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On Friday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Georgia GOP sent a letter to the State Election Board (SEB). In it, Republicans demanded that the SEB force counties to implement procedures that will cause chaos from now until Election Day, and that could slow the vote-counting process.
The RNC is demanding that the SEB implement the rules laid out in the letter at its meeting on Monday.
The letter is important not because of the claims it makes about voting system vulnerabilities in Georgia, but because it shows that the national Republican party and its Georgia wing are all-in on claiming that November’s midterms are rife with fraud before a single vote has been cast. Friday’s letter is further evidence that Republicans will point to anything and everything they can in order to cast doubt on the results of an election they are increasingly likely to lose.
The dynamic of Republicans claiming fraud in elections that have yet to occur has been going on since the start of the second Trump administration, but those claims are about to reach a fever pitch as we inch closer to Election Day.
The RNC and Georgia Republicans point to an AI-enabled test by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy that allowed researchers there to identify who voters voted for in the May primary.
Using AI, the researchers were able to combine scans of ballots with other publicly-available voter information to match ballots with the voters who cast them, “thus undoing the secrecy of their cast ballot.”
While that may sound troubling on its face, Republicans and SEB board members who have been warning about ballot-matching for months have never explained whether it’s even a reasonable possibility.
In fact, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has already ordered counties to remove some voter information that would allow AI-enabled searching to match voters to their ballots.
Just like supposed fraud that could occur by using mail-in ballots, the election deniers who hold a majority on the SEB have never shown that anyone has actually used AI to manipulate data in order to commit some form of election fraud.
On the issue of matching ballots to voters, the SEB’s MAGA majority have effectively advertised a vulnerability in Georgia’s election system for months now. They’ve done so under the guise of “protecting the secrecy of the ballot,” as board member Salleigh Grubbs often says. But in reality, the three MAGA stalwarts on the board — Grubbs, Janelle King and the newly-appointed Carolyn Roddy — are using the vulnerability exploited by Princeton researchers to call for a complete prohibition of voting machines, and a switch to hand-counted paper ballots.
Counting elections by hand would take far longer than using the voting machines that Georgia employs, and it would open the results up to a significantly higher error rate than machines. Not to mention, by forcing counties to count by hand, election deniers like those on the board as well as Republican officials in Georgia and elsewhere could make questionable fraud claims based on the glut of errors that hand counts would present.
While Friday’s letter didn’t go as far as Grubbs and others would have liked — forcing the entire state to count November’s midterm elections by hand — its demands, if implemented, will cause a fair bit of chaos from now until Election Day.
The letter demands that the board immediately implement the following policies:
Have poll workers shuffle ballots by hand before scanning them to count votes. Context: The errors this could cause will be used to call results into question.
Publish a report “on the status of ballot secrecy” before early voting begins. Context: Doing so would allow Republicans to raise fear among their voters that their votes could be exposed by unnamed actors, fear that Republicans hope will motivate their unmotivated base to show up in November.
“Seek federal assistance” to upgrade Georgia’s voting machines and other election equipment. Context: Election deniers like those on the SEB want the federal government involved as much as possible so that agencies like the Justice Department and Homeland Security can lend credibility to exaggerated or outright false fraud claims.
You can read the full letter below. The SEB meets on Monday. By then, I’ll have more exclusive information to share about interference efforts here in Georgia.
