Subterms
Mr. Kemp rose to Georgia’s governorship with the help of President Trump, but his refusal to try to overturn the state’s election results has drawn Mr. Trump’s ire — and may affect his political future. More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyThe DailySubscribe:Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsA Guide to Georgia’s Senate RunoffsGeorgia flipped blue for Joe Biden. Now two costly battles there will decide control of the Senate.Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Jessica Cheung and Austin Mitchell; and edited by Paige Cowett and Lisa Tobin.More episodes ofThe DailyDecember 11, 2020 • More
Attorneys general from both parties reject baseless allegations in case filed with US supreme courtGeorgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday urged the US supreme court to reject a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Donald Trump seeking to undo Joe Biden’s victory, saying the case has no factual or legal grounds and makes “bogus” claims.“What Texas is doing in this proceeding is to ask this court to reconsider a mass of baseless claims about problems with the election that have already been considered, and rejected, by this court and other courts,” Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general, wrote in a filing to the nine justices. Continue reading… More
Each election season as campaigns ramp up get-out-the-vote efforts, socially awkward Americans face a dilemma: is it possible to help salvage democracy without having to cold-call anyone?
The letter-writing organization Vote Forward offers a solution. This year, the non-profit says, it inspired more than 182,000 people to send more than 17m personalized letters encouraging others to exercise their rights.
“We’re thrilled with how it went,” said Scott Forman, Vote Forward’s founder. “Early this year we set what felt at the time like an insanely ambitious goal of writing 10m letters, which is an order of magnitude more than we had done in previous years,” he said. “It was pretty wild to see how it got a little bit viral.”
Forman said avoiding tricky conversations was part of the reason he started the program: “I’m not really that enthusiastic in wanting to knock on doors or make phone calls.” During a global pandemic, face-to-face interactions become even less feasible, making the operation – launched in 2017 – feel somewhat prescient.
Now the organization, with just six staff members, has a new task: getting out the vote, especially among underrepresented groups, for Georgia’s crucial Senate runoff elections, which will determine the balance of power in the chamber – and thus shape Joe Biden’s presidency.
The strategy has three parts: boosting voter registration, encouraging people to request ballots, and nudging unlikely voters toward the polls.
Vote Forward’s letter-writing scheme asks volunteers to add a handwritten message beginning with the words “I vote because” on letters that are otherwise prewritten with voting information; volunteers then send the letters to potential voters identified by the organization. So what is the best way to convince Georgians to make their voices heard?
The temptation might be to write something like: “I vote because, though Democrats may not be perfect, many of them still appear to have remnants of a soul. Vote blue!”
But Forman urges a more restrained approach, noting that research has shown non-partisan messages are more effective at increasing turnout than partisan efforts. Though some of Vote Forward’s campaigns target Democratic-leaning voters, these letters are “not a political pitch. It’s about lowercase-D democratic values,” Forman said. “And I personally think that is something we need to try to unify around.”
Indeed, he points out, at a time when many Americans are stuck in political feedback loops and unwilling to listen to the other side, a “warm and neighborly” note can be just the thing to cut through. “I do feel like some of the conspiracy-minded and anti-factual beliefs that people have come from being in bubbles – information bubbles and social bubbles,” Forman said. “Getting this factual and personal piece of mail from a fellow citizen,” he added, might help “to puncture some of those bubbles”.
Forman’s own letters to Georgians, he said, would focus on exercising one’s voice. “I’ve gotten more and more attracted to the idea that voting is about agency,” he said. “So I would write something like: ‘I vote because it’s important to me that my voice be heard by our leaders, and they take my interests into account when they make decisions for all of us.’”
Bria East, a Philadelphia educator who received a Vote Forward letter, supports Forman’s argument: “It was such an unbiased and positive reminder,” East wrote in a letter the organization shared. “This year I am registered to vote but haven’t sent my ballot in. This letter was the motivation I needed to do so.”
Vote Forward also advises against referring specifically to the national stakes of Georgia’s Senate races. “Georgia voters are making a choice about who will represent Georgia, and our messages should respect that,” the group says. Letters should contain positive, inclusive messages and avoid getting into specifics about the issues.
Democrats have a difficult battle ahead as the Rev Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff seek to replace the Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in a traditionally red state. But Joe Biden turned Georgia blue in the presidential race, and Forman has hope for the Senate: “Runoff elections are problematic in that they tend to depress turnout overall,” he noted. But with such high stakes and a new Democratic coalition having formed in the state behind Biden, “my hope is that a lot of people will vote. And if they do, I think that Rev Warnock and Mr Ossoff have a decent chance.” More
Nearly half of voters cast absentee ballots in the election, a huge increase. If Republicans have their way, that might not last. More
On 1 December Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia, stood on the steps of the state capitol in Atlanta and let rip on Donald Trump.
“Mr President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia,” he said, contradicting Trump’s increasingly unhinged claim that he had won the presidential race against all evidence.
“Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence,” Sterling went on, referring to a storm of death threats and intimidation that had been unleashed by Trump supporters against public officials in the state.
“Someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right.”
Then Sterling uttered the phrase that instantly entered the annals of American political rhetoric: “It has to stop.”
It did not stop.
Two days after Sterling’s impassioned speech went viral, Elena Parent, a Democratic state senator in Georgia, turned up for a hearing organized by Republican leaders to try to cast doubt on the election result. Trump attorneys, led by Rudy Giuliani, presented the hearing with a raft of conspiracy theories and baseless claims that tens of thousands of dead people and other ineligible individuals had voted.
The Republicans hadn’t warned Parent that the event would be attended by Giuliani, Trump’s henchman in his mission to undermine American democracy until this week when the former New York mayor came down with Covid-19. So she had no idea that a big crowd of far-right fanatics and the media outlets that feed them lies and falsehoods would also be in the chamber.
If she had known, she would have been careful to protect her personal details online. And she might not have sent out an anodyne tweet decrying the event accurately as a “sad sham”.
The bombardment began immediately. “The attacks came from all corners and on all platforms,” Parent told the Guardian. “They were in chat-boards, by email, in comments on my Facebook and Instagram pages, on the phone. They ran the gamut from basic insults to ‘We are watching you, you have kids, we are coming to your house.’”
In eight years as an elected politician in Georgia, she had never experienced anything like it. “It was surreal. I’m not someone who will ever be bullied or intimidated into being silent, but never have I had an issue on this scale.”
The bile spread far and wide. An elected official in Missouri accused her on Facebook of an act of treason “punishable by death”.
The worst part wasn’t the threats of sexual violence against her, or even the death threats; it was that her home address was plastered all over the internet. As a result, state police have stepped up patrols outside her home.
Parent has no doubt about the source of the overwhelming assault she has endured. “We have a president who does not care about American institutions or democracy. He has created a cult-like following and is exposing people like me across the country to danger because of his unfounded rhetoric on the election.”
What she fears most is that “cult-like” quality of Trump supporters. “That makes the entire experience more disturbing because you know there is no logic or sense of reality that will dissuade or deter these folks.”
The election may be more than five weeks in the past, but in Georgia, the heat that Trump has generated around his unprecedented refusal to accept defeat shows no sign of cooling.
Parent suspects that for elected officials like her, as well as election workers, it will remain “very difficult” through the two US senate runoff elections in Georgia on 5 January, which will be crucial in determining which party controls the Senate, and probably until Joe Biden’s inauguration on 20 January and beyond.
At the center of the maelstrom are the public servants in charge of Georgia’s election process. Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state who on Monday recertified the results after three separate counts all showed Biden the victor by about 12,000 votes, has faced caravans of armed “Stop the Steal” militants driving past his house.
In an interview with the Guardian, Raffensperger said that his wife was the first to start getting death threats. “Then I started getting them. Then she started getting sexualized texts. Threatening stuff.” More
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