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      Georgia approves election rule that could delay vote certification

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      The Georgia state election board approved a new rule on Monday that gives local officials more power to investigate votes after election day, increasing concerns the Republican-controlled body is steamrolling a series of consequential changes that could pave the way for chaos this fall.The rule approved Monday authorizes any member on a county board of election “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results”. Even though Georgia law still requires certification of the vote by 5pm the Monday after election day, experts are concerned that these maneuvers give election deniers significant leeway to slow down the certification process and create uncertainty.“It provides no safeguards against requests unscrupulously designed to delay or obstruct the lawful certification process,” lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, the watchdog groups Citizens for Responsibilities and Ethics in Washington (Crew) and the Public Rights Project wrote in a letter to the board. “It would empower individual county board members to make unreasonable and vexatious demands for any election-related documents – even ones that have no bearing on certification – without providing any basis for their requests.”The board has moved aggressively to implement new procedures ahead of the election and three Republicans on it have earned public praise from Donald Trump. Earlier this month, it adopted a new rule that gives local boards the power to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into elections before certifying. It does not define what constitutes a “reasonable inquiry.”The new power to request all election-related documents comes as Julie Adams, a Republican on the Fulton county election board, has refused to certify elections in the state’s largest county and has claimed she has been denied access to adequate information. Adams is also suing the county board of the elections and its election director with the backing of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute to require more access to election documents.Adams is connected to a network for election deniers led by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his attempt to try and overturn the election. Several activists in that network helped shape the rule the board adopted on Monday, ProPublica reported.“Trump and his Maga allies have taken over the Georgia state election board to try and give a veneer of legality to their illegal scheme to disrupt the certification of Georgia’s 2024 election results,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the chief executive of the voter rights organization Fair Fight. “Many of Trump’s key election denier allies are behind these illegal, anti-freedom changes to Georgia election rules, and it’s all with the goal of helping Trump win the ‘Peach State’, even if he doesn’t earn a majority of Georgians’ votes.”The new rule also requires the board of elections in each county to meet no later than 3pm on the Friday after the election to compare the total number of unique voter ID numbers in each precinct with the total number of ballots cast in that precinct. The votes in each precinct can’t be counted until the investigation is resolved. If the results can’t be reconciled, the board is authorized to “determine a method to compute the votes justly”.Several Republicans on the board framed the new rule, which it adopted with a 3-2 vote, as an effort to ensure that only valid votes were cast. “If the board found votes that were made illegally, they should not be counted,” said Janice Johnston, a Republican on the board.But others on the board said it was acting beyond its powers and said the proposal was opening the door to delay certification.“This board is once again exceeding our authority,” said John Fervier, the board’s Republican chairman, who joined the lone Democrat on the board to vote against the rule. “We are not elected officials. And we should not try to create law.”It’s not unusual for there to be small discrepancies between the total numbers of votes cast and the total number of voters. These differences are usually not large enough to affect an election outcome.“The most common cause for a discrepancy is usually if someone leaves with their ballot before casting it,” said Tate Fall, the director of elections in Cobb county in suburban Atlanta. “This would cause there to be one more check-in on the poll pads then there are ballots in the scanner. Typically poll workers catch these discrepancies early as they check the machine counts hourly.” She added that any discrepancies are always explained in a reconciliation report submitted to the Georgia secretary of state’s office after an election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSara Tindall Ghazal, a Democrat on the board, said during Monday’s meeting that voters sometimes will cast a ballot in person after voting by mail because they’re worried their vote won’t count. In those cases, election workers will typically cancel the mail-in vote before tabulation, she said.The board is still considering a proposal to have election workers hand count every ballot cast on election day. The original proposal, submitted by Sharlene Alexander, a Republican election board member in Fayette county, would have required three workers at the precinct to separate ballots into stacks of 50 and count them by hand on election night. After receiving feedback from election officials, Janelle King, a Republican member on the board, amended the proposal to allow counties to begin counting the next day. They would still be required to complete the count by Georgia’s certification deadline.King’s amendment meant that the board had to put off a final vote on the rule until its next meeting in September.Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, has heavily criticized the proposed rule changes, saying they would lead to delays in election results and decrease trust in results.“Georgia voters reject this 11th hour chaos, and so should the unelected members of the State Election Board,” he said in a statement last week. “These misguided, last-minute changes from unelected bureaucrats who have never run an election and seem to reject the advice of anyone who ever has could cause serious problems in an election that otherwise will be secure and accurate.” More

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      Lone Democrat on Georgia state board defends elections amid new rules

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      Sara Tindall Ghazal was scouring her closet as 8pm approached on Wednesday night. She was preparing for her first appearance on cable news, something she has avoided her entire career.In fact, Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the Georgia state election board (SEB), has shunned media attention and appearances since she was appointed to the board in 2021. Back then, even as Georgia became the focal point of former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and as rightwing media and a nationwide network of election denial activists homed in on the state, Tindall Ghazal kept to herself, quietly carrying out her duties in previously obscure meetings of the board.But after two days of public board meetings last week in which her Republican counterparts on the board adopted myriad rules at the behest of some of those very election denier activists, Tindall Ghazal’s cable news debut had become unavoidable.“The makeup of this board has changed from being a board that followed the rule of law and made decisions based on what state and federal law required, and what was best for running elections, to one that is being driven by far-rightwing narratives,” she said.For more than 16 hours on 6 and 7 August, Tindall Ghazal had sat with her fellow board members, all Republicans, and listened to speakers complain that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump – and propose rules that would prevent that from happening again in November but that Tindall Ghazal said will “cause chaos” in November.They include a rule that gives local election officials more power to refuse to certify election results, and another that provides more complicated procedures for voters filling out absentee ballots, as well as constant video surveillance at ballot drop box sites. Tindall Ghazal also voted against reopening a case pushed by election deniers that claims results in 2020 in Fulton county were flipped to benefit Joe Biden.Voting with her in dissent was John Fervier, a Republican and the board chair. Voting for the rules and investigation into Fulton county were a trio of Republicans who were praised by Trump at a recent campaign rally in Atlanta. All three have expressed beliefs in widespread election fraud that even conservative groups have said does not exist.“It’s an iterative process,” Tindall Ghazal said of the SEB’s descent into election denialism. “The narratives exist already and are deeply embedded in the minds of some of the board members and certainly much of the audience and petitioners, and everything that is done in the meetings is done to perpetuate those narratives.”Just as Tindall Ghazal’s Republican colleagues voted to reopen the case against Fulton county, Trump was already promoting the decision on his social media platform, Truth Social.“The Attorney General of Georgia MUST get moving on this,” Trump wrote. “So must Governor Kemp, and the Secretary of State.”Despite Trump’s Truth Social post, nothing has changed in the Fulton county case. Following his loss in 2020, the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, ordered an audit of votes in Fulton, the state’s most populous county and home to heavily Democratic Atlanta.The audit found 345 more votes for Trump than had been counted during the election. But that didn’t change the fact that Biden had received 243,000 more votes than Trump in Fulton county, the audit confirmed.Still, election deniers like those who have successfully pressured the board in recent years to investigate claims of voter fraud have insisted that the case needs further attention. Last week, they got a major win, when the pro-Trump trio of SEB members Janelle King, Rick Jeffares and Janice Johnston sent the case to the attorney general for a new investigation.“We take election integrity very seriously, and we will apply the constitution, the law and the facts as we have always done,” a spokesperson for the Georgia attorney general, Chris Carr, a Republican, told the Associated Press.The SEB also passed rules that Tindall Ghazal said were “far outside our authority as a rule-making body”. Of the rules passed last week, Tindall Ghazal says the most problematic is one that allows for county election board members in Georgia’s 159 counties to refuse to certify results – which courts have largely ruled is a “ministerial” task not up to the discretion of local election officials – if a “reasonable inquiry” can be conducted into allegations of election fraud or errors.“Reasonable inquiry is about as uncertain a standard as I can think of,” Tindall Ghazal said.Several Democratic members of the state legislature spoke out against the rule, as did voting rights groups. Former chair of the Fulton county board of elections Cathy Woolard, a Democrat, said that the certification rule will invite scores of lawsuits challenging the ability of county election board members to use their discretion to hold up certification of election results.“It’s hard for me to imagine the sheer volume of lawsuits that will be filed to challenge the process, the rules, the disregard for the rule of law,” Woolard said.In voting with Tindall Ghazal against the certification rule, Fervier, a political appointee of the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, previewed the legal fight ahead over certification.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Please make sure the votes are in the record for any potential future litigation,” Fervier said at the meeting.At a recent Trump rally in Atlanta, Johnston stood and waved to the crowd as they applauded her, King and Jeffares for “fighting for victory”, as Trump himself put it.“They’re on fire, they’re doing a great job,” Trump said, naming the three of them but not Fervier.“Three pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”After a second, eight-hour day on the dais on 7 August, Tindall Ghazal said she needed “some protein” before preparing for her first major television interview. Her hair was already sorted: close-cropped in a growing-out buzz from losing her hair to chemotherapy treatments for stage two breast cancer.Tindall Ghazal received her cancer diagnosis during a meeting of the state election board in October, then had a mastectomy the following month. The episode was “transformative”, she said, proving that she had a strong network of family and friends to support her. Undergoing the procedure and chemo, Tindall Ghazal never missed an election board meeting.“I don’t do well when I have too much time on my hands, so having the board work kept my mind busy on something that I care deeply about.,” Tindall Ghazal said.An eighth-generation Georgian and attorney, Tindall Ghazal has monitored elections and peace talks for former president Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center in Syria, Rwanda and Liberia, where she met her husband, Patrick, in 1998. After leaving the Carter Center, Tindall Ghazal became the director of voter protection for the Democratic party of Georgia.In 2021, Georgia Democrats appointed her to the SEB. At the time, she knew she’d be the only Democrat – but she also had faith that Republicans on the board would work for the benefit of all Georgians. For a time, Tindall Ghazal says, that was the case. Republicans had appointed relative moderates to the board.Since 2021, three moderate Republican appointees have been replaced by King, Johnston and Jeffares. Johnston has been receptive to complaints and calls for investigations from election denial activists, the Guardian found in March; Jeffares has openly posted about his belief in Trump’s election lies, although he told the Guardian that he believed Trump legitimately lost in Georgia in 2020. King, a conservative media personality with no experience managing elections, is married to Kelvin King, who ran against the former football star Herschel Walker in the Republican primary in 2022 but lost. (Walker went on to lose to Raphael Warnock in the general election.) King hosts a podcast and appears on a political panel at a TV station in Atlanta, but has no experience administering elections, nor does Jeffares.Leftwing groups like Fair Fight Action, which was founded by the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a Democrat, said the trio of Johnston, King and Jeffares had been chosen for their roles on the board not because of their experience administering elections, but because of their fealty to Trump.“The state election board has become a Maga government body, with three new members likely chosen not because they have elections experience, but because they’re seen as loyalists who will defer to Trump’s 2020 election fraud lies,” Fair Fight’s communications director, Max Flugrath, said in a statement.As non-elected officials hearing complaints about elections, ballots and other minutiae of the election process, the SEB was a relatively obscure government body whose meetings have not typically provided scenes of great political theater. But that changed in 2020, when the SEB became the focus of election denial activists’ attempts to prove the election was stolen from Trump. Now the board’s meetings have garnered greater attention from a nationwide network of election deniers, Georgia’s political press, voting rights advocacy groups and left-leaning watchdogs.Trump’s mention of King, Johnston and Jeffares put an even bigger spotlight on the previously obscure body. Johnston, who attended Trump’s rally and waved at the cheering crowd, did not return a request for comment, but King said that while she did not attend the rally, if she had, she was well within her rights to “attend any Republican event freely as I would expect [Tindall Ghazal] to do the same if she wishes”. Jeffares also didn’t attend the rally, he said. In a lengthy conversation with the Guardian, Jeffares, a Trump supporter, said he believed Trump lost fair and square in Georgia in 2020, but repeatedly expressed belief in possible election fraud taking place in the state, especially in Fulton county.Jeffares said he wasn’t watching Trump’s rally in Atlanta when the ex-president mentioned his name. He heard about it several days later.“It makes me mad that we’ve been labeled” as election deniers, Jeffares said. “I didn’t even watch it, but when I heard he mentioned our name, you know my first thought was? Damn, we’re in trouble now.”But Jeffares’ concern over Trump’s mentioning of the board’s work didn’t stop him from saying he’d be open to a position in a second Trump administration. In a conversation with the Guardian, Jeffares said he proposed himself as a candidate for a regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency. The proposal came during a conversation with a former Trump campaign adviser, Brian Jack, who is running for a US congressional seat in November. Jeffares, who runs a company that deals with sewage and wastewater projects, helped Jack with his campaign, he said.“I said if y’all can’t figure out who you want to be the EPA director for the south-east, I’d like to have it,” Jeffares said. “That’s all I said.”With a Democratic ticket marked by surging enthusiasm following the replacement of Biden as candidate with Kamala Harris, Georgia’s status as a swing state has once again become a focal point of both Republican and Democratic campaign strategy. As the state election board continues to implement rules that will affect how Georgia’s elections are run – and is dominated by pro-Trump Republicans who hold the majority – the focus on Tindall Ghazal and her work on the board may be about to get a lot bigger.“All I know is this is where we are, and I am just trying to stop a disaster,” she said. More

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      Ashwin Ramaswami takes on a fake elector for a Georgia state senate seat

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      The top of a ticket might normally be expected to have a profound impact on local races, especially with new vigor thanks to Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden. The problem in Georgia is that there are almost no local races worth discussing because the state is gerrymandered to microscopic proportions.There is exactly one state senate race that’s predictably competitive for a Democratic pick-up in Georgia. And that one race is spicy.The Republican state senator Shawn Still will face trial in the Fulton county election interference case along with Donald Trump and 17 other co-defendants. He is accused of being one of the so-called fake electors in the scheme.Facing Still in November for the suburban Atlanta seat is Ashwin Ramaswami, a 25-year-old techie graduate of Forsyth county’s renowned public schools, impossibly earnest, unusually young, reflective of this district’s increasingly diverse demography, and utterly indefatigable. He is everywhere all at once and – perhaps unintentionally – wearing people down with high-end nerd glam and the zeal of a challenger.Ramaswami is a computer science graduate from Stanford University with a law degree from Georgetown, which he somehow managed to obtain while bouncing between startups and Google internships and fellowships with venture capital outfits and work for the federal government on election cybersecurity.He turned 25 at the end of July, four months ahead of the cutoff where he would have been too young to run for the Georgia senate.Most people on his trajectory end up in a 70-hour-a-week consulting job, earning a salary that reads like a phone number that they don’t have time to spend.“I just soon realized that just going off into tech and making money that way wasn’t really for me,” he told the Guardian. “It wasn’t that interesting, to be honest, because there are so many bigger issues going on, right?”If a devoutly Hindu candidate who is young enough to be on his parent’s health insurance does not sound like the profile of a Georgia politician, it is because politics is playing catchup with Atlanta’s rapid demographic changes and its increasingly international character.Georgia’s 48th state senate district crosses north Fulton, Forsyth and Gwinnett counties and is in the heart of the region’s affluent tech community. Nearly a third of its residents are foreign born. Ramaswami’s parents are from the same part of India as Kamala Harris’s mother, he said. (He is not related to Vivek Ramaswamy, former Republican presidential candidate and conservative firecracker.)Politically the district has been a purple mosaic of longtime Republican voters increasingly competing with newer, younger, Democratic transplants. The former Georgia GOP chairman David Shafer – one of the defendants in the Trump case here – held this seat when he was a state senator. It passed to Democrat Michelle Au, an Asian American physician, before the legislature carved it up in redistricting. Still won it by 11 points in 2022.The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee believes Still’s seat has a 7-point Republican lean now, discounting the effects of the indictment on the race. Two senate seats held by Democrats are within striking distance of a Republican. All of Georgia’s remaining senate districts require a wipeout wave election to be seriously competitive.Still, 52, owner of a swimming pool subcontracting company and a former finance chairman for the Georgia Republican party, did not return calls or emails asking for comment. But he has presented himself as a relatively moderate Republican and maintains his innocence in the case, describing his role as necessary to preserve legal challenges to the 2020 election in Georgia.View image in fullscreen“We went to the meeting. We listened to the attorneys. We signed our names exactly as we were prescribed,” he said on the Alan Sanders Show last month. “I never thought for a moment I had anything to hide.” Still characterizes the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, as “corrupt” for bringing charges, and said he would go to court immediately to clear his name if he could. An appellate court hearing to see if the case moves forward is scheduled for October.Twenty years ago, most people who lived in the district were white. Not so now, Still said.“We are in a minority to majority state,” Still told Sanders. “If people think that we can keep doing things the way that we’ve always done it, we are going to be in for a pretty rude awakening and wake up one day and never be able to win office again.”Still has campaigned aggressively to hold his seat, including and especially in the Indian community, which has a significant number of Republican supporters. “They’ve been very welcoming, because we share the same values, about family, about public safety, about education,” Still said. “If they see that you share their values, it’s OK if you don’t look like them, or worship like them, right.“In the past, I think a lot of Republicans have just kind of written off smaller groups like that. And we can’t afford to do that any more.”Education is a key component of Ramaswami’s pitch. The high school Ramaswami attended in the district – from which he graduated second in his class – is now majority students of color and 28% Asian.Ramaswami speaks often about the value of a product of these schools representing the community in the legislature. He can speak authentically and with authority about the somewhat absurd expectations parents in this part of Georgia place on their children’s achievements. Ramaswami is the kid that blows the grading curve.Up until recently, he also sounded like it.Constant campaigning has started to scrape the geek off of him, a bit. Conversations with voters and donors – and anyone he can corral – has that effect over time, he said.“You do it over and over again and then you get better, right?” he said. “Like, I wasn’t good at this when I was starting, but I figured I need to get better at it. I want to actually, you know, serve my community.”Ramaswami’s campaign has been relentless, even by the heightened standards of swing state politics. He has become a fixture in public in the north metro area, knocking on doors and showing up to churches and mosques and synagogues and temples and perhaps backyard pool parties and pickup basketball games. That retail politicking has been coupled with an intense social media and digital media campaign, fueled by more than $400,000 in fundraising – more than double that of his opponent.“I didn’t know him at the time, but the first thing I ever heard about him was from other people who do politics in north Fulton and Johns Creek talking about how often they’re getting texts and campaign emails from him,” said Alex Vanden Heuvel, a 27-year-old political consultant with FTR Political Strategies. “Anytime we bring it up, that’s the first thing out of anybody’s mouth is his digital game, like he’s always in your inbox, always in your texts.”Sara Henderson, a Georgia-based political consultant, knows Ramaswami and likened the persistence of his campaigning to being sold an extended warranty.“Every second of the day. It doesn’t turn it off,” she said. “Twenty-four seven. I think that it’s good in a way, to see that excitement and that, like, ‘I’m in it for the right reasons.’ But there’s also some learning that needs to happen about political nuance and knowing the right timing … Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but it doesn’t always get the grease it needs.”But the goal is name recognition, Ramaswami said. His internal polling suggests he is now more recognizable than Still is.“It has actually been the case for a lot of my career, where I feel like I’m just doing normal things and then somehow that’s, like, 10 times more than what everyone else does,” Ramaswami said. “So, you know, I’m glad that it’s setting a new standard. I don’t feel overworked.” More

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      Jimmy Carter Said to Have Plans to Vote for Kamala Harris

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      Former President Jimmy Carter, who has been in hospice care for more than 17 months, has said that he has every intention of voting for Vice President Kamala Harris in the fall, according to his family.Mr. Carter, 99, who served as the nation’s 39th president from 1977 to 1981, would turn 100 on Oct. 1. No American president has lived longer than him.Mr. Carter’s son Chip asked his father on Wednesday if he was trying to make it to his 100th birthday, according to the former president’s grandson Jason.“I’m trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,” Mr. Carter replied, according to the grandson.The Atlanta Journal-Constitution previously reported on the conversation.Ms. Harris did not immediately comment.Mr. Carter appeared gaunt and frail at the funeral ceremony in Atlanta for his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, in November. He has remained at home in Plains, Ga., in hospice care far longer than many would have imagined; most people receive hospice care for less than a month.The early-voting period in Georgia begins on Oct. 15, and Georgia counties are expected to start to mail out absentee ballots about a month before Election Day. Mr. Carter intends to vote by mail, his grandson said.Georgia is one of a handful of battleground states expected to be crucial in the contest between Ms. Harris and Donald J. Trump, who won the state in 2016 but lost it, and the White House, in 2020 to Joseph R. Biden Jr.A CBS News/YouGov poll released on Sunday showed Mr. Trump leading Ms. Harris by three percentage points in the state. But there has been limited public opinion data illuminating the state of the campaign in Georgia since Mr. Biden withdrew and endorsed Ms. Harris last month. More

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      Trump Says Georgia’s Governor Is Hampering His Efforts to Win There

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      Former President Donald J. Trump suggested without evidence on Saturday that Georgia’s Republican governor was hampering his efforts to win the battleground state in November, a claim that carried echoes of Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat to President Biden there in 2020.“In my opinion, they want us to lose,” Mr. Trump said, accusing the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, and its secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, of being disloyal and trying to make life difficult for him.At a rally at the Georgia State University Convocation Center in Atlanta, in a speech that lasted more than 90 minutes and that was peppered with grievances about his loss four years ago, Mr. Trump falsely claimed, “I won this state twice,” referring to the 2016 and 2020 elections.Mr. Trump lost to Mr. Biden by roughly 12,000 votes in Georgia in 2020. Last year, the former president was indicted by an Atlanta grand jury on charges related to his efforts to subvert the results of that election in that state. On Saturday, he complained that he might not have ended up in legal jeopardy if Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger had cooperated with his attempts to reverse the 2020 results.Mr. Trump added that he thought Georgia had slipped under Mr. Kemp’s leadership. “The state has gone to hell,” he said.Representatives for Mr. Kemp, who indicated in June that he had not voted for Mr. Trump in the Republican primary this year, and Mr. Raffensperger did not immediately respond to requests for comment.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

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      Name-calling and hyperbole: Trump continues fear-mongering fest at Georgia rally

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      Donald Trump addressed a fully-packed venue in downtown Atlanta on Saturday, with thousands of people waiting in the Georgia heat outside to enter, or to protest his appearance in a city he has condemned repeatedly.His remarks were consistent with the tenor and comportment of restraint and probity Atlantans are used to hearing at this point.“She happens to be a really low IQ individual. We don’t need a low IQ individual,” Trump said of the vice-president Kamala Harris. “They love dealing with low IQ individuals … She’s Bernie Sanders but not as smart.”Trump highlighted a handful of recent murders in the city, saying “Atlanta is like a killing field, and your governor should get off his ass and do something about it.”Trump rattled off a set of crime statistics in Atlanta that bear no resemblance to the actual change in crime over the last two years. Crime spiked in Atlanta in the last year of Trump’s term and peaked in 2022. It has subsequently fallen back to 2019 levels.But crime – and particularly crime involving immigrants – has been central to his appeal to Republican voters. Trump invoked the murder of Laken Riley, a college student murdered on the campus of the University of Georgia. Police have charged an undocumented immigrant with her murder.“Laken’s blood is on Kamala Harris’s hands,” Trump said, “as though she was standing there watching it herself.” Trump is trying to tie this to Harris’s role as “border czar” early in the Biden administration. “Harris should not be asking for your votes. She should be begging Laken Riley’s family for forgiveness.”Trump made a point of highlighting the work of three Republican appointees to Georgia’s board of elections, who have been entertaining changes to election rules that critics say are setting the stage for a legal contest in case of a Trump loss in November.Of President Joe Biden and the debate that led to his withdrawal from the race, Trump said “He was choking like a dog! He was choking. And that was the end of him … they did a coup, but he doesn’t know it.”Trump said, without any evidence, that “40 or 50 million illegal aliens” will enter the United States if Harris wins, he said, claiming that suburbs will be overrun with “savage foreign gangs”. He also claimed, falsely, that Harris wants to replace all gas cars with electric cars, to ban meat, to increase taxes by 70 to 80% and more claims that can only be taken as hyperbole because they are so far divorced from fact. He also reiterated claims that the 2020 election was stolen.Trump repeatedly called Harris a “lunatic”.Trump’s appearance in Atlanta is at the same venue Harris filled on Tuesday in her first Georgia rally since Biden’s dramatic withdrawal from the race and her ascension as the presumptive Democratic nominee.The contrast between Trump and Harris in the space was stark. Harris’s multiracial crowd Tuesday was peppered with the pink and green of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters. Red Maga hats and Trump mug shots – or the now-iconic shot of his fist in the air after the assassination attempt – dominated the mostly white sea of support for Trump.Trump opened up his appearance in Atlanta lying about the Harris event in the same place, falsely claiming that people left the event early and that there were empty seats. Both events packed the room.Notably, the upper stands began to empty out about an hour into Trump’s comments.The refrain, repeated by speaker after speaker at the rally, was that Trump took a bullet for Republican voters, and they should return the favor with powerful turnout in Georgia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He took a bullet for you, and in that moment, we found out who Donald Trump is,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene, a representative, in a speech before 10,000 Trump supporters at the Georgia State Convocation Center. “He stood up, put his fist in the air and said ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ And that’s what we will do.”JD Vance, Republican vice-presidential nominee, took note of the emerging Democratic labeling of Republicans as “weird” as he warmed up the crowd.Weird is how “Kamala Harris comes to Atlanta and speaks with a fake southern accent even though she grew up in Canada”, Vance said. “Go watch the clips; she sounds like a southern belle.”Vance also linked the people who tried to “bankrupt” and “impeach” Trump to the attempted assassination.“America is never going to elect a San Francisco liberal who is so far out of the mainstream,” Vance said.Despite this assertion, polls increasingly suggest that Harris may be ahead of Trump today, with the Democratic national convention coming in two weeks. Before Biden’s withdrawal, Trump had been consistently ahead of Biden, so much so that political discussion here had been about whether the Biden campaign would capitulate in Georgia in order to focus its resources on Rust Belt races.Too few polls measuring Harris and Trump in Georgia have been conducted to read the race here, but both campaigns have begun treating Georgia as a battleground state once again.“The road to the White House runs through Georgia,” Greene said, almost word for word what Rev Raphael Warnock, a Georgia senator, told Harris supporters five days earlier.In long, rambling comments, Trump lambasted Brian Kemp, the governor, and Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, for disloyalty: “In my opinion, they want us to lose. If we lose Georgia, we lose the whole thing and our country goes to hell.” More

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      ‘We have to be voting biblically’: the Courage Tour rallies Christians to get Trump in office

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      By 9am on Monday, hundreds of worshipers who had gathered under a tent in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, were already on their feet. Praiseful music bumped from enormous speakers. The temperature was pushing 90F (32C).The congregants had gathered in north-western Wisconsin for the Courage Tour, a travelling tent revival featuring a lineup of charismatic preachers and self-styled prophets promising healing, and delivering a political message: register to vote. Watch, or work, the polls. And help deliver the 2024 election to Donald Trump.Serving as a voter registration drive and hub for recruiting poll workers, it was no mistake that the Courage Tour came to Wisconsin just three months ahead of the presidential election in November. The tour had already visited three other swing states: Georgia, Michigan and Arizona.Heavy-hitting Maga organizations – including America First Policy Institute, TPUSA Faith and America First Works – had a presence outside the tent. Inside, headlining the event was Lance Wallnau, a prominent figure in the New Apostolic Reformation – a movement on the right that embraces modern-day apostles, aims to establish Christian dominion over society and politics and has grown in influence since Trump was elected president in 2016.“‘Pray for your rulers,’ that’s about as far as we got in the Bible,” said Wallnau, setting the tone for the day, which would feature a series of sermons focused on the ideal role of Christians in government and society. “I think what’s happened is over time, we began to realize you cannot trust that government like you thought you could trust, and you can’t trust the media to tell you what’s really happening,” he exclaimed.What followed in Wallnau’s morning sermon were a series of greatest hits of the Maga right: January 6 (not an insurrection), the 2020 election (marred by fraud) and Covid-19 (a Chinese bioweapon).Many of the attendees had learned of the event from Eau Claire’s Oasis church – a Pentecostal church whose congregants were already familiar with the movement’s goal to turn believers into activists with a religious mission.“This is wonderful,” said Cyndi Lund, an Oasis churchgoer who attended the four-day event. “I teach a class on biblical citizenship – the Lord put in my heart that we have to be voting biblically, and if nothing else, we have a duty in America to vote.”According to the preachers who sermonized on Monday, the correct biblical worldview is a deeply conservative one. The speakers repeatedly stated their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion, ideas that were elaborated on in pamphlets passed around the crowd and on three large screens facing the audience. (“Tolerance IS NOT A commandment,” read one poster, propped up in front of the pro-Trump Turning Point USA stall outside the tent.)After Wallnau spoke, Bill Federer, an evangelist who has written more than thirty books weighing in on US history from an anti-communist and rightwing perspective, offered a brief and often intensely inaccurate, intellectual history of the US and Europe. During his talk, Federer dropped references to the villains of his historiography – among them Karl Marx, Fidel Castro, the German philosopher Hegel and, “a little closer to home”, the political theorist of the New Left, Saul Alinsky. The crowd, apparently already versed in Federer’s intellectual universe, groaned and booed when Federer mentioned Alinsky.Federer also railed on “globalists”, tapping into the longstanding antisemitic idea of a shadowy cabal led by wealthy Jewish people who dictate world events.“Globalists,” Federer said, “are giving money to LGBTQ activists to get involved with politics.”It would be up to God-fearing Christians with a biblical worldview to push back against “wokeism”, by influencing what New Apostolic Reformers refer to as the “seven mountains” of society: religion, family, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and, most important at the Courage Tour, government.The stakes, emphasized many of the speakers, couldn’t be overstated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What we’re up against aren’t people,” said Mercedes Sparks, speaking on the topic of the secularization of US life. “These are spirits.” Sparks made clear her explicit goal – shared by the other speakers on the tour – of bringing Christianity into politics and government. But despite invoking an intense form of Christian nationalism, the speakers at the Courage Tour repeatedly decried the label as a smear.“This whole idea of Christian nationalism, it’s kind of interesting, right?” said Sparks, who claimed the term amounts to a form of persecution against Christian Americans. “This term that’s being thrown around, that I really think is designed to shame Christians into not voting and not being engaged like any other group that makes up America.”By the end of the day, the speakers had warmed up the crowd for the afternoon’s natural conclusion: a call to get involved.Joshua Caleb, a speaker at the event who described himself as a former Republican opposition researcher, called on attendees to join his organization, The Lion of Judah – a group which, according to its website, aims to unleash “the ROAR of Christian Voters across America” and urges members to “fight the fraud” by becoming election workers. Event organizers handed out flyers provided by the Trump-aligned America First Works and the evangelical group Faith and Freedom, urging pastors to help their congregants get registered to vote before the November election.Not all attendees were prepared for the speakers’ political, and often dire, message.“It’s too intense for me,” said Kahmara Kelly, who is 20 years old and recently joined the Oasis church. “My body just doesn’t like the tension that could come with it, and the conflict, so I just try avoiding politics.” At times, Kelly left the tent for a breath of air.“Not gonna lie, I was ready to just walk away,” Kelly added. More

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      Man Pleads Guilty to Threatening to Kill Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      Sean Patrick Cirillo called Ms. Greene’s office and told staff members about his plans to kill the politician, the F.B.I. said. He faces a maximum of five years in prison.An Atlanta man pleaded guilty on Tuesday to making death threats against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.The man, Sean Patrick Cirillo, 34, made two threatening phone calls on Nov. 8, 2023, to Ms. Greene’s Washington, D.C., office, spoke to staff members and said that he planned to shoot the politician in the head, an F.B.I. agent said in court documents.“I’m gonna kill her next week,” Mr. Cirillo said, according to recordings of the phone call that were reviewed by the F.B.I. “I’m gonna murder her.”Mr. Cirillo pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Atlanta to one count of transmitting interstate threats. He will face a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison when he is sentenced on Nov. 7.“Threatening to kill a public official is reprehensible,” Ryan K. Buchanan, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement. “Our office will not tolerate any form of violence, threats or intimidation against public officials.”In a statement, Mr. Cirillo’s lawyer, Allison Dawson, said that Mr. Cirillo had struggled with mental health issues and was not on his prescribed medication at the time of the incident.Ms. Greene’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.After Mr. Cirillo was arrested, Ms. Greene said in a statement to Atlanta News First: “Threats to murder elected officials should never be tolerated.”During his phone calls to Ms. Greene’s office, the F.B.I. said, Mr. Cirillo said that he was focusing on Ms. Greene through the sight of a sniper rifle. He also threatened to kill her staff members who picked up the two calls, which he made on Nov. 8 at 1:33 p.m. and 5:36 p.m., the F.B.I. said.The next day, when the F.B.I. showed up at Mr. Cirillo’s home by tracking his phone number, Mr. Cirillo admitted to making the calls, said he had made them to “get attention” and added that he had called “multiple other people as well including other members of Congress,” court records state. It is not clear who else received Mr. Cirillo’s calls.Mr. Cirillo’s guilty plea is the latest event in a recent pattern of threats toward political figures. Last week, a man was charged with threatening to assault and kill federal officials, judges and state employees across several states, including people involved in the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump.In California, some elected officials said they were rethinking public office in light of increasing harassment.Kirsten Noyes More