Less than two months before the election, the Trump-aligned majority on the Georgia State Election Board passed a new set of eleventh-hour rule changes on Friday that could plunge the vote counting process into chaos and give Republicans yet another pretext not to certify the results if Kamala Harris wins the state.
During a highly contentious meeting, the state board voted 3-2 to require county election boards to hand count ballots cast on Election Day and then compare the results to the totals tallied by electronic voting machines to reconcile any discrepancies. While hand counts are commonly used in post-election audits to ensure accurate results, counting all votes by hand is significantly more burdensome, time-consuming, and error-prone than using standard voting machines. The rules were passed by three Republican appointees who Trump praised as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory” during a rally in Atlanta in August.
“We’re so far off the deep end of sanity here,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s lone Democratic member, who voted against the rule changes, told me. “It’s a terrible, terrible idea to do this sort of thing with no notice, no training.”
Given the short time period for counties to certify the election—the deadline is the Monday after Election Day—voting rights activists worry that the new hand counting mandate, combined with rules adopted last month requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and access “all election-related documentation,” will be weaponized by Republicans to oppose election certification. “After changing election certification rules in ways that give new power to local election officials to refuse to certify results, the MAGA board is now changing rules in ways that seem meant to create a fail point in our system,” says Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the voting rights group Fair Fight.
The new rules put the state board directly at odds with election officials, Republicans and Democrats alike. A lawyer for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who defended the results of the 2020 election, said they were likely illegal and poorly timed, noting that the new requirements will not go into effect until October 14 at the earliest, after absentee ballots have been mailed to voters on October 7 and just as in-person early voting starts on October 15.
“We’re so far off the deep end of sanity here,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s lone Democratic member, told me. “It’s a terrible, terrible idea to do this sort of thing with no notice, no training.”
“It is far too late in the election process for counties to implement new rules and procedures, and many poll workers have already completed their required training,” Charlene McGowan, the general counsel for Raffensperger, wrote to the board before Friday’s meeting. The new voting hand counting rules “would disrupt existing chain of custody protocols under the law and needlessly introduce the risk of error, lost ballots, or fraud,” she added.
The office of Georgia Republican Attorney General Chris Carr sent a letter to the board Friday morning informing them that several of the proposed rules, including the hand count of ballots, “very likely exceed the Board’s statutory authority” and “appear to conflict with the statutes governing the conduct of elections.” (At least two other rules approved by the board on Friday, including one that significantly expands the areas where partisan poll watchers can observe the vote counting, also likely violate state laws, the attorney general said.)
“The overwhelming number of election officials I’ve heard from are opposed to this,” said John Fervier, the GOP chair of the board, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. “It’s too close to the election. It’s too late to train a lot of poll workers. There’s a lack of resources in many counties to effectuate this rule.” Most importantly, he said, “this is not supported at all in statute.”
All five election officials who spoke during the public comment section of the meeting spoke against the new rules. “The only people who support this are activists who think that the 2020 election was stolen,” says Tindall Ghazal. “Election workers don’t want it. Election supervisors don’t want it. You don’t change the rules this dramatically, this close to the election.”
The board did, however, vote 4-1 to table another proposal to count ballots by hand during early voting, which one of the pro-Trump members, Janelle King, said could lead to privacy concerns ahead of the election. (King also criticized Raffensperger for “unethical” behavior for recording the call where Trump demanded he “find 11,780 votes” to overturn’s Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, but did not reprimand Trump for pressuring the secretary of state to overturn the election.)
The push for hand counts has become a rallying cry of election deniers who falsely blame electronic voting machines for Trump’s defeat. One of the biggest backers of this conspiracy theory is MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
Ironically, under the guise of protecting election integrity, hand counts actually lead to less accurate results due to human error. Numerous studies show that hand counts produce double the error rate of machine scanners. When Republicans in Nye County, Nevada, attempted to hand count ballots in 2022, they reported an error rate of 25 percent on the first day before the courts shut the effort down.
“It’s a rule looking for a problem that doesn’t exist,” says Travis Doss, executive director of the Augusta-Richmond County Board of Elections. Doss is president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, a bipartisan group of more than 500 election workers from across the state. The group asked the board last month not to pass any more rule changes before the election because it was “gravely concerned that dramatic changes at this stage will disrupt the preparation and training processes already in motion for poll workers, absentee voting, advance voting and Election Day preparation.” It specifically opposed the hand counting requitement because of “the rule’s potential to delay results; set fatigued employees up for failure; and undermine the very confidence the rule’s author claims to seek.”
There’s good reason to worry that delays or errors caused by a hand count of ballots would then be cited by Republicans as a reason not to certify the election if a Democrat wins. That occurred in 2022, when the election board in rural Cochise County, Arizona, attempted to hand count all ballots, were told by a court it was illegal, then refused to certify the results after Democrats narrowly won close state races. The two Republican board members who led the scheme were subsequently indicted by the state’s attorney general for obstructing the vote counting process.
That kind of controversy over the vote counting process is exactly what Trump and his allies seem to be agitating for, which is why they’ve worked so hard to stack local and state election boards with MAGA election deniers in places like Georgia. The new rules are “throwing things off kilter to the point where it could create chaos when that’s the last thing we need,” Doss says. (The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has also repeatedly warned states not to implement voting changes close to an election.)
Tindall Ghazal predicts that any effort to refuse to certify the election will fail, because courts and state officials will force rogue counties to approve the results, but she worries how Trump could weaponize any delay or dispute in the vote counting process, which are now far more likely to occur because of the new rules passed by his allies on the state election board.
“It leads to public uncertainty and public distrust, because it gets messy,” she says. “And that’s the real goal. To throw enough sand in the eyes of the public to make them think maybe something went wrong.”
Ty Doran (“Manifest”) and Noah Lamanna (“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds”) have joined the cast of Netflix’s original dramedy series “Ginny & Georgia,” which has just wrapped production on its third season. In Season 3, Doran will play Wolfe, a laid-back student in Ginny’s (Antonia Gentry) poetry class who is not particularly interested in academics. […]
On August 3, Donald Trump held a raucous rally in Georgia, where he attacked Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for refusing to overturn the 2020 election and reiterated his lie that he “won” the state in 2020. But Trump singled out the new MAGA-aligned majority on the state’s election board for praise.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Georgia State Election [Board] is in a very positive way,” the ex-president said to cheers. “They’re on fire, they’re doing a great job. Three members: Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King. Three people, they’re all pit bulls, fighting for honesty, transparency and victory. They’re fighting.”
Johnston, a retired obstetrician who spread false claims about the 2020 election in Atlanta’s heavily Democratic Fulton County, rose from her seat near the stage and waved to the crowd. “My courage was contagious,” Trump remarked after she stood. “Well, your courage is contagious, too.”
Three days later, on the 59th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act no less, those three Republicans returned the favor to Trump, passing a new rule on a 3-2 vote requiring that counties undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into vote totals before certifying election results. It is set to go into effect in 20 days, two months before voters go to the polls in one of the country’s most important battleground states.
Legal experts say the rule is illegal and will likely be challenged in court, since county election officials have a ministerial role when it comes to certifying elections and Georgia law clearly states that local officials “shall certify” the results. But if the measure—which does not define what a “reasonable inquiry” is —stands, Democrats and voting rights groups are warning that Republican election deniers will use it as a pretext not to certify an election if a Democrat wins—the very thing Trump unsuccessfully tried to get election officials to do in 2020.
“The risk is using pretextual reasons to fail to certify when folks are not pleased with the results,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democratic Party representative on the board, when the rule was first proposed. “That is my concern—using excuses to fail to certify.”
This very thing has occurred in recent elections. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitutionreported, Republican-appointed board members in Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, Gwinnett and Spalding counties voted against certifying results during both local elections last November and the presidential primary this March. The “reasonable inquiry” rule was written by a Republican board member in Fulton County, Michael Heekin, who voted against certifying the presidential primary results because of alleged ballot security concerns. Republican officials have also refused to certify election results in states including Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and New Mexico.
“These are MAGA certification rules, and they’re in direct conflict with Georgia law, which states in multiple places that local elections board officials shallperform their duties, meaning their duties are mandatory, not discretionary,” State Rep. Sam Park, a lawyer and minority whip for Georgia House Democrats, said at a press conference Tuesday.
The Georgia state board’s actions are a consequence of the sweeping voter suppression law passed by the state legislature in 2021 after Trump failed to overturn the results. The law, SB202, included 16 provisions rolling back access to the ballot; the conservative group Heritage Action, the sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, which is behind Project 2025, took credit for the measure, saying in a leaked video obtained by Mother Jones and Documented that it included “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended.”
“These are MAGA certification rules, and they’re in direct conflict with Georgia law”
Most notably, the law removed Raffensperger, who resisted Trump’s demands to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Biden’s victory, as chair and voting member of the state board, which oversees voting rules and election certification. Instead, it gave Republicans in the heavily gerrymandered legislature more power to choose the board’s members, which allowed election deniers to gain a controlling majority of the body this year.
In January, the Georgia Senate, run by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, confirmed Rick Jeffares as that body’s pick for the board. Jeffares posted memes shortly after the 2020 election “that suggested dead people had voted by mail, claimed the Democrats and China had colluded, and implied that Democrats had cheated,” according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. (Jones, the lieutenant governor, served as a fake member of the Electoral College, as part of Trump’s effort to overturn the election.)
Johnston, the board member who attended the Trump rally, was appointed by the Georgia Republican Party in 2022. She has already hinted that GOP county officials could use the new power given to them by the state board to refuse to certify election results.
“Not all elections are certified,” she said at the seven-hour board meeting on Tuesday. “There are ballot battles and there are elections that need to be addressed carefully, and there may be issues that prevent a board from certifying.”
State board member Tindall Ghazal says that Republican officials who have refused to certify election results “are not operating in good faith” and are trying to sow doubt about the legitimacy of elections. “It’s very clear some of the decisions are being driven by partisan interests and there’s a partisan interest in chaos.”
The move to thwart election certification is just one of many disturbing moves recently taken by the board’s MAGA-friendly majority. In another meeting Wednesday, they voted to re-open an investigation into the 2020 results in the Democratic stronghold of Fulton County, where Trump and his allies spread lies about “suitcases” of ballots being counted on election night after GOP poll monitors left. As a result of SB202, the state board now has new power to take control of election administration in up to four counties it deems “underperforming,” sparking fears that Republicans will usurp election operations in heavily Democratic areas.
The board is also considering another rule that would allow county election officials to demand to review a long list of election documents before certifying results, which could further undercut efforts to certify elections in a timely manner and another measure that would give partisan poll watchers greater access to monitor the vote counting process—a key demand of election deniers who tried to disrupt the 2020 vote.
“Changing Georgia election rules with under 90 days to go should raise alarms for everyone who values the integrity of elections—these changes can be used by Trump and his allies to obstruct certification of the 2024 election results,” says Max Flugrath, a spokesman for the voting rights group Fair Fight.
Even Republicans who have denounced Trump are doing the bidding of election deniers in the state. In late July, the secretary of state’s office unveiled a new online portal that allows someone to cancel the registration of another voter online if they have allegedly died or moved out of state. Users only need to know a voter’s name, date of birth, and county residence to initiate a cancellation request, and the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number or their driver’s license number in order to finalize a cancellation. That very information leaked online after the portal’s rollout, exacerbating concerns about voter privacy. Georgia Senate Democrats said the site “empowers conspiracy theorists and other bad actors to deny Georgians the right to vote.”
The portal is particularly worrisome because SB202 explicitly green-lit unlimited challenges to voter eligibility and right-wing activists challenged the registrations of roughly 100,000 people during the 2022 midterms. The Georgia legislature made it even easier to launch mass voter challenges this year, sparking fears that more voters could be wrongly removed from voter rolls. ProPublica reported that there have already been attempts to cancel the registrations of Raffensperger and far-right GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene using the new online tool.
Georgia is once again a toss-up state, as the latest projections show Kamala Harris pulling even with Trump. But the election deniers who have been empowered after 2020 are doing everything they can to rig the rules to prevent a Democrat from winning the state again.
On August 3, Donald Trump held a raucous rally in Georgia, where he attacked Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for refusing to overturn the 2020 election and reiterated his lie that he “won” the state in 2020. But Trump singled out the new MAGA-aligned majority on the state’s election board for praise.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Georgia State Election [Board] is in a very positive way,” the ex-president said to cheers. “They’re on fire, they’re doing a great job. Three members: Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King. Three people, they’re all pit bulls, fighting for honesty, transparency and victory. They’re fighting.”
Johnston, a retired obstetrician who spread false claims about the 2020 election in Atlanta’s heavily Democratic Fulton County, rose from her seat near the stage and waved to the crowd. “My courage was contagious,” Trump remarked after she stood. “Well, your courage is contagious, too.”
Three days later, on the 59th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act no less, those three Republicans returned the favor to Trump, passing a new rule on a 3-2 vote requiring that counties undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into vote totals before certifying election results. It is set to go into effect in 20 days, two months before voters go to the polls in one of the country’s most important battleground states.
Legal experts say the rule is illegal and will likely be challenged in court, since county election officials have a ministerial role when it comes to certifying elections and Georgia law clearly states that local officials “shall certify” the results. But if the measure—which does not define what a “reasonable inquiry” is —stands, Democrats and voting rights groups are warning that Republican election deniers will use it as a pretext not to certify an election if a Democrat wins—the very thing Trump unsuccessfully tried to get election officials to do in 2020.
“The risk is using pretextual reasons to fail to certify when folks are not pleased with the results,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democratic Party representative on the board, when the rule was first proposed. “That is my concern—using excuses to fail to certify.”
This very thing has occurred in recent elections. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitutionreported, Republican-appointed board members in Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, Gwinnett and Spalding counties voted against certifying results during both local elections last November and the presidential primary this March. The “reasonable inquiry” rule was written by a Republican board member in Fulton County, Michael Heekin, who voted against certifying the presidential primary results because of alleged ballot security concerns. Republican officials have also refused to certify election results in states including Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and New Mexico.
“These are MAGA certification rules, and they’re in direct conflict with Georgia law, which states in multiple places that local elections board officials shallperform their duties, meaning their duties are mandatory, not discretionary,” State Rep. Sam Park, a lawyer and minority whip for Georgia House Democrats, said at a press conference Tuesday.
The Georgia state board’s actions are a consequence of the sweeping voter suppression law passed by the state legislature in 2021 after Trump failed to overturn the results. The law, SB202, included 16 provisions rolling back access to the ballot; the conservative group Heritage Action, the sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, which is behind Project 2025, took credit for the measure, saying in a leaked video obtained by Mother Jones and Documented that it included “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended.”
“These are MAGA certification rules, and they’re in direct conflict with Georgia law”
Most notably, the law removed Raffensperger, who resisted Trump’s demands to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Biden’s victory, as chair and voting member of the state board, which oversees voting rules and election certification. Instead, it gave Republicans in the heavily gerrymandered legislature more power to choose the board’s members, which allowed election deniers to gain a controlling majority of the body this year.
In January, the Georgia Senate, run by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, confirmed Rick Jeffares as that body’s pick for the board. Jeffares posted memes shortly after the 2020 election “that suggested dead people had voted by mail, claimed the Democrats and China had colluded, and implied that Democrats had cheated,” according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. (Jones, the lieutenant governor, served as a fake member of the Electoral College, as part of Trump’s effort to overturn the election.)
Johnston, the board member who attended the Trump rally, was appointed by the Georgia Republican Party in 2022. She has already hinted that GOP county officials could use the new power given to them by the state board to refuse to certify election results.
“Not all elections are certified,” she said at the seven-hour board meeting on Tuesday. “There are ballot battles and there are elections that need to be addressed carefully, and there may be issues that prevent a board from certifying.”
State board member Tindall Ghazal says that Republican officials who have refused to certify election results “are not operating in good faith” and are trying to sow doubt about the legitimacy of elections. “It’s very clear some of the decisions are being driven by partisan interests and there’s a partisan interest in chaos.”
The move to thwart election certification is just one of many disturbing moves recently taken by the board’s MAGA-friendly majority. In another meeting Wednesday, they voted to re-open an investigation into the 2020 results in the Democratic stronghold of Fulton County, where Trump and his allies spread lies about “suitcases” of ballots being counted on election night after GOP poll monitors left. As a result of SB202, the state board now has new power to take control of election administration in up to four counties it deems “underperforming,” sparking fears that Republicans will usurp election operations in heavily Democratic areas.
The board is also considering another rule that would allow county election officials to demand to review a long list of election documents before certifying results, which could further undercut efforts to certify elections in a timely manner and another measure that would give partisan poll watchers greater access to monitor the vote counting process—a key demand of election deniers who tried to disrupt the 2020 vote.
“Changing Georgia election rules with under 90 days to go should raise alarms for everyone who values the integrity of elections—these changes can be used by Trump and his allies to obstruct certification of the 2024 election results,” says Max Flugrath, a spokesman for the voting rights group Fair Fight.
Even Republicans who have denounced Trump are doing the bidding of election deniers in the state. In late July, the secretary of state’s office unveiled a new online portal that allows someone to cancel the registration of another voter online if they have allegedly died or moved out of state. Users only need to know a voter’s name, date of birth, and county residence to initiate a cancellation request, and the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number or their driver’s license number in order to finalize a cancellation. That very information leaked online after the portal’s rollout, exacerbating concerns about voter privacy. Georgia Senate Democrats said the site “empowers conspiracy theorists and other bad actors to deny Georgians the right to vote.”
The portal is particularly worrisome because SB202 explicitly green-lit unlimited challenges to voter eligibility and right-wing activists challenged the registrations of roughly 100,000 people during the 2022 midterms. The Georgia legislature made it even easier to launch mass voter challenges this year, sparking fears that more voters could be wrongly removed from voter rolls. ProPublica reported that there have already been attempts to cancel the registrations of Raffensperger and far-right GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene using the new online tool.
Georgia is once again a toss-up state, as the latest projections show Kamala Harris pulling even with Trump. But the election deniers who have been empowered after 2020 are doing everything they can to rig the rules to prevent a Democrat from winning the state again.
If not for her partner driving her, Madeline Ryan Smith isn’t sure how she’d be able to campaign across the four counties she hopes to represent in Georgia’sstate House. Smith is blind: “Getting from Point A to Point B physically” is the biggest hurdle she faces on the campaign trail.
“I think it is problematic and kind of disheartening that disabled candidates have to rely so heavily on able-bodied people around them,” Smith said. “We talk a lot of big game about public transportation, and then we choose not to implement it anywhere except for metropolitan cities.”
Smith, 27 years old, is the Democratic nominee for her district; the Republican incumbent she’s running against (himself a Democrat until the mid-aughts) has been in office since 1985, before she was born. Her experience living with a disability has influenced her policy views, including support for expanding Medicaid and getting rid of Georgia’s subminimum wage for disabled workers.
Many candidates claim to support disabled people; Smith wants them to “prove it.”
Although disabled people make up the largest minority group in the country, there are disproportionately few openly disabled politicians relative to the approximately 42.5 million American adults with disabilities. There are several reasons: disabled people can lose Social Security benefits while running for office; some politicians—like FDR throughout his 12 years in the White House—hide their disabilities due to ableism; for people with some health conditions, the long hours aren’t feasible.
In January 2023, Smith was elected as Georgia Democratic Party’s Disability Caucus Chair, where she’s already been met with disappointment by the state Democratic Party’s decision to leave disability policy out of its platform this year.
Politicians, Smith says, need to start proving that they actually care about disabled constituents. “When anyone inside the Democratic Party who’s running for office comes to me and says, ‘Oh yeah, I’m so supportive of people with disabilities,’” she notes, “I say, ‘Okay, prove it.’” Many of those candidates, Smith says, don’t provide standard accommodations like alternative text on social media posts for people with low vision—including her—or American Sign Language interpreters at events.
Smith says they need to take the initiative. “It’s in the ADA, so I don’t need to be teaching anyone how to do that,” Smith says. The Americans with Disabilities Act—which many disabled people still have to fight to get institutions (and the people who run them) to follow—was signed into law in 1990, again before Smith was even born.
At political events not run by disabled people, Smith has “never seen anyone stand up to make a speech and describe themselves visually”—the type of visual description that Republicans attacked Vice President Kamala Harris for using in a meeting with disability activists.
“The reason people are making fun of Kamala Harris as she accommodates the audience she is speaking to is twofold: ignorance and ableism,” Smith adds. “There’s no other explanation.”
Constantly facing inaccessibility has led Smith to make her campaign as accessible as possible both to the people working on it and to her constituents.
“Events are accessible. They’re safe. They’re masked. We have hand sanitizer,” she says. “ We do the whole nine yards because…a lot of my campaign staff is disabled anyway.” Smith says it’s a priority for her team to “proactively think about accessibility” rather than as an afterthought.
And she hopes that seeing more disabled people run for office—through campaigns like hers—will have a positive impact on other people with disabilities and inspire them to do the same. “It is so important, so vitally important,” Smith said, for disabled youth to “see people with disabilities in positions of power.”
It’s the morning of November 28, 2023, and a lawyer gives an opening statement to the jury. He tells a story of a 9-year-old boy who sees his older brother Bennie collapsed on the ground after being shot in the chest. Someone calls 911, but when the police finally arrive, they don’t rush to help him, instead handcuffing the boy’s mother, who is screaming and hysterical, and pushing her to the ground. When the cops finally go over to Bennie, they put a sheet over his face. But Bennie’s chest is still going up and down—he’s still breathing.
“This probably happens over and over but we only know about it because it’s Young Thug and Brian Steel.”
The lawyer, Brian Steel, says that Bennie’s brother would come to believe that “the only two ways he can break the generational hopelessness and despair for his family, himself—and he wanted to break it for as many people as he could who were in this struggle—was to be a professional athlete or an accomplished musical artist.” He chose music.
The young boy’s name is Jeffery Williams. He was born in 1991 and grew up in the Jonesboro South projects in Atlanta, Georgia, but was displaced at the age of 16 when the public housing development was demolished. He began rapping as Young Thug in 2010. Three studio albums and nearly 20 mixtapes later, he has become one of the most celebrated trap artists.
But in May 2022, Young Thug—along with 27 others associated with his label YSL Records—was arrested. The rapper is now on trial for a host of charges, including using YSL as a front to run a criminal street gang and violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Although he’s not accused of murder, the state alleges that Young Thug rented a car used in the 2015 murder of rival gang member Donovan Thomas Jr. Fulton County prosecutors, led by District Attorney Fani Willis, are connecting this murder to dozens of more recent incidents of gun crime and killings and claiming that Young Thug is the leader and instigator behind the wave of violence. Some of the state’s evidence against the artist comes from his rap lyrics, including bars like “Gave the lawyer close to two mil’, he handle all the killings”—from the song “Just How It Is”—which the indictment describes as “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
For decades, politicians, prosecutors, and the media have incited panic around Black rappers and their lyrics, a practice that, according to some constitutional experts, raises free speech concerns when those lyrics are presented at trial. Reading lyrics out of context, they warn, reinforces racial stereotypes, biases the jury, and prevents fair decisions, reframing the trial around artistic narratives rather than material evidence.
“Prosecutors do this because they know it makes their job easy,” Jack Lerner, a University of California, Irvine, law professor and a co-author of “Rap On Trial: A Legal Guide,” toldCourthouse News Service following the Young Thug indictment. “They know that juries that aren’t familiar with rap music will essentially rob the rap artist of a fair trial. It really creates a chilling effect for the artist and has very serious First Amendment implications.”
Last year, Reps. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) re-introduced the Restoring Artistic Protection Act, which would create federal rules to limit the ways in which artists’ lyrics can be used against them in criminal and civil cases. The lawmakers quoted a federal judge’s 2021 ruling barring two Philadelphia police officers from introducing as evidence the lyrics of a rapper who was suing them for wrongful arrest. “Freddy Mercury did not confess to having ‘just killed a man’ by putting ‘a gun against his head’ and ‘pull[ing] the trigger,’” the Trump-appointed judge wrote. “Bob Marley did not confess to having shot a sheriff. And Johnny Cash did not confess to shooting ‘a man in Reno, just to watch him die.’”
Willis, who was elected DA on a tough-on-crime platform in 2020, is the driving force behind the RICO accusations against Young Thug and his YSL co-defendants. Her history with Georgia’s RICO statute—an unusually broad version of a legal tool used across the country to combat organized crime—dates back a decade. As an assistant district attorney in 2014, she led the prosecution of 12 educators who allegedly cheated on state tests by correcting students’ answers to improve their scores. Eleven of them were convicted under RICO. Willis is now attempting to use the same law to prosecute Donald Trump and his allies for allegedly conspiring to steal the state’s 2020 presidential election. Meanwhile, Georgia’s attorney general is prosecuting dozens of anti-Cop City activists under RICO, accusing them of using illegal tactics to stop construction of the controversial law enforcement training center.
Enacted in 1980, Georgia’s RICO law expanded state power by, among other things, making it harder for crime bosses to use subordinates to shield themselves from legal liability. The statute gives prosecutors the authority to combine offenses committed by different people if they can argue that the illegal activity fell into a pattern and the defendants shared a common goal, explained Michael Mears, a professor at John Marshall Law School in Atlanta, in a 2023 interview with the New York Times. “It allows a prosecutor to go after the head of an organization, loosely defined, without having to prove that that head directly engaged in a conspiracy or any acts that violated state law,” he told the paper. “If you are a prosecutor, it’s a gold mine. If you are a defense attorney, it’s a nightmare.”
The law carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years and fines of $25,000, giving the government an enormous amount of leverage to push defendants to take plea deals. In a 2022 press conference, Willis called herself a “fan of RICO” because it “allows a prosecutor’s office and law enforcement to tell the whole story.” She later stated, “We use it as a tool so [jurors] can have all the information they need to make a wise decision.”
But critics have accused Georgia prosecutors of abusing the law. The cases can take years to try—jury selection alone in the YSL case took 10 months—and are ruinously expensive to defend. Officials from the ACLU blasted the attorney general’s Cop City prosecution as a form of “extreme intimidation tactics that we need to resist.”
“A lot of people ask me to make Brian Steel and Thug merch, but I’m not trying to get sued.”
“There is legitimate concern that Georgia’s sweeping indictment could form a playbook for other prosecutors and state officials seeking to stifle political dissent,” the ACLU officials argued. Those fears aren’t baseless. Earlier this year, 10 Republican state senators put forward a bill that would further expand RICO in Georgia to punish low-level misdemeanors like loitering and illegally putting up posters. The legislation would also provide for increased penalties if the defendants are found to have targeted their victims based on “political affiliation or belief.”
The AG’s office declined to comment to Mother Jones, citing the pending prosecution. Willis’ office did not respond to questions.
Perhaps because it lacks a clear political valence—like the Trump and Cop City cases—the YSL trial hasn’t always attracted the kind of mainstream media attention it deserves. Until recently, to get any regular updates on the televised trial, one had to turn to social media, particularly to an X account that goes by @ThuggerDaily. The anonymous author now has more than 70,000 followers, and he supplies them with translations of impenetrable legalese, videos of dramatic testimony, and explanations of all the players and strategies used in the trial. His work has brought national attention to the inner workings of Georgia’s criminal justice system, and it’s been cited by everyone from legal experts to music outlets like Complex and The Fader.
Starting last month, the trial began receiving more intensive national coverage after Fulton County Judge Ural Glanville made a series of inflammatory decisions, including holding a secret meeting with prosecutors and a key witness. When Steel, the lawyer for Young Thug, learned about that meeting, Glanville demanded that Steel disclose how he’d found out about it. Steel refused to divulge his source and was then held in contempt by the judge. That was followed by calls for Glanville to withdraw from the case and by a series of appeals to higher courts in Georgia. The trial is now on indefinite hold until another judge makes a formal decision on whether Glanville should be removed.
I had the opportunity to ask @ThuggerDaily about his perspective on the intricacies of the trial, as well as what it reveals about Georgia’s fight against crime. You can read a condensed version of the discussion—which was conducted over email and has been edited for clarity and organization—below:
How did you become interested in Young Thug’s music? My initiation was when the Jeffery mixtape blew up in 2016.
The first time Thug really clicked for me was on the bus on the way home from a high school soccer game my team had just won. Whoever was on aux played “Hercules” off a mixtape Thug had just dropped, which remains in my top 10 Thug songs ever. I was hooked on that song but didn’t really check out Thug’s other music until a friend of mine showed me “With Them” off Slime Season 3 the day it dropped. That sound blew my mind and that entire tape resonated with me immediately. That week, I went back and checked out Thug’s entire discography and have been a huge fan ever since.
What’s the story behind you starting to cover the YSL trial? What’s your background (legal, music, etc.)?
I often get asked if I have any background in law or journalism—I have literally zero. Never ran a social media account either.
I had been a part of a Discord chat of active Young Thug fans for a long time, and when the RICO case first dropped, naturally everyone wanted as much information as possible. But the media coverage was absolutely horrid. Early on, none of us understood what Thug was being accused of doing. There were important hearings almost every month for the year leading up to the trial, but they weren’t streamed online and journalists didn’t cover them, so information was sparse. I took it upon myself to start reading court filings and summarizing them in the Discord server, and eventually, the owners of the Discord made me my own channel to announce case updates for everyone.
We’d have watch parties for hearings with dozens of people tuning into bond hearings, but there were many that were not available for streaming. I accidentally stumbled upon a document summoning someone from jail to the courtroom with a Zoom passcode on it. I tried to keep it private for as long as I could, but eventually someone else came across the code through the same document and trolled the courtroom by screaming, “FREE THUG,” into the mic. After that, they made a new Zoom passcode and kept it super locked up. I was also checking the court docket every day and was reading and learning a lot about the law—just 6 months prior I didn’t even know what an indictment was.
Fast forward to December 2022 and news of Walter “DK” Murphy taking the first plea deal dropped. The fans realized how big of a deal this was and we all scoured the internet looking for more information, but there was none. Radio silence. It was insane! I even resorted to DMing his lawyer, but they turned me away. The next day, Gunna took a plea deal. The info coming out about the deal was also bad but in the opposite extreme—it obviously made huge waves on social media, but the details coming out were sensationalized and, frankly, full of misinformation. No one posted the actual paperwork—the main thing going around was the video of Gunna’s plea allocution, where he responded, “Yes Ma’am,”—but I got it a full six hours before anyone posted the relevant parts to social media. I made one very important connection very early on who was able to access court documents without paying and often before journalists got them. I still talk to this same contact a lot. I can’t really say who, but without them, ThuggerDaily wouldn’t be what it is—they sent me all the documents I was getting early on. Before them, I was paying per page and I’d get them delayed.
Slimelife Shawty aka Wunnie Lee is the third person to plea out of jail in the YSL case and will be coming home today.#yslricocasepic.twitter.com/Iqj5DAZHHh
This is when someone from the Discord server, the original owner of @ThuggerDaily, reached out to me. At this point, the Twitter account was an inactive Young Thug meme page with roughly 1,000 followers. We’d already talked about me potentially taking it over and turning my Discord updates into a full social media court updates page, but the wave of plea deals was the catalyst.
My first official post was announcing Slimelife Shawty’s plea deal, which garnered 40 likes.
When did you start getting attention for your work? I was looking at posts from 2023 that didn’t receive as much engagement as you are getting now.
Honestly, getting attention was gradual and consistent. There are, of course, huge spikes when big developments happen, but I was getting recognition from local lawyers and even YSL case lawyers and friends and family of the defendants pretty early on. However, with the craziness in the last month—between Woody, recusal motions, Steel being ordered to go to jail, etc.—my page doubled in size in the span of 2 weeks.
I started with 1,000 followers. On the day of opening statements, I went from about 16,000 followers to 20k. Today, I’m at 66k.
Why do you think there is so little active coverage of the trial? I mostly see explainers from mainstream outlets or basic reporting on developments with no added context like you’re doing. What are media outlets missing in their coverage of the trial?
This trial is extremely unique in ways that make it difficult to report. It has hundreds of witnesses and spans a timeline of 13 years with multiple narratives. It’s very unfriendly for traditional reporting as they would have to pay someone to cover five days of court a week for over two years. A random viewer can’t just pop in and understand why the state is asking the witness about a 10-year-old robbery in which no defendant was a participant. Even understanding Thug’s charges and what the state has to prove isn’t easy. It’s just too much. The only digestible parts are the funny clips of court proceedings that really SHOULDN’T be happening.
In June, Brian Steel filed a motion to recuse Judge Glanville from the case. Why are there so many moving parts like the absurd number of witnesses involved, the long jury selection process, and the messy court proceedings?
The state chose to indict 28 defendants in a conspiracy case with 700+ witnesses. It’s now around 200 witnesses after the judge ordered cuts when it was clear how long the trial was taking. That’s the source of most of the mess. Most think it’s working against them, but it’s hard to predict what a jury is thinking. They may have a decent murder case somewhere, but they insisted on the fluff to make it a RICO conspiracy.
What do you think the state wants out of this trial? Is its plan working?
I think that Atlanta has a gang problem for sure, and this is a performative way of saying, “We’re doing something.” They have given plenty of “dangerous” people zero jail time in exchange for testimony against Young Thug. It’s clearly designed to make headlines instead of making a difference.
You can’t arrest your way out of this.
What possible outcomes do you see for Young Thug and YSL in this trial?
As far as a final outcome, I have no idea. At this juncture, there’s a million ways the case can develop. However, I am 100% certain this first trial will end in a mistrial, whether it’s now or on appeal. Other than that, too much depends on unpredictable variables such as if the state wants to retry or offer favorable pleas, whether we get a new judge, which witnesses will show up again, etc., for me to make a decent prediction.
What do you think the trial says about Georgia’s criminal justice system and the other high-profile RICO cases in the state?
This trial has shown a whole new crowd of people, myself included, how much power the state has. Violation after violation and constant misconduct has been forgiven under the assumption that Georgia is trying their best. Even people who think Thug is guilty still acknowledge he deserves a fair trial and isn’t getting one. Everyone knows it. Yet we are wasting millions of dollars and years of time while the judge, who has lost control of the courtroom, has little oversight.
What do you think is the importance of having trials televised for the public?
It’s horrifying that this probably happens over and over but we only know about it because it’s Young Thug and Brian Steel. Even in this case, the state has tried to turn off the cameras under the guise of “witness safety.” The drawbacks of public trials definitely exist and I’m sure the jurors dislike social media reporting on the trial, but the alternative is no public accountability of public servants. It’s immensely important.
You should be getting paid for your work. Are you?
Other than Twitter ad revenue—which is honestly pitiful—no. For a while, I tried to monetize my page by reaching out to hip-hop promo agencies to do paid tweets, but it was a hard sell because my page was so niche. A lot of people ask me to make Brian Steel and Thug merch, but I’m not trying to get sued lol. I’m not sure how to go about monetizing my page otherwise. Hopefully I can be involved in the inevitable documentary somehow and get a check there.
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