We’re fighting 10 states for information about the Trump administration’s role in interfering with the midterms. You can help cover those costs with a discounted subscription to Doom for $3.60 a month here. If you appreciate us staying on top of all this chaos, spread the word and choose a paid subscription, or drop a few bucks in the Coffee Fund. Now, on to the news… - jg
Last week began with the Georgia State Election Board passing a desperate (and arguably unconstitutional) resolution demanding that the federal government access state election systems. The week ended with a more formal request that the Justice Department and Homeland Security effectively prohibit the use of voting machines and Georgia’s entire election system in November.
The State Election Board’s (SEB) actions were largely for show, but they have darker implications for what is coming — widespread attempts by government officials and bodies loyal to Trump and Republicans to overturn November’s election results.
The White House has no role in how states conduct their elections under the constitution, but federal law enforcement does have jurisdiction over some aspects of our elections. What the SEB did this week was allege that Georgia is violating federal election law and demand that the government step in.
But none of them can be trusted, because officials at the SEB, the DOJ, the DHS and many, many other government bodies across federal, state and local governments now operate as apparatchiks in service of Trump’s dominant wing of the Republican party.
The SEB’s actions matter not because they will actually result in the DOJ investigating or prosecuting Georgia election officials — although they might — or that Georgians will actually be prevented from using voting machines, but because of the message it sends.
That message is being sent to Americans already primed to believe that elections are full of fraud or who don’t have enough time to understand that, while it may look important that state election officials in Georgia are asking the DOJ to step in, the SEB’s request for federal intervention is not credible because of who runs both the SEB and the DOJ.
Here are some facts about who is laying the groundwork for attempts to question or overturn an election in November that Republicans are on pace to lose:
SEB executive director James Mills - A lifelong Republican who has no experience in election administration and has a background as a state legislator and the owner of mini-storage businesses
SEB vice-chair Janelle King - A former Atlanta-area conservative social media personality with no background in election administration, King was appointed to her position by Republicans in Georgia’s legislature. King’s husband recently ran and lost to become Georgia’s next Secretary of State.
SEB board member Salleigh Grubbs - An election denial activist who rose to fame for chasing a truck she incorrectly believed was filled with shredded ballots in the 2020 election, Grubbs has no experience in election administration and was appointed to her position by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who was indicted for his role in the fake electors scheme to illegally give Trump Georgia’s electoral college votes in 2020.
SEB board member Carolyn Roddy - Along with Mills, Roddy appears to be the driving force behind this week’s actions. Roddy was appointed to the SEB in July, has no experience in election administration, was an appointee under the first Trump administration, and began her career in politics working for Newt Gingrich.
That’s on the SEB side of things. At the Justice Department, offices focused on voting rights and elections have been hollowed out of experienced staff, resulting in things like second-year lawyers representing the government in important cases like Democrats’ lawsuit seeking information about possible plans to seize ballots.
One of those offices, the Civil Rights Division, is led by Trump sycophant Harmeet Dhillon, who is helping to lead the charge in the Trump administration’s attempts to amplify the statistically insignificant number of noncitizen voters. Dhillon is almost surely intimately involved what is Trump’s likely plans to seize ballots.
At DHS, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin made the extraordinary claim this week that his agency is looking into 300,000 cases of noncitizen voting, or noncitizens who are registered to vote — it’s not entirely clear and Mullin hasn’t clarified exactly what he meant by the 300,000 number.
Even if 300,000 votes were cast by noncitizens in federal elections since 2020, it would not have had an effect on the outcomes of any of those elections. That’s because 300,000 votes amount to .07% of the roughly 406 million votes cast in those contests.
***
What the SEB did this week is attempt to exploit Americans’ somewhat natural belief that the actions of official government bodies are credible.
But the SEB and the DOJ, as well as government agencies at the federal, state and local levels, are now overtly political institutions in service of one party, the Republicans, and more to the point, one man, Donald Trump.
At no point in the next month and, indeed, until Trump is out of office, can any government agency run by Republicans be taken at its word that it is acting in good faith.
It should also be noted why the SEB did what it did this week: If Republicans stood a good chance of winning in November, the apparatchiks at the SEB would not be calling to essentially shut down Georgia’s election systems in order to possibly cast all of the state’s 3-5 million votes by hand — their ultimate goal.
But as apparatchiks, they recognize the warning signs of steep losses for their party in November, and are therefore required to do something about it.
The same can be said for noncitizen voting claims and prosecutions being amplified by the DOJ and DHS. We are witnessing a Soviet-style, whole-of-government operation aimed at securing power for the Republican party, through claims of election fraud, election lawsuits, attempts at federal intervention, ballot seizures and arrests of election officials and, finally, the parliamentary maneuvers that Republicans will employ in January in an attempt to overturn the election victories of Democrats.
And it’s all going to get much worse.
***
This week’s developments were a preview of the chaos to come. The credibility that the SEB has lent to claims that Georgia’s election systems and voting machines are vulnerable to manipulation are just part of a much broader threat matrix that Republicans are employing to cast doubt in November’s results.
Republican lawyers, public officials across the country, members of the Trump administration and federal law enforcement will use that doubt to try to throw out Democratic votes via mail-in ballot challenges, recount and audit demands and more. This is standard practice in the new, Trumpian era of highly-politicized elections, but the ensuing weeks will see these efforts ramped up to 11.
The best way to combat this massive and coordinated effort to overturn the results of November’s elections is to vote for Democrats in such overwhelming numbers that no reasonable person could conclude that Republicans have even a remotely plausible argument that fraud was committed. This is what happened in Hungary, when voters ousted right-wing authoritarian leader Viktor Orban in an unimpeachable landslide.
Americans must do the same in this election, or what happened this week will become the norm: Republicans claiming any election they lose was fraudulent, and therefore doesn’t count.
***
Doom social:
Bluesky - @americandoom.bsky.social
TikTok - @americandoom_
YouTube - @americandoom_
Instagram - @americandoom_