The Georgia State Election Board is trying to give the DOJ and DHS access to our election systems. Simultaneously, the board is charging me $134 for communications between Republican board members and those two agencies. Help me pay these costs with a discounted subscription to American Doom for $3.60 a month, or by dropping a few dollars in our Coffee Fund.
Key points:
The MAGA-dominated Georgia State Election Board passed a resolution that likely has no legal authority to allow the Justice Department and Homeland Security unfettered access to the state’s voting machines and election systems.
Republicans on the board did this to enable the Trump administration to hunt for technical errors or other minor problems that will allow Trump to claim that the November elections were stolen from Republicans.
The move represents a new front in Republican efforts to insert control over elections by the federal government and Trump himself, in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution.
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The Georgia State Election Board took the unprecedented step today of attempting to give the Trump administration access to Georgia’s voting machines and election systems — a resolution that is likely to be ignored by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and is in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution.
In a 3-2 vote carried by the MAGA majority of board members, the board passed a resolution that would give the departments of Justice and Homeland Security access to servers and hard drives in Georgia’s voting machines and election systems. The resolution was passed under the guise of election integrity — Republican board members and election skeptics claim that Georgia’s voting machines have not been properly maintained with software updates.
Election denial forces in the state argue that the lack of updates has made Georgia’s voting machines vulnerable to manipulation, a contentious accusation that Raffensperger’s office has repeatedly rebuffed.
But the real impetus behind Monday’s resolution is to grant federal law enforcement access to Georgia’s election system so that those agencies can go on a “phishing expedition” as part of Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive hunt for proof of widespread voter fraud, according to a state election official with knowledge of the matter.
Trump’s manic quest to prove widespread voter fraud is simply an effort to sow doubt in the November midterm elections, which Republicans are on pace to lose.
Across the country, the DOJ and DHS have been threatening to arrest election officials from both parties for refusing to hand over voter rolls and remove tens of thousands of voters that the agencies questionably claim are ineligible to vote. In January, the FBI seized thousands of Fulton County, Georgia ballots from the 2020 election in order to prove Trump’s bogus fraud claims. The Justice Department and Homeland Security have also ramped up claims of noncitizen voting, arresting 16 people across the country who allegedly voted in presidential elections in recent years, and claiming that the agencies are pursuing hundreds of thousands of similar cases.
In Nevada, DHS claimed it had found 185 noncitizens registered to vote on the state’s voter rolls only to have state election officials point out that all 185 people were citizens. It’s part of a pattern of DHS inflating numbers of noncitizens registered to vote as part of Trump’s efforts to sow doubt in the midterms.
Monday’s resolution will almost surely be ignored by Raffensperger, the source with knowledge of the matter told American Doom. That’s because the State Election Board has no power to tell Raffensperger’s office how to conduct elections, or who is able to access voting machines and election systems.
Additionally, there is the plain text of the constitution, which does not grant federal law enforcement agencies like the Justice Department or Homeland Security any role in election administration. Instead, those agencies have jurisdiction over investigations into election crimes, which the State Election Board does not allege have been committed.
“I think this is a ‘Please pay attention to us, we can help you kind of thing,’” the source said.
Under Trump, federal law enforcement is most certainly paying attention. Hundreds of agents within Homeland Security have been reassigned to hunt for noncitizen voters. Hundreds of lawyers have left the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which has jurisdiction over election crimes, in protest of the Trump administration’s demands to find nonexistent widespread election fraud.
The three Republicans on the State Election Board, which has been dominated by MAGA diehards for years, claimed that a “patch” of software on Georgia’s election systems could be updated in time for the November election, a claim that Democratic board member Sara Tindal-Ghazal said was “impossible.”
“It is not a patch. It is an entirely new software system that would have to be loaded on, and it literally takes months,” Tindal-Ghazal said. “So what you are calling for is impossible to do before the midterm elections.”
Republicans on the State Election Board did not respond to request for comment. For more than a year, American Doom has pressed GOP board members on their communications with Trump administration officials as well as the Justice Department. There has been no response.
Carolyn Roddy, the board’s newest Republican who was appointed to her position by the Georgia GOP in July, said the purpose of the resolution “is to seek support from federal partners.”
Congress is the only branch of the federal government that has any role in election administration under the constitution — not federal law enforcement agencies like the Justice Department and Homeland Security, which fall under the executive branch.
“The Times, Places and Manner of Holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators,” Article I, Section 4 of the constitution dictates.
Republican board member Janelle King, who last year bragged of her contact with DOJ officials in spreading exaggerated or outright false fraud claims in Georgia, noted that Trump had mentioned vulnerabilities in Georgia’s election systems.
“For God’s sake our own president said that they found vulnerabilities,” King said.
“No matter who is in office, I do not support federal intervention in state-run elections,” Tindal-Ghazal replied, noting that the constitution does not allow for federal involvement in elections, other than Congress.
Roddy and her Republican colleagues dismissed or ignored concerns over the constitutional limits of the federal government’s involvement in elections.
“I’m not asking the DOJ to come in and tell the state how to run their elections, what we’re asking the DOJ to do is to come in and support us in nudging our Secretary of State’s office, who is overseeing federal elections as well, to do their job,” King said.
The word “nudging” does not appear in the constitution.
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