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      Georgia Jury to Consider Whether Trump Illegally Interfered in 2020 Election

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      The panel will have up to a year to recommend whether the prosecutor should pursue criminal charges against the former president and his allies.ATLANTA — As the criminal investigation of Donald J. Trump by Manhattan prosecutors appears to be stalling out, the separate investigation into whether the former president and his allies illegally interfered with Georgia’s 2020 election results took a significant step forward on Monday, as 23 people were chosen to serve on a special investigative grand jury.The panel will focus exclusively on “whether there were unlawful attempts to disrupt the administration of the 2020 elections here in Georgia,” Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court told 200 potential jurors who had been called to a downtown Atlanta courthouse swarming with law enforcement agents.The ability of the special grand jury to subpoena witnesses and documents will help prosecutors, who have encountered resistance from some potential witnesses who have declined to testify voluntarily. The panel will have up to a year to issue a report advising District Attorney Fani T. Willis on whether to pursue criminal charges.Some legal experts have said the inquiry could be perilous for Mr. Trump, who, in a January 2021 phone call, asked Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to put Mr. Trump ahead of his Democratic rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., in Georgia’s presidential election tally.The seating of the Georgia grand jury comes as a criminal inquiry in Manhattan has come to an apparent standstill. Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, is said to be concerned about the strength of the New York case, which focuses on whether Mr. Trump exaggerated the value of assets in annual financial statements. People close to the investigation have told The New York Times that the inquiry may lose steam if other witnesses do not step up to cooperate.In the Georgia case, a group of legal experts, in an analysis published last year by the Brookings Institution, wrote that the call to Mr. Raffensperger, and other postelection moves by Mr. Trump, put the former president at “substantial risk” of criminal charges in Georgia, including racketeering, election fraud solicitation, intentional interference with performance of election duties and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The investigation is also likely to look at Trump allies who inserted themselves into election administration matters in Georgia, including Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani; Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; and Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff. The investigation is within the purview of the Fulton County district attorney because many of the actions in question took place in or involved phone calls to officials in Fulton County, which includes the State Capitol building in downtown Atlanta and numerous government offices.In addition to the call with Mr. Raffensperger, Mr. Trump has publicly described how he called Gov. Brian Kemp after the election and asked him to call a special election to “get to the bottom” of “a big election-integrity problem in Georgia.” Mr. Trump also called Chris Carr, the state attorney general, asking him not to oppose a lawsuit challenging the election results in Georgia and other states, and Mr. Raffensperger’s chief investigator, asking her to find “dishonesty” in the election.In January 2021, Mr. Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to put Mr. Trump ahead in Georgia’s presidential election tally.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe investigations into such matters were already underway, Judge McBurney said in court on Monday. “But now it’s time for 26 members of our community to participate in that investigation,” he said, referring to the 23 jurors and three alternates.Judge McBurney told potential jurors to announce that they had a potential conflict if they were convinced that a crime had definitely been committed in regard to the 2020 elections — or if they were convinced that no crimes at all had occurred. Roughly 25 said they had such a conflict.The special grand jurors will issue subpoenas, hear testimony and review documents. The meetings will be confidential, and jurors will not be allowed to discuss the proceedings outside of their meetings. But the judge noted that witnesses could speak about the proceedings publicly if they so wished.In January, a majority of the judges in the Fulton County Superior Court system approved Ms. Willis’s request for the special grand jury, allowing it to meet for up to a year beginning May 2. After the panel makes recommendations regarding criminal prosecutions, it will be up to Ms. Willis, a Democrat, to return to a regular grand jury to seek criminal indictments.Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, said that impaneling the grand jury was a sign that prosecutors had acknowledged the complexity, sensitivity and unique nature of the case. Among other things, Ms. Willis has raised the possibility that Mr. Trump and his allies violated the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO. Like the federal RICO law, which has been used to target the Mafia and other organized crime networks, Georgia’s state racketeering statute is a tool that can be used to go after a broad range of groups that take part in patterns of criminal conduct. Proving that case would require a deep examination of multiple moving parts.Among them, potentially, are a call that Mr. Graham made to Mr. Raffensperger asking whether mail-in votes could be discarded in counties with high rates of questionable ballot signatures; a visit Mr. Meadows made to suburban Atlanta to monitor an election audit there; and postelection appearances that Mr. Giuliani made before state legislative committees in which he asked for an alternative pro-Trump slate of electors to be appointed.“There’s a lot more than just the phone call,” said Mr. Kreis, who added that the case involved areas of the law that were “underdeveloped.”“We don’t have a lot of claims or potential claims that someone violated Georgia law by soliciting election fraud, because you’d have to be pretty crazy to go to the secretary of state’s office to demand a change in vote tabulations,” he said. “These are things so brazen it’s almost beyond belief.”Mr. Trump has other legal challenges to overcome in the wake of his one-term presidency, all of them taking on greater importance given the fact that he appears to be positioning himself to make another presidential run in 2024.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 7Numerous inquiries. More

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      Will Trump Face a Legal Reckoning in Georgia?

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      Over 2,300 text messages to and from Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff for Donald J. Trump, offer stunning real-time details of the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Not least among the revelations are Mr. Meadows’s repeated overtures to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, with Mr. Meadows pressing the Georgian to be in communication with the White House.Mr. Trump and Mr. Raffensperger eventually spoke, resulting in Mr. Trump’s now-infamous demand that the secretary “find 11,780 votes” — just one more vote than Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the state.On May 2 we see the latest consequence of those efforts: the opening of a special grand jury by District Attorney Fani Willis in Fulton County, Ga., to gather evidence relating to possible criminal charges against Mr. Trump and others associated with him. As important as congressional investigations are, Ms. Willis’s work may present the most serious prospect of prosecution that Mr. Trump and his enablers are facing.We understand that after Robert Mueller’s investigation and two impeachments, the prospect of Mr. Trump actually facing accountability may be viewed with skepticism. Most recently, he seems to have avoided charges by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg.But Ms. Willis, a Democrat, has a demonstrated record of courage and of conviction. She has taken on — and convicted — a politically powerful group, Atlanta’s teachers, as the lead prosecutor in the city’s teacher cheating scandal.And she is playing with a strong hand in this investigation. The evidentiary record of Mr. Trump’s postelection efforts in Georgia is compelling. It is highlighted by a recording of Mr. Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, call with Mr. Raffensperger, in which Mr. Trump exhorted Mr. Raffensperger to “find” those votes.The tape also contains threats against the secretary and his staff that had an element of coercion, like Mr. Trump’s warning that failing to identify (nonexistent) fraud would be “a big risk” to Mr. Raffensperger and to his lawyer. The recording is backed by voluminous evidence that Mr. Trump likely knew full well he had lost, including acknowledgment from administration officials like his attorney general, William P. Barr, and an internal Trump campaign memo admitting that many fraud claims were unfounded. As a federal judge noted in finding that Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election were likely criminal, the former president “likely knew the justification was baseless and therefore that the entire plan was unlawful.”What’s more, Georgia criminal law is some of the most favorable in the country for getting at Mr. Trump’s alleged misconduct. For example, there is a Georgia law on the books expressly forbidding just what Mr. Trump apparently did in Ms. Willis’s jurisdiction: solicitation of election fraud. Under this statute, a person commits criminal solicitation of election fraud when he or she intentionally “solicits, requests, commands, importunes or otherwise attempts to cause” another person to engage in election fraud.The decision to impanel a special grand jury is itself another indicator of the peril Mr. Trump may face. Under Georgia practice, special purpose grand juries are typically used for focused investigation of a matter and have the power to subpoena witnesses. Special grand juries develop expertise in a single case over a sustained period (here up to 12 months), as opposed to regular grand juries, which hear many matters over a shorter period. Unlike regular grand juries, the special grand jury cannot issue an indictment, but any charging recommendations are presented by a district attorney to a regular grand jury, which can then indict based on the special grand jury’s work.The special grand jury will begin issuing subpoenas for some of the 30 or so witnesses who have refused requests for voluntary interviews. Those initial witnesses will then be served and will start appearing in June. Mr. Trump and those closest to him have a history of rushing to court to fight subpoenas, but they are unlikely to be given the opportunity in this first wave. Careful prosecutors usually start with less controversial witnesses, and Ms. Willis is a careful prosecutor. If Mr. Trump or those closest to him are served, that is when subpoenas are most likely to be challenged in court — but that is probably months away.If Mr. Trump is charged, it will set off a legal battle. There are substantial legal defenses that Mr. Trump could attempt. He could argue that he has constitutional immunity from prosecution for his acts while president, that his words were protected by the First Amendment or even that he acted in absolute good faith because he genuinely believed that he had won.The judicial system will ultimately decide if these defenses will work. But soliciting election fraud is not within the scope of official presidential duties protected by immunity, the First Amendment does not protect criminal activity, and a president cannot successfully claim good faith when he was repeatedly told by his own officials that there was no fraud. Still, no one should consider the case a slam-dunk.The case also in no way diminishes the importance of the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 committee. In fact, the committee will most likely aid the Georgia prosecution while going about the business of its own investigation. (Ms. Willis and the committee have reportedly already been in contact.) For example, litigation with Mr. Meadows disclosed key details of the alleged plot to overturn the Georgia election. An email the committee filed from one of the lawyers helping Mr. Trump, Cleta Mitchell, included a detailed 11-point memo about overturning the election. Operating outside Washington, Ms. Willis might have taken years to obtain that email and other evidence like it.Jury trials, which both of us have tried and supervised, are living events, and success is never assured. But in Georgia, if it reaches that stage, the evidence is strong, the law is favorable, the prosecutor is proven, and the cause — democracy itself — is just.Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at Brookings and the executive chair at the States United Democracy Center, was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment and is the author of “Overcoming Trumpery.” Donald Ayer, a former U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration and deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, is an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law and on the advisory board of States United.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. More

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      Trial Alleging Voter Suppression in 2018 Abrams-Kemp Georgia Race Begins

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      A trial is underway to determine whether Georgia’s handling of the 2018 election for governor was discriminatory, in a case brought by Stacey Abrams’s voting rights group.The 2018 race for governor in Georgia ended in a bitter dispute between Brian Kemp, a Republican who was serving as secretary of state at the time, and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic challenger who accused the state of voter suppression.The election, won by Kemp, was plagued by long lines, especially in communities of color where wait times occasionally exceeded two hours. And Kemp’s office put 53,000 voter registrations on hold under the state’s “exact match” rule, which requires that voters’ registration information exactly match what is on file with the state’s Department of Driver Services or Social Security Administration. Many of those 53,000 were Black voters, according to an investigation by The Associated Press in 2018.After the election, Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group founded by Abrams, sued the state, claiming its election practices were illegal and discriminatory.Now, more than three years after the suit was filed, the trial began on Monday in Atlanta — the first federal voting rights trial in Georgia in over a decade. Abrams is now in the middle of a second campaign for governor, a rematch with Kemp.After Judge Steve C. Jones tossed parts of the original lawsuit last year, Fair Fight opened its case challenging three specific tenets of the Georgia election system. These tenets, the group says, make it harder for people to vote, especially Black voters.“Through the three practices at issue in this case — exact match, affirmative mismanagement of the voter rolls and failure to train on absentee ballot cancellations — these defendants have erected a series of roadblocks — roadblocks that propose unjustifiable burdens on eligible voters in violation of both the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act,” Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, a lawyer for Fair Fight and the other plaintiffs, said in her opening statement.The office of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state and the defendant in the case, has said repeatedly that the state has already beaten back most of the claims in court, and accused Fair Fight of playing politics.“They ran this litigation like a campaign,” Joshua B. Belinfante, a lawyer for the secretary of state, said in his opening remarks. He continued: “What the evidence will show is what the plaintiffs allege is part of a campaign is not what is happening on the ground in Georgia elections.”Echoes from the pastFair Fight and other groups have challenged Georgia’s election laws on both constitutional grounds and under a provision of the Voting Rights Act known as Section 2. The trial represents one of the first marquee challenges using this provision after the Supreme Court weakened its protections for voting rights last year.In her opening remarks, Lawrence-Hardy spoke of John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and civil rights icon who died in 2020. And she drew comparisons between the current legal battle and the state’s history of suppressing voters. Georgia was one of the states that were put under special federal oversight by the Voting Rights Act when it was signed in 1965 because of the history of discrimination at the polls in those states.“The methods may be different than in the past, but the state’s creation of barriers to voting in Georgia have the same impact, particularly for people of color and immigrants who meet all eligibility requirements to vote in Georgia’s elections,” Lawrence-Hardy said. She added that when the state first proposed the exact-match identification policy in 2009, Georgia was still under federal oversight and the Justice Department rejected the initial proposal.The trial, which is expected to last roughly a month, will feature dozens of voters who claim that their right to vote was foiled by the state’s rules and regulations, with anecdotes from both the 2018 and the 2020 elections. Election workers will also testify.“You’ll hear how these election workers, who come from all political persuasions and demographic roots, operate under extraordinarily trying circumstances,” Belinfante, the lawyer for the secretary of state, said in his opening remarks. “And you’ll hear how at the end of the day they just want to get it right.”But the trial will not focus on the state’s controversial new voting law that was passed last year and that added numerous new restrictions on voting. The lawsuit was filed before that law was introduced and passed.A window of opportunityThough Raffensperger is on the defense, the trial also presents a political opportunity for the sitting secretary of state, who is seeking re-election. After he rebuffed Donald Trump’s entreaties to “find” enough votes to subvert the election in Georgia, Raffensperger became a key target of Trump, who has endorsed a well-funded challenger in Representative Jody Hice, a Republican who has publicly claimed that Trump won the election in Georgia.Raffensperger has not backed down from saying Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election in Georgia, a stance that has put him at odds with a segment of the Republican base who will be deciding his fate in the May 24 primary.But the trial has allowed Raffensperger the opportunity to attack Abrams and embrace issues that help endear him to the Republican base, such as noncitizen voting. Republicans have focused on noncitizens voting in their hunt for widespread voter fraud (there is no evidence of swaths of noncitizens voting, nor of widespread fraud) and also to justify new policies. Lawyers for Fair Fight contend that part of the “exact match” process could result in citizens being prevented from voting, including newly naturalized citizens.“I want to make sure it is citizen-only voting here in the state of Georgia,” Raffensperger said in a brief news conference before the trial began on Monday. “We are defending this basic protection of the integrity of Georgia’s elections.”Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, has accused Fair Fight of playing politics with the lawsuit. Dustin Chambers/ReutersWhat to read President Biden announced that the Environmental Protection Agency would lift summertime regulations on E15, an ethanol-gasoline blend, the latest sign that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed the White House to embrace fossil fuels.U.S.-backed news outlets and Ukrainian activists’ efforts to deliver news to Russians are starting to show signs of working, sowing doubt in the Kremlin’s accounts of the invasion.North Carolina dropped Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, from its voter rolls, as officials investigate whether he fraudulently cast a ballot in the state in 2020.in the moment Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas used the migrant drop-off as a fund-raising opportunity. Joel Martinez/The Monitor, via Associated PressTexas sends a bus to … Fox News The arrival of a busload of migrants sent to Washington by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas made for quite the event.Not so much on the ground, but on cable news, on Twitter and in fund-raising emails.In response to the Biden administration’s plans to end a Trump-era pandemic policy that turned away most unauthorized migrants at the border, Abbott pledged to put immigrants on charter buses and send them to Washington. This morning, the first bus arrived near Union Station, with Fox News camera crews ready to record the moment.Understand the Battle Over U.S. Voting RightsCard 1 of 6Why are voting rights an issue now? More

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      Local Election Officials in Georgia Oppose G.O.P. Election Bill

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      As Republicans rush to pass a second round of new voting and election rules, a bipartisan group of election officials is fighting back.ATLANTA — A year ago, when Georgia Republicans passed a mammoth law of election measures and voting restrictions, many local election officials felt frustrated and sidelined, as their concerns about resources, ballot access and implementation went largely ignored.This year, Republicans have returned with a new bill — and the election officials are pushing back.A bipartisan coalition of county-level election administrators — the people who carry out the day-to-day work of running elections — is speaking out against the latest Republican measure. At a legislative hearing on Monday, they warned that the proposal would create additional burdens on a dwindling force of election workers and that the provisions could lead to more voter intimidation.“You’re going to waste time, and you’re going to cause me to lose poll workers,” said Joel Natt, a Republican member of the Forsyth County board of elections, referring to a provision in the bill that he said would force workers to count hundreds of blank sheets of paper. “I have 400 poll workers that work for our board. That is 400 people that I could see telling me after May, ‘Have a nice life,’ and it’s hard enough to keep them right now.”Among other provisions, the bill would expand the reach of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation over election crimes; limit private funding of elections; empower partisan poll watchers; and establish new requirements for tracking absentee ballots as they are verified and counted.The bill passed the Georgia House this month, roughly two weeks after it was first introduced. Initially, the State Senate appeared set to pass the measure at a similar speed. The state’s legislative session ends on April 4, giving lawmakers less than a week to pass the bill.But county-level election officials worked behind the scenes, in letters and phone calls to legislators, expressing their concerns about the bill and dissatisfaction that they had not been consulted in the drafting process.The pushback comes as the impact of the wave of election laws passed by Republicans last year is beginning to be felt. In Texas, where a new law altered the absentee ballot process, election officials dealt with widespread confusion among absentee voters in the March primary. Mail ballot rejections surged, and county officials worked around the clock to help voters fix their ballots. Still, more than 18,000 voters had their ballots tossed out.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.The vocal opposition from Georgia election officials represents a shift from a year ago, when some individual officials, mostly Democrats, spoke out against the first Republican bill. But many local officials simply felt ignored by lawmakers who were eager to appear to be addressing Republican voters’ false beliefs about fraud in the 2020 election.The statewide association of local election officials is now working to “start taking stances on legislation like this, where the association would have a view that represents a majority of our members,” said Joseph Kirk, the elections supervisor for Bartow County, which is deeply Republican, who serves as a secretary for the association. He added that the group had not taken a stance on the election bill but that many members were voicing their opinions individually.At a conference this month, Ryan Germany, general counsel for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, encouraged members to speak up.“They really need to know what you guys think about this stuff because they hear from a lot of people, but I don’t think they hear from a lot of election officials,” said Mr. Germany, who spoke favorably about several provisions in the bill, according to audio of the event obtained by The New York Times.Dozens of voting rights advocates and county election officials crowded the State Senate Ethics Committee hearing on Monday afternoon, saying the bill would make it harder for election administrators to do their jobs.From left, State Senators Sally Harrell, Butch Miller and Jeff Mullis listened as Cindy Battles, right, testified during the hearing on Monday. Nicole Craine for The New York Times“There are so many unfunded mandates being passed by this body. You are not giving county election officials the budget that they need to run their elections,” said Cindy Battles, the policy and engagement director at the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a civil rights group. “And then you are making it more difficult to get what they need.”Several officials pointed to a provision that would require elections administrators to account for all elections-related documents, including the pieces of paper that ballots are printed on. Mr. Natt, the vice chair of elections for Forsyth County’s board of elections, held up a ream of paper to represent one of the hundreds of blank sheets of paper that his office would need to count under the law.“That is a lot of counting. That is a lot of time and waste management,” he said.State Representative James Burchett, a Republican from southeastern Georgia and sponsor of the bill, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. He told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this month that “the intent of the bill is to address issues that we’ve seen in the elections process.”During the hearing on Monday, State Senator Butch Miller, a Republican and member of the State Senate Ethics Committee, appeared to consider some of the officials’ concerns.“I think we’ll probably have additional work to be done,” he said. While Mr. Miller said he was not interested in sweeping changes to the bill, he also said he was not opposed to “tweaking them and accommodating certain issues.” The committee has not yet scheduled a vote on the bill.Election officials warned about language they considered too broad in a provision that restricts third-party donations to election offices. The proposal is popular among Republicans who believe grants from an organization tied to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, had undue influence in the 2020 election. Some Georgia election officials said the legislation would require any organization that makes a donation to receive approval from the state board of elections. That could include churches or other local groups that offer their buildings as polling locations.“By a strict interpretation of this particular provision, that would be a grant of gift or donation,” Milton Kidd, the elections director in Douglas County, a deeply Democratic county, said in an interview.Mr. Kidd added that many churches did not have staff to handle the application process, which could threaten his ability to maintain enough polling locations.Officials also took issue with a provision requiring partisan poll watchers to be given “meaningful access” to observe the ballot-counting process. The language might jeopardize the privacy of the ballot, they said.“I am a big fan of poll watchers, of being observed, I want my polling places to have observation, it’s a very important part of the process,” said Mr. Kirk, the administrator in Bartow County, which is northwest of Atlanta. “But it’s also very important to have guardrails on that observation, to keep it from becoming disruptive, to make sure a person’s information stays safe.”A provision that gives the Georgia Bureau of Investigation the power to subpoena election records for fraud investigations has also stirred opposition, mostly among Democratic local officials, who view it as both unnecessary — the secretary of state’s office currently handles election investigations — and intended to scare off voters.“That just smacks of voter intimidation,” said Dele Lowman Smith, the chair of the DeKalb County board of voter registration and elections. “And that’s a big concern.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Flipped,’ by Greg Bluestein

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      FLIPPEDHow Georgia Turned Purple and Broke the Monopoly on Republican PowerBy Greg BluesteinHow do Democrats flip a state from red to purple to blue? This question keeps Democratic operatives lying awake at night.What better place to search for answers than Georgia? In 2020, Georgians voted for the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden. The elections of the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff also handed Democrats a slim majority in the U.S. Senate. The results, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein in his new book, “Flipped,” provided “Democrats an invaluable foothold in the Deep South and a bulwark against growing Republican strength in the Midwest.”Demography was not destiny, according to Bluestein. Despite the developments that were enlarging liberal, educated suburban communities while diversifying the Georgia population, partisan change depended on talented candidates, campaign strategists and local election officials.Bluestein revisits the story of Stacey Abrams, who, working with the guidance of Lauren Groh-Wargo, ran a trailblazing campaign for the governorship in 2018. Abrams was one of the first statewide figures who sought to harness the “emerging alliance that was racially, economically and geographically diverse” rather than trying to recreate the Democratic coalition that elected Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992. Bluestein recounts how Abrams, a Black woman, was almost denied the right to vote because a poll worker insisted that she had requested an absentee ballot. If Abrams, an attorney, struggled to cast a ballot, “what about the countless other Georgians, she wondered, who could never have so quickly fixed their problem?” After losing the contest to Secretary of State Brian Kemp, Abrams founded Fair Fight, which would register large numbers of Black voters by the 2020 election.A bright spot for Democrats in 2018 was Lucy McBath, the daughter of civil rights activists. She defeated Karen Handel to represent the Sixth Congressional District. Handel had won office a year earlier in a special election, beating Ossoff, a documentary producer who had hoped to show that with Donald Trump in the White House, Democrats could win suburban Republicans and independents in districts that had been dominated by conservatives like Newt Gingrich. Instead, the election proved that Republican voters in 2017 were still loyal. McBath, whose son, Jordan, was killed by a white man in 2012, won election by advocating gun control in the wake of a horrendous mass school shooting in Florida.Ossoff and Warnock found ways to run effective statewide campaigns for the Senate in 2020 despite the challenges posed by Covid shutdowns, masking and social distancing. During the runoff election campaign after Nov. 3, both candidates responded to the fierce outrage among Democrats who were tired of the chaos and extremism coming from the White House. As Trump kept talking about himself and about rigged votes every time he visited the state (to the frustration of Republicans), Warnock and Ossoff ran smart social media campaigns and connected to voters’ hope for a better future.Remarkably, Bluestein writes that the Biden campaign underestimated the potential for victory in Georgia. Since Democrats had not won the state’s electoral votes in a presidential election since 1992, Biden’s team concluded that the risk of losing was too high. Fortunately for Democrats, local candidates disagreed. They did so by embracing the party’s liberal traditions rather than trying to mimic Republicans.Still, the victories in 2020 ultimately depended on volunteers and voters whose voices are too often missing from Bluestein’s narrative. He doesn’t do enough to capture the thousands of volunteers who engaged in phone banking, text messaging, canvassing and turning out the vote. Nor are there many portraits of the voters who went blue.“Flipped” will disillusion Democrats who hope that a realignment won’t meet fierce resistance. Lawrence Sloan, a Black American who operated a machine that opened mail-in ballots in Fulton County, was scared for his life after a video circulated online that appeared to show Sloan giving the middle finger to the machine and tossing out a ballot. In fact, we learn, his temper flared because the machine had nicked his finger, and Sloan was throwing out instructions for how to complete a mail-in ballot. Because of the misleading video, which Trump’s sons retweeted, Sloan was harassed and threatened. On one occasion, he asked friends to rescue him from a restaurant filled with Trump loyalists. “As a Black man in the South,” he said, “I know when pickup trucks start pulling up and honking their horns, it’s time to go.” Similarly, the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who refused to go along with Trump’s schemes, decided that his two grandchildren could not safely visit his home.All of this brings us to the question of whether Georgia has really flipped or if 2020 was an aberration. Many parts of Bluestein’s story highlight how exceptional the conditions were in 2020. Democrats won with the help of Hollywood celebrities and political heavyweights who won’t always show up. A raging pandemic as well as a president whose politics terrified many voters raised the stakes of the state’s election in ways that would otherwise have been impossible.The next few elections will reveal if Democratic success has staying power. It is worth remembering that Jimmy Carter’s efforts to forge a new kind of Democratic South ended up being trumped by Gingrich’s version of Reagan Republicanism. Even after reading this informative book, it’s all too easy to imagine how a struggling President Biden, an inflationary economy, war in Ukraine and a persistent pandemic — combined with gerrymandering, high rural turnout, national party support and Election Day polling sabotage — could result in Republicans welcoming back the Grand Old Party in 2024 following a short detour off the beaten path of conservatism. More

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      In Georgia's Secretary of State Race, 2020 Is Still on the Ballot

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      A normally sleepy secretary of state race has become a critical barometer of Republicans’ views of the last election — and of Trump.We have a dispatch tonight from our colleague Nick Corasaniti, who traveled to Georgia last week to report on the Republican primary between Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, and Representative Jody Hice, a challenger backed by Donald Trump.MACON, Ga. — At a regional airport in central Georgia, Representative Jody Hice offered a quick summation at the top of his remarks to a crowd of voters. Hice’s political situation requires repeated explanation — why he’s leaving a safe seat in Congress to run for a bureaucratic state government post.“I feel with all my heart that our last election was massively compromised right here in Georgia,” he told the crowd of roughly two dozen voters last week.The audience responded in unison: “Amen.”The last election, indeed, was not massively compromised in Georgia, as multiple audits and hand recounts affirmed. But as the normally sleepy races for secretary of state have suddenly become critical battlegrounds, Georgia remains on the front lines. It’s the site of the most high-profile Republican primary for secretary of state, between Hice and the incumbent, Brad Raffensperger, who drew the ire of Donald Trump for refusing to acquiesce to his attempts to overturn the election.Hice’s campaign shows just how political these secretary of state races have become across the country, contests to determine who will oversee the supposedly apolitical task of administering elections. Hice spent last week barnstorming Georgia as if the primary election was a week away. (It’s actually scheduled for May 24.) He held four stops a day by chartering a private jet to crisscross the state, a flex of financial and organizational muscle that is more often found in a race for governor, Senate or even president.In a roughly 10-minute stump speech at the airport in Macon, Hice touted his conservative credentials as a member of the House Freedom Caucus, noted Trump’s endorsement and attacked Democratic attempts in Congress to write new federal voting legislation. But he avoided many of the specific and disproven conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He instead focused on broader, though still disproven, allegations about voting in Georgia.‘A lot of shenanigans’Core to Hice’s pitch on the campaign trail is that Raffensperger, his primary opponent, sent mail ballot applications to every voter on Georgia’s voting rolls and that all voter rolls were about 10 percent inaccurate. Sending out ballot applications, Hice said, “opened the door initially for all kinds of problems.”What he did not mention was that voters still needed to send in their applications and be verified by the state, so that each application was checked and verified before a voter could receive a ballot. And on the accuracy of the voter rolls, studies have varied, but more often than not inaccuracies occur because voters have moved locally.His supporters are more specific in their attacks on the 2020 election. They spoke in detail about a video that made the rounds in conservative media purporting to show election workers pulling ballots out from under a table. The workers, multiple state officials have confirmed, were simply continuing their counting after mistakenly taking a break.“The video of the ballots in a van coming in at three in the morning in the Fulton County counting room, that kind of tells you everything you need to know,” said Brad Ebel, 52, a Georgia delegate from Macon. “I think there was a lot of shenanigans that went on that were not lawful.”A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.Ebel is not alone. In Georgia, 74 percent of Republican voters said there was widespread fraud in 2020, according to a recent poll by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, drew the ire of Donald Trump for refusing to overturn the 2020 election results. His primary challenger is backed by the former president.Audra Melton for The New York Times‘Pastor Q’ vs. the candidate of ‘truth’Raffensperger, for his part, has been busy making appearances on both conservative news sites and the mainstream press, seeking to match Hice’s statewide campaigning by utilizing his stature as the sitting secretary of state.In a recent interview, Raffensperger said that Hice “does not know what he’s talking about” regarding the absentee ballot process.“It’s just a myth that was made and propagated by people that had losing campaigns or didn’t do their job,” Raffensperger said. “The Republican Party and the Trump campaign did not have an absentee ballot chase program, whereas the other party did,” he added, referring to how political campaigns track absentee ballots and make sure voters return theirs.Raffensperger continually said he was the candidate of “the truth” and referred to his opponent as Pastor Q, a reference to the congressman’s former role as a pastor and his support for other candidates for secretary of state who have praised QAnon-style conspiracy theories.“At some point, Pastor Q endorsed them and they’ve endorsed him,” Raffensperger said. “And so that’s his position, and I think it’s untenable, and I believe that’s why he won’t be elected statewide.”When asked about his involvement with candidates who have appeared at pro-QAnon events, Hice said, “They reached out to us early about a meeting that I did not attend, but I’m in favor of any conservatives who will stand up and run for office.”‘I’m totally convinced President Trump won Georgia’Raffensperger is perhaps best known for rebuffing Trump’s request to “find 11,780 votes” in Georgia, one more than the amount he lost by, in a brazen attempt to overturn the election.When asked how he would respond had he received that call from Trump, Hice avoided a direct answer. But he appeared to side with Trump’s argument.“The context of the call was we need to make sure that legal ballots were counted and illegal ballots were not counted,” Hice said. “I’m totally convinced President Trump won Georgia had we had a true election that was fair, and that in essence is what the president was aware of. How do you continue finding ballots, ballots, ballots, ballots, days, days, days after the election, just enough for President Trump to lose?”Supporters of Hice backed the congressman’s view that Trump won Georgia.Representative Jody Hice campaigning for secretary of state in Macon, Georgia, last month. He said he is “totally convinced” that Trump would have won Georgia, echoing conspiracy theories.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“If you’re asking me do I think that there were things that occurred that were outside of what was correct and legal? Yes,” said Bert Adams, a Savannah resident who attended Hice’s meet-and-greet with her husband, Sam, in that Georgia city last Thursday. “And could that have led to a different outcome than the one that was correct and legal? Probably.”Though he remains focused on false allegations about the 2020 election, Hice also talked about state election law, and changes to it that he wants the Legislature to work on: banning drop boxes, banning outside funding and adding more limits to the absentee ballot process, though he did not specify those limits.Though he is the challenger, Hice has been by far the most prolific fund-raiser among candidates running for secretary of state, both in Georgia and around the country. He has raised more than $1.6 million since announcing his candidacy, and has roughly $650,000 in cash on hand.Yet as his single-engine turboprop jet sat idling outside in Macon, Hice made a closing plea.“We need your financial support,” he said. “It’s a huge endeavor, obviously, to reach out to the entire state.”What to readRussia laid siege to urban areas across Ukraine on Thursday, and the United Nations predicted that roughly a quarter of the population could be displaced. Our colleagues continue their live coverage.The confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, will begin on March 21, Carl Hulse reports.Democrats won an early victory in a New York State redistricting case, when a judge indicated on Thursday that he would allow this year’s midterm elections to proceed using newly drawn district lines that heavily favor Democrats. Nicholas Fandos reports.In a court filing, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said that there was enough evidence to conclude that Trump and some of his allies may have conspired to commit fraud and obstruction in misleading Americans about the outcome of the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the result, Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer report.Closing segmentJessica Cisneros addressing supporters in Laredo, Texas, on Tuesday. She is facing an incumbent in a runoff election for a congressional district in South Texas.Jason Garza for The New York TimesSpoiler alertAnyone on the ballot can win an election. It’s also true that anyone on the ballot can sway an election — without actually winning.On Tuesday, a little-known candidate who won a couple thousand votes in the Texas primaries has stretched out an already bitter Democratic race by more than two months.In Texas, candidates have to win at least 50 percent of the vote to win their party nomination. If no one gets at least 50 percent, the top two vote-getters advance to a runoff. On Tuesday, Representative Henry Cuellar, a longtime South Texas Democrat, received the most votes in his primary but fell short of the 50-percent threshold, pushing him into a runoff against Jessica Cisneros, a progressive immigration lawyer.As of Thursday afternoon, Cuellar had won 48.4 percent of the vote and Cisneros had 46.9 percent. A third liberal candidate, Tannya Benavides, had 4.7 percent. Attempts to reach Benavides were unsuccessful. She wasn’t anywhere near qualifying for the runoff in May, but she received just enough votes to prevent either candidate from winning the primary outright.They’re called spoiler candidates, but it’s not necessarily a fair descriptor.Major-party candidates who fail to win enough support are in many ways just as responsible for their losses as little-known candidates who earn a mere fraction of the vote. But spoiler candidates have helped shape American politics for better or for worse. One third-party candidate in Georgia told us that he has been a target of Republican ire — even death threats — for running in the 2020 Senate race.The candidate, Shane Hazel, a Libertarian, received 2.3 percent of the vote in the November general election in Georgia in 2020.David Perdue, who was the incumbent Republican senator, came less than half a percentage point shy of the 50 percent mark. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, advanced to the runoff as well — and won the Senate seat. Ossoff’s victory, alongside Raphael Warnock’s, a fellow Georgia Democrat, gave their party control of the Senate.While Hazel and his supporters were thrilled that a scrappy campaign had influenced a marquee Senate race, he doesn’t call himself a spoiler. He might have angered Republicans for helping to thwart a Perdue victory, but he said his intention was to give voice to voters, not to simply send a race to a runoff.And he’ll be back on the ballot in 2022, but for a different office.“There are a lot of Republicans who are extremely upset,” Hazel said, “that I’m running for governor.”Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Election Deniers Are Running for Secretary of State Across the Country

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      Brazenly partisan candidates who insist that Donald Trump won the 2020 election are transforming races for the once-obscure office of secretary of state.PHOENIX — Nearly two dozen Republicans who have publicly questioned or disputed the results of the 2020 election are running for secretary of state across the country, in some cases after being directly encouraged by allies of former President Donald J. Trump.Their candidacies are alarming watchdog groups, Democrats and some fellow Republicans, who worry that these Trump supporters, if elected to posts that exist largely to safeguard and administer the democratic process, would weaponize those offices to undermine it — whether by subverting an election outright or by sowing doubts about any local, state or federal elections their party loses.For decades, secretaries of state worked in relative anonymity, setting regulations and enforcing rules for how elections were administered by local counties and boards. Some held their jobs for many years and viewed themselves not as politicians but as bureaucrats in chief, tending to such arcane responsibilities as keeping the state seal or maintaining custody of state archives.The aftermath of the 2020 presidential election changed all that.In the two months between Election Day and Congress’s certification of President Biden’s victory, Mr. Trump and his allies pressured Republican secretaries of state, election board members and other officials in battleground states to overturn his defeat. In a phone call that is now the subject of an Atlanta grand jury investigation into Mr. Trump’s actions in Georgia, the former president urged Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state to Mr. Biden.That intense focus on a once-obscure state-level office has dramatically transformed its place in American politics — and the pool of candidates it attracts. Campaigns for secretaries of state this year are attracting more money, more attention and more brazenly partisan candidates than ever before.All told, some 21 candidates who dispute Mr. Biden’s victory are running for secretary of state in 18 states, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan group tracking races for secretary of state throughout the country.“It’s like putting arsonists in charge of the Fire Department,” said Joanna Lydgate, the group’s chief executive. “When we think about the anti-democracy playbook, you change the rules and you change the players so you can change the outcome.”Many of the election deniers are running in solidly red states where it is less likely that their actions could tilt a presidential election. But several others, who have formed a coalition calling itself the America First slate, are running in states won by Mr. Biden in 2020, including in the crucial battleground states of Michigan, Arizona and Nevada.The coalition’s members are coordinating talking points and sharing staff members and fund-raising efforts — an unusual degree of cooperation for down-ballot candidates from different states. They are in strong position to win Republican primaries in those battleground states, as well as in somewhat-bluer Colorado and heavily Democratic California.Their chances in November, should they succeed in the primaries, could rest heavily on how well Republicans fare in the midterm elections, given voters’ tendency to vote for down-ballot candidates such as secretary of state from the same party as their choices for governor or senator.A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans appear poised to capture enough seats to take control, thanks to redistricting and gerrymandering alone.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Both parties are preparing for abortion rights and voting rights to be defining topics.While local election officials typically oversee the counting of individual ballots, and state legislatures sign off on slates for the Electoral College, secretaries of state often certify elections and set the tone of how elections are run. Their election-management duties generally include distributing voter registration cards, allocating voting machines, educating voters, auditing election results and ordering recounts.Had secretaries of state taken their cues from Mr. Trump in the last election, they could have put their thumbs on the scales of fair elections by forcing the closure of polling places, removing ballot drop boxes or withholding other resources that could make voting easier in heavily Democratic precincts. Worse, critics say, they could have raised doubts about, or even refused to certify, Mr. Biden’s victories.The powers of secretaries of state to subvert elections vary from state to state and are largely untested in court. Mr. Trump’s phone call to Mr. Raffensperger in Georgia raised the specter of out-and-out fraud in the tabulation of a presidential vote. Short of that, in states where secretaries of state have the power to certify elections, the refusal to do so could be a vital step in overturning one. In a presidential election, state legislators and the governor hold the power to approve an alternative set of presidential electors, and refusing to certify could boost such an effort.In contests for governor or for House or Senate seats, the refusal to certify the result of an election could send states into uncharted legal waters.Those who say they are alarmed at the possibilities include many current Democratic secretaries of state — and a few Republican ones.“The narrative that is being promoted by people who are ill-informed and simply trying to promote a political narrative to benefit themselves in a particular candidacy is very dangerous,” said John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state in Alabama who is term-limited.Former President Donald J. Trump urged Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state.Damon Winter/The New York TimesThe significance of the America First coalition’s parallel efforts can be seen clearly in Arizona, where the slate’s candidate is Mark Finchem, a former firefighter and real estate agent who has served in the state House since 2015 and has become the leading Republican contender for secretary of state. He has raised some $663,000 for his campaign, according to state filings, more than the two leading Democratic candidates combined.Mr. Finchem, who declined to comment for this article, was in Washington on Jan. 6 and attended the Stop the Steal rally that led to the storming of the Capitol. He has publicly acknowledged his affiliation with the Oath Keepers, the far-right militia group whose leader and other members were charged with seditious conspiracy for their roles in the Capitol riot. He championed the Republican-ordered review of the 2020 vote in Maricopa County — though he never endorsed its conclusion that Mr. Biden won — and received a prime speaking spot in Mr. Trump’s Jan. 15 rally outside Phoenix.There, Mr. Finchem told the crowd that the 2020 election had prompted him to run for secretary of state, said he was part of a “nationwide populist movement to regain control over our government” and called for the State Legislature to decertify the presidential result in Arizona, which Mr. Biden carried by nearly 11,000 votes.“Ladies and gentlemen, we know it and they know it — Donald Trump won,” Mr. Finchem said.The coalition’s other candidates include Jim Marchant in Nevada, a former state legislator; Rachel Hamm in California, who contends that Mr. Trump actually won that deep-blue state; and Kristina Karamo in Michigan, who developed a high profile in conservative media after she made uncorroborated claims that she had seen fraudulent ballots being counted in Detroit during the 2020 election, allegations that have been disproved by both local election officials and courts.Major donors to the coalition include such promoters of election conspiracies as Mike Lindell, the chief executive of My Pillow, and Patrick Byrne, a former executive at Overstock.com, both of whom have also helped fund several election-denial campaigns and lawsuits. Mr. Byrne said he gave the group $15,000.“​​We would like as many like-minded secretary of state candidates to come forward as we can,” Mr. Marchant said at a Las Vegas conference that featured members of the coalition along with speakers who are well-known to followers of QAnon conspiracy theories. “I’ve got a few that have contacted me. We’re working to bring them into the coalition.”In an interview, Mr. Marchant said the group had presented its theories about the 2020 election at three “summits” in different states recently and planned others in Wisconsin, Texas, Colorado and Nevada.He brushed off concerns about undermining confidence in elections and instead assailed sitting state and local officials for resisting further audits of the 2020 vote. “If they’re so confident, wouldn’t they gloat and say, ‘See, we told you so?’” he said. “They won’t. They can’t afford to do that.”United States Representative Jody Hice of Georgia was one of the first secretary of state challengers to be endorsed by Mr. Trump.Dustin Chambers/ReutersTony Daunt, a longtime Michigan Republican official who was appointed last year to the panel that certifies the state’s election results, said Ms. Karamo, who has falsely claimed that Mr. Trump won Michigan, was unqualified to be secretary of state because of the “nonsense regarding the stolen election.”But Mr. Daunt and Mr. Merrill, of Alabama, are among very few Republican election officials who have publicly criticized the spreading of lies about the 2020 election. Instead, pro-Trump Republicans are enthusiastic about those candidates, and both the candidates and their supporters say the changes they are pushing for will make it more difficult to commit election fraud, which they portray as a pressing threat.Mr. Finchem is sponsoring a bill in Arizona that would treat all voters’ ballots as public records and make them searchable online. Another of his bills would require all ballots to be counted by hand, although studies show that hand counting introduces more errors. And he has repeatedly called for “currency grade” paper as a countermeasure against fake ballots, though there is no evidence that fake ballots have posed a threat to fair elections.Nothing and no one has catalyzed Republican enthusiasm for secretary of state contests more than Mr. Trump himself, who has offered three endorsements for Mr. Finchem, Ms. Karamo and United States Representative Jody Hice, who is challenging Mr. Raffensperger in Georgia’s Republican primary. Mr. Hice reported more than $575,000 in donations for his secretary of state candidacy in June, twice Mr. Raffensperger’s total.And Mr. Marchant, in Nevada, said he entered the race after being encouraged by allies of Mr. Trump.While the money being spent on races for secretary of state as yet does not approach the fund-raising by candidates for governor or Senate, they are no longer the low-budget affairs they once were. In Georgia, Michigan and Minnesota, fund-raising is more than double what it was at this point during the 2018 midterms, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.Despite their fund-raising struggles in the Arizona contest, Democrats are having some success creating a national support structure for secretary of state candidates.Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan who is facing a likely re-election battle against Ms. Karamo, has raised $1.2 million this campaign cycle, more than six times what her Republican predecessor raised by this point in 2014. Nationally, Democratic candidates for secretary of state raised six times as much money in 2021 — and from five times as many donors — as they did in 2017, according to ActBlue, the Democratic donation platform.Kristina Karamo, a Republican candidate for secretary of state in Michigan, claimed she had seen fraudulent ballots being counted during the 2020 election.Nic Antaya/Getty ImagesJena Griswold, the secretary of state in Colorado and the chairwoman of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said she had hired full-time staff for the first time in the association’s history. She said the group had set a fund-raising goal of $15 million for this cycle, far surpassing the $1.8 million it raised in 2019 and 2020, and had raised $4.5 million toward that goal so far.“The stature of the office is different, and the stature of what officeholders are doing is also different,” Ms. Griswold said.Susan C. Beachy More

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      Atlanta D.A. Requests Special Grand Jury in Trump Election Inquiry

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      The prosecutor, Fani T. Willis of Fulton County, Ga., is investigating possible election interference by the former president and his allies.A district attorney in Atlanta on Thursday asked a judge to convene a special grand jury to help a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.The inquiry is seen by legal experts as potentially perilous for the former president. The grand jury request from the district attorney in Fulton County, Fani T. Willis, had been expected after crucial witnesses refused to participate voluntarily. A grand jury could issue subpoenas compelling those witnesses to provide information.The distinction of a special grand jury is that it would focus exclusively on the Trump investigation, while regular grand juries handle many cases and cannot spend as much time on a single one. The Georgia case is one of two active criminal investigations known to involve the former president and his circle; the other is the examination of his financial dealings by the Manhattan district attorney.“The District Attorney’s Office has received information indicating a reasonable probability that the State of Georgia’s administration of elections in 2020, including the State’s election of the President of the United States, was subject to possible criminal disruptions,” Ms. Willis wrote in a letter to Christopher S. Brasher, the chief judge of the Fulton County Superior Court; the letter was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Judge Brasher declined to comment.Ms. Willis added, “We have made efforts to interview multiple witnesses and gather evidence, and a significant number of witnesses and prospective witnesses have refused to cooperate with the investigation absent a subpoena requiring their testimony.”The inquiry is the only criminal case known to have been taken up by a prosecutor that focuses directly on Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. It is set to play out in a state taking center stage in the nation’s battle over voting rights, and one where a heated Republican primary for governor is testing Mr. Trump’s strength as a kingmaker in the Republican Party.If the investigation proceeds, legal experts say that the former president’s potential criminal exposure could include charges of racketeering or conspiracy to commit election fraud.The inquiry centers on Mr. Trump’s actions in the two months between his election loss and Congress’s certification of the results, including a call he made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to pressure him to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state.Ms. Willis said that Mr. Raffensperger was among those who had refused to cooperate without a subpoena.“We already have cooperated,” Mr. Raffensperger said in an interview with Fox News on Thursday. “Any information that they’ve requested, we sent it to them. And if we’re compelled to come before a grand jury, obviously, we will follow the law and come before a grand jury and testify.”Representatives for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday, but the former president did release a statement characterizing his phone call with Mr. Raffensperger as “perfect.” He has cast other investigations, including one being conducted by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, as politically motivated. Fulton is the most populous county in Georgia and a Democratic stronghold, and Ms. Willis is a Democrat.The Georgia inquiry is one of several criminal, civil and congressional investigations focused on Mr. Trump. He and his allies have been sparring in court with the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The committee won a major victory on Wednesday when the Supreme Court refused a request from Mr. Trump to block the release of White House records, and on Thursday, the panel asked Ivanka Trump to cooperate in the inquiry.In addition to the criminal inquiry being conducted by the Manhattan district attorney, Ms. James is leading a civil fraud investigation into Mr. Trump’s business empire. She has issued subpoenas seeking interviews with two of his adult children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and her office previously interviewed a third, Eric Trump.In Atlanta, Ms. Willis said last year that she would consider racketeering charges, among others. An analysis released last year by the Brookings Institution that has been studied by Ms. Willis’s office concluded that Mr. Trump’s postelection conduct in Georgia had put him “at substantial risk of possible state charges,” including racketeering, election fraud solicitation, intentional interference with performance of election duties and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More