Georgia

The line to get into the Donald Trump rally snaked about a quarter-mile around the venue in Marietta, Georgia, on Tuesday, an hour before the event started.The hall, which seats 2,700 people, had already started filling up with supporters, the first of whom arrived around 1pm for the 7.30pm event. Not everyone was getting in.There’s no shortage of political enthusiasm in Georgia. Early voting opened on Tuesday, with 310,980 people casting a ballot in person according to the Georgia secretary of state’s office. The previous record was about 130,000. Few of Trump’s supporters sported “I voted” stickers.Though the energy before the rally was high, many have noted in recent months – including Kamala Harris during the presidential debate last month – that crowds at Trump rallies dwindle as his speeches turn into multi-hour rambles.“I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch,” Harris said during the debate. “You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”The Guardian tested that proposition on Tuesday.About three out of 10 people attending the rally left before Trump finished speaking at 10.14pm. In their defense, Trump was an hour and a half late.Seven minutes into Trump’s address, as he recited a litany of grievances about inflation, schools, the quality of cars, cities, immigration and the prospect of a third world war, a dozen people had already walked out.Twenty minutes in, as Trump was describing how “murderers” immigrating illegally posed a bigger threat to America than inflation, Ryan Taylor, a podcaster, headed to her car.“I live an hour away, and my son is waiting in the car,” she said. “He didn’t want to come in. He’s a teenager.” He’s 15, she said.View image in fullscreenHaley Lummus, of Jasper, Georgia, left at 9.22pm, just as Trump was describing Harris as the “taxing queen” and complaining about how his attacks on San Francisco depreciate the value of the property he owns there.“We had to wait a while, like to get him on stage,” she said. “Everyone was doing the wave, and there was a lot of people very excited to see him cheering.” Why was she leaving early? “I worked and I’m tired.”Perhaps 50 people had left by then.A group of five young men wearing brand-new red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps walked out just before 9.30, as Trump was claiming that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza would not have happened if he had been president. The five looked mildly bewildered and very slightly out of place, even there.“We’re from Denmark, and we don’t really care about American politics at all, but we wanted to experience American politics firsthand,” said Gustave. He and his friends were staying about 15 minutes away, heard about Trump’s appearance and said why not. They described the event as a “fever dream” and “something like The Bachelor” before heading off to beat traffic.Another 50 or so left over the next 10 minutes. Four of them were thrown out.“Some of us went in with flags to scream, ‘Free Palestine’.” said one young man who wouldn’t identify himself. Trump was talking about ending taxes on tips. “The flags got snatched from us. We got booed. We got kicked. I still support Trump though.” They complained that the burly security guard in front of them roughed them up, taunting him as they ambled on the periphery of the hall. A few minutes later, Secret Service agents arrested one of them.By 9.50, as Trump was talking about how the “migrant invasion” was “stealing American jobs”, a consistent stream of people hit the exits. Most said they had to work the next day, or had a babysitter to relieve. Marietta is a metro Atlanta city, while Trump’s base of support often lives in more rural communities a distance away.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenSeason Poole, once an army diesel mechanic, lives in Social Circle, Georgia. This was her second rally; she attended one in North Carolina two weeks ago, she said. As Trump described “alien gang members and migrant criminals from prison”, Poole contemplated schoolwork and an hour drive.At least 500 people had left by then. Voni Miller would have stayed if she could.

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“He made me cry,” Miller said. “I cried when he was speaking about making changes. You know, closing the border, making changes. If Kamala wins we’re so screwed, because she can’t make up her mind about anything. It just made me cry because he’s giving up so much. He doesn’t have to do this for us. Like, you know what I mean. He has all the money, but he is still getting shot at, and people saying horrible things about him. But he’s doing it because he wants to make changes for America, and it was just so emotional.”So. Why leave?“I’m actually leaving early because my phone is dying and I have a Tesla so I can’t get in. It’s really upsetting, because it meant a lot to be here, and I just can’t get in my car.”By 10.05, as Trump was talking about how important it was for police officers to be shielded from civil suits in misconduct cases for “doing something good”, Trump had lost about a third of his audience.Stephen Rosenbaum was walking back to his car with his son at that point. “I think I get more out of these rallies than anything else, and I hope that other people do,” he said. “He shows the human side. You know, we watched the Butler rally live on television when it happened. It was terrible,” he said about the first assassination attempt on Trump. “But, you know, right before all those events took place, he said, Listen, we just want to make the country a better place.”Rosenbaum has been to several rallies, he said.“We wanted to see that, see it in real life. We want to see it live,” he said. But, you’re not staying for the whole thing? “He’s got to go to school tomorrow. And he’s gotten to the part now where, I mean, we’ve seen enough of these. We kind of know how it’s going to finish. We just wanted to see it live. You know?” More

Election certification is a mandatory duty, not discretionary, for county election officials in Georgia, a judge ruled on Tuesday, rejecting assertions made by a Republican elections official that elections board members could refuse to certify an election based on their suspicions of fraud or error.Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton county board of registration and elections, brought the suit earlier this year after abstaining from a vote to certify the May primary election. The America First Policy Institute, a legal thinktank that was formed by former Donald Trump advisers in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss to help lay legal groundwork for his potential return to office, joined the suit.Adams refused certification after claiming she had been denied access to a long list of elections documents. But Robert McBurney, Fulton county superior court judge, ruled that Adams was entitled to review documents quickly, but failing to provide those documents was not grounds for denying the certification of an election.“If election superintendents were, as plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so – because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud – refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” wrote McBurney in his ruling. “Our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen.”The law uses the world “shall”, meaning certification is an order, McBurney wrote.“To users of common parlance, ‘shall’ connotes instruction or command: You shall not pass!” he wrote.Adams is the regional coordinator for south-eastern states in the Election Integrity Network (EIN), a national group that has recruited election deniers to target local election offices. EIN was founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere.Adams’s suit aimed to overturn longstanding Georgia precedent that the act of election certification is “ministerial”, an administrative activity marking the end of an election. Elections disputes in Georgia have historically been managed through investigation by local district attorneys, the attorney general’s office and ultimately in court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA bloc of Trump-aligned Republicans on Georgia’s state elections board have rejected that interpretation of the law and implemented changes to election policies allowing for an undefined “reasonable inquiry” by local elections officers before certification. Those changes are under challenge by Democratic leaders in separate court cases. More

The legal brawl between Georgia’s Donald Trump-oriented state board of elections and Fulton county’s election office continues to intensify, a warm-up for the post-election cavalcade of 2020 redux lawsuits expected in November.Fulton county filed a lawsuit on Monday to prevent the board from placing 2020 election denialists on a monitoring team for the November election. In response, state board members voted to subpoena a wide range of records from the 2020 election in Fulton county.The lawsuit asks for a judgment establishing that the state board of elections does not have the authority to force the county to accept appointments to their monitoring team. Fulton county and the state board came to a voluntary agreement in May to hire a monitoring team for the 2024 election after the state board found that it may have double-scanned as many as 3,000 ballots in a recount of the 2020 election. The state board reprimanded the county for the mistake in May.Fulton county then agreed to implement a third-party monitoring system, in part to assuage critics like those on the board of elections. The monitors would observe election processes for training, ballot preparation, programming voting machines and other processes.“Since that time, the SEB has repeatedly provided conflicting information and failed to take action related to monitors,” said Sherri Allen, the Fulton county board of registration and elections chair.“State Election Board members have stated in meetings with Fulton County BRE members that the State Election Board would ‘disavow’ the Fulton County BRE if the Fulton County BRE did not accept the monitors proposed by the State Election Board,” the lawsuit states. “Any such adverse action would directly conflict with multiple provisions of the Election Code.”An advisory letter sent to the state board last month by Georgia’s attorney general, Christopher Carr, also told the board that it did not have the authority to force Fulton county to accept its monitors.“Let’s make it clear that this is a closed case under the law, as determined by the attorney general’s office,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, a Democratic appointee to the state election board, in dissent. Ghazal noted that the county was only legally obligated to retain the 2020 documents – volumes of absentee ballot data, scanner tapes, poll pad data, ballot images and other information – for two years.But Janice Johnston, a Republican member of the state board praised by Trump as a “pit bull”, said she had been assured that the documents were available because of pending litigation. “If Fulton county cannot or does not have the documents, then the place to go is to the clerk of the court where they should be … available for completion of the investigation of Mr Rossi and Mr Moncla’s complaint.”Joe Rossi, a teacher at a technical college in Macon, and Kevin Moncla, a Texan and the director of the Election Oversight Group, are prominent activists who have continued to press a case in court and before the state elections board over the 2020 election.The county appointed a monitoring team led by Ryan Germany, former general counsel for Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state. But Trump-aligned members of the state board, at odds with Raffensperger over his handling of the 2020 election, want to add their own members to Germany’s team.Those members include Heather Honey, who worked on the Maricopa county, Arizona, audit of the 2020 election with the Trump-campaign funded Cyber Ninjas investigation, and Frank Ryan, a former US representative who as a state senator in Pennsylvania made false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and rejected the state’s electoral count.At the rancorous board meeting on Tuesday, the Georgia state representative Saira Draper, a litigant in a suit to block recent changes to election rules, sparred with Janelle King and Johnston, two Republican members of the state board, over the board’s investigation of some county election boards’ decision to reject voter challenges.“What we’ve seen since 2021 is a targeting of certain counties,” Draper said, responding to a report from Mike Coan, the board’s executive director who investigated how elections offices around Atlanta, Savannah, Columbus, Athens and other large counties had responded to voter challenges.“We haven’t seen the mass voter challenges across Georgia any more. We have seen them against Democratic centers … counties with large numbers of Democratic voters, and that’s a nakedly partisan ploy,” she said. “There are people who are sore losers, who have brought frivolous voter challenges targeting Democratic counties, and those challenges have been appropriately dismissed. And now they want a second bite at the apple, both in the courts and here at the state elections board one week before early voting starts.”“Was Stacey Abrams a sore loser?” King asked Draper. Abrams never conceded her 2018 loss to the governor, Brian Kemp, and suggested that Kemp as secretary of state had manipulated the election apparatus to his advantage.“I wish she had conceded,” Draper replied.Fulton county is also contending with a lawsuit from the Georgia Republican party, alleging that the county’s election office hasn’t hired enough Republicans as poll workers for the 2024 election.The suit states that Georgia law requires counties to hire poll workers from a list parties provide in equal measure. Republicans submitted the names of 74 workers to Fulton county elections director Nadine Williams to hire, but out of the 800 or more elections hires, only nine have been hired for early voting and six for election day, according to the suit. Williams has instead given hiring authority to temporary staffing agencies and precinct managers, who have not given preference to names on the Republican list, it states.Williams’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the hiring of poll workers.The Fulton county board of registration and elections will meet on Thursday at 11am. Among the items on the agenda are an update on the monitoring team and the terms of the proposal, a review of the state board’s new rules and the impact to operations, and an executive session to discuss litigation and personnel matters. More