood in Fairburn, just outside of Atlanta. In the silence of the morning, the organizers flew out of the van in groups of twos and threes and quickly, methodically covered different houses. Their goal that day was to knock on just over 6,000 doors, bringing their total across the state to just over 100,000.
‘So many people are not aware of simple voting information’ More
Last week, Raphael Warnock made history by winning a special senatorial election in Georgia, becoming the first Black Democrat from the south ever elected to the United States Senate. Warnock, the senior pastor of the same church Martin Luther King Jr once led, pulled off the upset thanks to high turnout among Black voters across the state, in metro and rural areas alike. While his victory may have the feel of an overnight success story to much of the nation, it is the product of voter engagement that’s occurred over the last decade.The signs that Warnock could pull off an unexpected victory were all there. In 2018, Stacey Abrams came within 1.4 percentage points of becoming Georgia’s first Black governor and the first Black woman to be governor in the nation’s history. Then, last November, Joe Biden carried the state, becoming only the second Democrat to win it in more than three decades. And it happened by the slimmest of margins: Biden bested Donald Trump by just 11,000 votes when more than 5m were cast. After these two statewide contests, Democratic strategists were optimistic that strong turnout among Black Georgians would allow them to win both Senate seats up for grabs. Warnock’s victory is a culmination of that trend and sustained voter engagement work by figures such as Stacey Abrams and years of Democratic organizers.As has been well-established, Black Americans are the most reliable Democratic voters in the country – for the last five decades, Democratic presidential and congressional candidates win about 90% of Black voters on average. This basically held true in Georgia in 2020, where Biden beat Trump among Black voters 88–11. Strategists understand that increasing Black voter turnout creates lopsided advantages for Democratic candidates for elected office. So in Georgia, where the number of Black Americans has steadily increased in recent years and presently makes up about a third of the state’s residents, Democrats recognized that a window of opportunity to win statewide contests would open.Stacey Abrams’ gubernatorial campaign leveraged the work of grassroots voter mobilization and civic engagement efforts and directed resources to expand outreach, especially in communities of color. And though she lost that election in an outcome clouded by voter suppression, the playbook for how to increase turnout by educating Georgians about the voting process and getting disengaged citizens to show up on election day was well-established. And it worked.Warnock beat Senator Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to the seat in December of 2019, by 75,000 votes in an especially high turnout election where 4.4 million Georgians participated. Black turnout exceeded nearly all projections. Initial analysis from the New York Times shows that turnout in precincts with a supermajority Black population only fell about 7 points from the presidential election whereas turnout in white working-class precincts – traditionally Republican strongholds – fell by 13 points. And Black precincts voted more for Warnock than they did for Biden by about 3 points.The sustained engagement and mobilization strategies aimed at Black voters never let up after the presidential election; resources continued to flow. Black Georgians – who are disproportionately affected by long wait times to vote, polling station closures, and voter identification requirements – weathered attempts to complicate and discourage their participation. The outcome of these recent elections isn’t the product of a new movement, but rather the result of a long, steady build to increase and maintain Black turnout.In addition to turnout, Warnock was also aided by his race and gender. Political science scholarship reliably shows that Black Democratic candidates increase both turnout and support for Democrats up and down ballot; it is no surprise that in Georgia’s other senatorial election, featuring two white men, the Democrat Jon Ossoff also outperformed Biden.And my own research shows that Black men, in particular, are especially motivated by race and gender descriptive representation. That is, the opportunity to help a Black male Democrat make history is alluring to even Black Republicans or disengaged eligible Black male voters. So it makes sense that Warnock outperformed both Biden and Ossoff with Black men. According to exit polls, Biden won 83% of Black men in Georgia to Trump’s 16%, and Ossoff won 88% of them; but Warnock won 90% of this bloc – one in eight of all voters.In this way, Warnock leveraged the momentum of other Black Democrats in the south running for statewide office, merging the appeal of descriptive representation to turn out and win more Black voters with policies that appeal to white Democrats who have become increasingly liberal over the last several years. Black candidates with progressive agendas in states with a significant Black population may become a winning formula. Warnock’s victory suggests that the close losses by Abrams and Florida’s Andrew Gillum in 2018 governors’ races were not flukes, but harbingers of what may come.In the end, Black voters in Georgia not only delivered historic victories in last week’s Senate races, but they also completed a flip of the United States Senate back into Democratic control, with Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote.The voter turnout work that began years ago in reliably Republican Georgia overcame efforts to suppress the votes of its Black citizens and managed to elect its first Black senator. Perhaps more importantly, those efforts not only changed the state, but they have the potential to shift the direction of the country after the Trump era. More
Deborah Scott has been registering voters for well over a decade in Georgia, but about five years ago she began to notice a problem. Georgia Stand-Up, the civic action group she leads, started getting a spike in calls from people who said they filled out a voter registration form but never received an official voter registration card. “We’re like ‘hey, what’s going on here?,’” she said.Scott’s group adjusted their voter registration strategy. After they got someone to register, they started tracking their voter registration and following up with them to ensure it went through. When there was a problem, they would help the voter follow up with local election officials. Sometimes, after that follow-up inquiry, the election officials would “miraculously” discover the registration was there all along, Scott said.Georgia Stand-Up took their strategy into the general election last year and Senate runoff this year, both of which saw extremely high turnout among Black voters. It’s a surge that many have attributed to years of investment by activists like Scott and Democrat Stacey Abrams, to mobilize voters of color, who traditionally have had lower turnout than their white counterparts, and flip the state for Democrats in stunning upsets in both the presidential race (Joe Biden was the first Democrat to carry the state in a presidential race in nearly 30 years) and two US Senate runoffs.As voter suppression has become more brazen in Georgia, overcoming it has become a core part of the work that Abrams and other organizers have done to mobilize the new electorate in the state. This work is not glamorous, focused on helping new voters navigate a bureaucracy designed to make it more difficult to vote. It’s making calls to voters to ensure they know their polling place, explaining how to fill out a mail-in ballot, and making sure they aren’t wrongly purged from the voter rolls. But the multi-year investment in overcoming voting barriers significantly contributed to organizers’ success in Georgia this year.“What we kept seeing was no matter what turnout we had, if we turned out in larger numbers, they always put other barriers in place,” said Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, another civil rights group focused on mobilizing voters of color. “We had to go through strategies that would help us to be more proactive.” Georgia Republicans have already signaled they plan to move ahead with new restrictions on vote-by-mail after an election in which a record number of people used the process.Butler said her group had to shift considerable resources to combat voter suppression starting in 2013, when the US supreme court struck down a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required places with a history of voting discrimination to submit voting changes to the federal government for approval before they went into effect. After the decision, her group began sending representatives to local boards of election so they could learn about polling place changes and consolidations and other changes they needed to know about before election day.Those strategies crystallized during the 2018 gubernatorial race, when Abrams lost to Brian Kemp, then the state’s top election official, and Georgia’s voting barriers were thrust to the center of the race. There was harsh scrutiny of state policy that placed 53,000 voter registrations in suspense over small discrepancies, 70% of which were Black voters. Georgia’s practice of aggressively purging hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls became a matter of national attention. For many, the election illuminated how severely restrictive voting rules could affect an election outcome.“There were so many people who had problems with their registration and didn’t discover the problem until they were already at the polls,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, who worked as the Georgia Democratic party’s voter protection director from 2018 to 2019. “And when more than half of voters would vote on election day, it’s too late to fix anything then.”Beyond highlighting severe barriers in Georgia, the 2018 election also highlighted Democrats’ political strength in Georgia, Ghazal added, opening up money and other resources for grassroots groups that previously hadn’t existed. Abrams’ decision to focus on voting barriers in the state after the election only further galvanized support.In recent years, Butler said, her group has stepped up efforts to prevent voters from being wrongfully purged. Regularly monitoring Georgia’s voter rolls, her group will contact voters who are at risk of being purged to inform them of how they can confirm their eligibility. If someone has been purged, they tell them how they can re-register.“We didn’t always do that. We didn’t have to do that until recently,” Butler said.This year, Fair Fight, the organization Abrams started after the 2018 election, had a network of more than 15,000 volunteers to help people overcome barriers to voting. When it looked like Pooler, a city just outside Savannah, wouldn’t offer any ballot drop boxes, Fair Fight texted voters there to get them to push local officials to install one, said Marisa Pyle, the group’s volunteer and rapid response organizer. Once officials announced there would be a drop box after all, Fair Fight followed up with voters and let them know the location. The group took a similar approach to pressure officials to allow early voting on campus at the University of Georgia.“Our goal was to make sure they got [voting information] in a way that was accessible. And when there were access gaps, trying to fill them with advocacy and our volunteer work,” Pyle said.The effort to contact voters doesn’t stop after election day. Once the polls closed in theSenate runoff, Butler and other groups launched an aggressive effort to contact voters who submitted a provisional ballot at the polls – a special kind of ballot election workers are required to offer if there is uncertainty about their eligibility.Butler said her group will often work with voters to help them understand what kind of documentation they need to provide to election officials in the days after the election in order to ensure their ballot isn’t rejected. If they are on the phone with a voter, organizers will sometimes even set up a three-way call with the board of elections to ensure they understand what they need to do to have their vote counted.The approach was deployed deftly in the general election and runoff. This year, when there were polling place changes in Georgia, organizers sent volunteers to the old locations to make sure voters were redirected to the new one. And as organizers knocked on doors trying to turn out new voters, teaching them about the voting process was at the heart of their conversations.As she knocked on doors ahead of the Senate runoff, Lacreasa Acey, a 38-year-old canvasser, said the emphasis on overcoming voting barriers was a big part of the conversations she had with voters. Sometimes, the information she offered could be as simple as telling people where they could vote or showing them how to fill out an absentee ballot.“It’s amazing how so many people are not aware of simple voting information. They don’t know where to go, they don’t know how to mail in ballots or anything like that, so they get frustrated and they say ‘you know what, I’m just not gonna vote at all,’” said Acey, who knocked on doors on behalf of the New South Super Pac, which backed the Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. “I have everything already. I have the answers.” More
