On October 8, about two dozen conservative activists gathered in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol, where a meeting of the state election board was taking place. A US Army veteran named Richard Schroeder, from Hall County, in the northeastern part of the state, led the group in prayer. Schroeder, who testified that day, was a regular presence at the board meetings, where he has spread debunked claims about election security and once identified himself as a poll worker in charge of tabulating votes. 

Schroeder first asked God for forgiveness for allowing the “evil” of migrants and transgender people to permeate the country. Then he turned to voting machines. 

“Nobody’s got more votes than President [Donald] Trump ever in the world,” Schroeder said. He and other members of the prayer circle wore shirts that read “IYKYK dvscorp08!,” referring to an alleged password to Georgia’s voting machines that was obtained by right-wing election deniers and spread online. 

“Our votes have been stolen,” he continued in prayer. “The Dominion voting machines have taken our God-given dominion and have been selecting winners—not electing winners.”

“Amen,” responded David Hancock, a member of the Gwinnett County board of elections. 

The activists were part of a small but influential network of election deniers who had successfully convinced the board’s pro-Trump majority to launch probes into unfounded claims of election fraud. They also persuaded the board, which issues guidance to county election officials and investigates problems with the voting process, to pass a series of controversial rules in the runup to the November election that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox recently deemed “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” In August, Trump had touted the trio of sympathetic board members by name at a campaign rally, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” 

The rules would have led to the spread of misinformation and could have been used as a justification not to certify results, Democrats and voting rights advocates warned. The changes also would have slowed the counting of votes, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “Everything we’ve been fighting for since 2020 has been to give the voter quicker response, quicker results,” Raffensperger said on October 14, noting that one of the board’s rules, requiring a hand count of ballots on Election Day, could have delayed the reporting of results into the wee hours of the morning. “Really, that just becomes a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.” 

Democrats and election watchdogs breathed a sigh of relief when Georgia courts blocked the Trump-inspired rules, including two that would have given local election officials more power to attempt to block certification. But they should not rest easy, as significant peril still remains. At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state. And over the past four years, Trump-aligned election deniers have asserted their power throughout local GOP organizations, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog.

Together, these MAGA Republicans could throw the election in Georgia—and thus the nation—into disarray. Officials at the county level, for instance, could still attempt to refuse to certify the results if Kamala Harris carries Georgia, while the state election board could amplify false allegations and launch bogus investigations supporting Trump’s inevitable claims of a stolen election. And those are just a couple of the nightmarish scenarios that could unfold next week.

Whatever transpires in the November 5 election, the radicalization of the board into a nakedly partisan arm of Trump’s election denial machine shows that our democratic system rests on a knife’s edge. What took place in Georgia can—and is—happening throughout the country. The takeover of much of Georgia’s election apparatus offers a distressing vision of the future if Trump returns to the White House, one in which the federal government is run by zealots whose only qualification is their fealty to Trump. 

“That’s exactly what Project 2025 is all about,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the state election board’s lone Democrat. “It is about replacing the bureaucrats within the federal government with political employees whose sole requirement for the job is loyalty to the president.” Tindall Ghazal points out that some of those people “don’t understand and don’t care about what the law requires. They’re completely unconstrained in their actions.”

The path to this troubling reality began on election night 2020, when Republican activists began spreading claims of widespread voter fraud. Believing that Trump ballots had been thrown out, a crowd gathered at an election office in Griffin, the seat of Spalding County, an hour south of Atlanta. Led by a county commissioner who filmed election workers through the glass, some in the crowd eventually climbed into a dumpster to find the supposedly discarded ballots. In Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, Salleigh Grubbs, the Cobb County GOP chair, chased a truck she believed contained shredded ballots. In an Atlanta ballot-counting facility, plastic bins under a folding table were labeled the infamous “suitcases full of ballots” that supposedly flipped the election in favor of Joe Biden. In the small town of Douglas in south Georgia, a county election board official claimed that voting machines had flipped votes. The state became ground zero for election fraud claims. 

None of it proved true. The dumpster in Griffin contained no ballots—just empty ballot envelopes that had been thrown away by election workers. The truck in Marietta did not have shredded ballots, Grubbs eventually discovered. The boxes under the table in Atlanta didn’t hold ballots for Biden that were double-counted to seal his victory over Trump. Instead, they just held regular ballots that were opened when workers were told by the secretary of state’s office to stay late and count more votes. The Dominion voting machines Grubbs and others prayed over never actually flipped votes—in Douglas or anywhere else—but they were broken into by local officials and attorneys working on behalf of Trump.

At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state.

From these debunked origins, the claims of a stolen election grew, spreading to include other outlandish allegations of a plot that supposedly involved Italians and Venezuelans hacking voting machines and the forgery of untold thousands of ballots that were placed in drop boxes by “mules.” 

Top Georgia election officials repeatedly discredited claims of a stolen election, as did multiple legal proceedings and court judgments. Three separate counts of ballots reaffirmed Biden’s 2020 victory. Voting-machine companies won major settlements against Fox News and Newsmax for airing false claims about their machines. A Fulton County judge threw out a lawsuit filed by DeKalb County Republicans challenging the security of the state’s voting machines. Two Georgia poll workers in Fulton County won a $148 million defamation judgment against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading the myth of “suitcases” of ballots. Jenna Ellis, another top lawyer for Trump, took a plea agreement in a wide-ranging election interference case and admitted she made false statements about illegal ballots being counted. 

Nonetheless, Trump-aligned Republicans throughout the state and nation began amplifying these claims and calling for investigations. They also got to work making sure “the steal” couldn’t happen again, beginning at the local level, where influential figures like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn were encouraging Trump supporters to take over local election boards. In 12 counties, local representatives in the state legislature passed laws that remade county election boards in favor of Republicans. One of the bills, HB 769, transformed the Spalding County board of elections from a mundane government body on which Black Democrats held a majority to an activist board controlled by white Republicans who amplified Trump’s election lies. 

When Spalding County officials first heard about HB 769 in the spring of 2021, they were confused. Typically, when the county’s representatives in the state legislature introduce a bill that affects the county, local officials are part of the process. But that wasn’t the case with this measure, which changed how the members of the board of elections were chosen. The board had always been essentially split between the parties—Democrats got two appointments and Republicans got two, with the foursome then choosing a fifth member to serve as chair. But HB 769 changed that—the board’s fifth member would now be chosen by local judges in a closed-door process and secret vote. In May 2021, the judges chose Republican Jim Newland, giving election deniers control over the board. 

Two of the new Republicans—Ben Johnson and Roy McClain—believed Trump had rightfully won the election. Johnson is a Trump-supporting QAnon fan and Elon Musk aficionado who frequently posts on Facebook about various right-wing culture war grievances and conspiracies, including that voting machines were subject to hacking and fraud. McClain has pushed for automatic hand recounts of all elections and in 2023 made a public showing of his refusal to certify results while privately signing off on certification, fulfilling his legal duty while maintaining his MAGA bonafides. Both Johnson and McClain were involved in a brief but failed effort in August 2021 to hire an Atlanta law firm to help them access voting machines in their hunt for evidence of election fraud. The plan was nixed when Raffensperger’s office warned them that it would be illegal to allow a third party to access election equipment.

Even in counties where election boards weren’t overhauled to favor Republicans, election deniers still had a presence. In Fulton County, home to Atlanta, two election deniers sit on the election board. Boards in the Atlanta metro counties of Cobb, DeKalb, Floyd, and Gwinnett also include skeptics who, while not holding a majority, frequently amplify misinformation about elections. By early 2024, at least 21 election deniers were in place on election boards in nine counties.

As election deniers won seats on election boards, they also gained power in local GOP chapters. In Spalding County, Republicans who refused to go along with Trump’s claims of a stolen election were pushed out of the local party. There and elsewhere, Republicans refused to give campaign funds raised from donors to Gov. Brian Kemp for his unwillingness to toe the line on Trump’s lies about election fraud, said Mary Braun, a Republican in Spalding County who told Mother Jones that Johnson and some local party members had a “vendetta” against her for opposing the false claims spread by her colleagues. (Johnson and other members of the Spalding County election board, along with its election supervisor and county attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers set their sights on perhaps the biggest prize of all, the state election board. In March 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tucked a provision into a sweeping new voter suppression bill that removed Raffensperger as chair and a voting member of the board, a previously obscure body of appointed officials whose meetings were scantly attended and typically mundane. Raffensperger had become a leading target of election deniers for defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election and refusing Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory. In addition to removing Raffensperger, Georgia lawmakers gave the state election board the authority to investigate the secretary of state for his handling of the 2020 investigation—and virtually anything else the board dreamed up. 

“This was punishment for him not obeying the president and revealing that conversation,” Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic member of the board, said of Trump’s infamous phone call to Raffensperger, pressuring him to overturn the 2020 election.

After ousting Raffensperger, influential state Republicans continued to remake the board in Trump’s image by pushing out establishment Republicans and replacing them with election deniers. In 2022, the Georgia GOP used its appointment to place Dr. Janice Johnston on the board. (Each party gets an appointment to the five-member board, both chambers of the legislature pick a member, and the legislature chooses the chair unless it is out of session, in which case the governor appoints the chair.) A former obstetrician, Johnston served as a poll watcher in Fulton County in 2020 alongside Julie Adams, an election denier who currently sits on Fulton’s election board. Johnston began frequently attending Fulton County board meetings after the election, spreading false claims about the 2020 vote count. 

In January 2024, the state Senate appointed Rick Jeffares, a former GOP state senator, to replace a well-regarded conservative election attorney Matthew Mashburn, who had opposed investigating Raffensperger. Jeffares was handpicked by his neighbor, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a fake elector for Trump in 2020, who said Jones urged him to “be strong” on the board. (Jones did not respond to a request for comment.) Jeffares had spread memes on social media questioning the outcome of the 2020 election, including false claims that dead people had voted by mail, and had few obvious qualifications for the job. The owner of three wastewater treatment companies, Jeffares went on to solicit a director position at the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration through a campaign intermediary while serving in his role on the State Election Board, which Democrats said raised ethical questions about his independence on the board. 

At that point, election deniers were one vote short of a majority on the board. So they began to pressure Edward Lindsey, a lawyer and former Republican member of the state House, who had also voted against bogus investigations into the 2020 outcome, to resign. Lindsey’s term was up in May 2024, but he told Republican House Speaker Jon Burns that he was willing to serve through the election to maintain continuity on the board. 

“I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.”

At a board meeting in February 2024, Johnston introduced a resolution asking the legislature to repeal no-excuse absentee voting, which MAGA Republicans blamed for Trump’s defeat in 2020, and to limit mail voting to those who were disabled, over 75, or out of town. Lindsey voted against it, blocking the resolution from passing. “We should not as a board, only a few months before the 2024 election…start to limit the ability of people to vote, particularly people who find it most difficult to stand in line because of certain life situations,” he said.

That infuriated Trump, who privately told Georgia Republicans that Lindsey had “got to go,” according to Rolling Stone. Local GOP chapters called on Lindsey to step down. In May 2024, Lindsey voted against referring officials in Fulton County to the attorney general for prosecution over their handling of the 2020 election. Election deniers who packed the state board meeting responded with jeers and carried signs that said, “Time to Go Ed!”

A few weeks after that vote, and just days before Georgia Republicans met for their state convention, the House speaker announced he was replacing Lindsey with Janelle King, a conservative media personality with no election experience who was married to a Republican candidate who lost the 2022 GOP primary for US Senate to Herschel Walker. King tweeted on election night in 2020 that she had “questions!!” about the “vote counting process” and later said on her podcast that she opposed no-excuse absentee voting. 

The MAGA takeover over the board was complete. “I believe when we look back on November 5, 2024, we’re going to say getting to that 3–2 election integrity–minded majority on the state election board made sure that we had the level playing field to win this election,” Georgia Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon said at the party’s convention after King was appointed to the board. 

The takeover of the state board went mostly without notice until August, when Trump praised Johnston, Jeffares, and King during his Atlanta rally, saying they were “on fire” while going on a 10-minute tirade against Kemp for refusing to overturn the 2020 election. Johnston sat in the second row and stood and waved to the crowd when Trump name-checked her. (Johnston, Jeffares, and King declined to comment for this article.)

With mainstream Republicans out of the way, the board’s pro-Trump majority quickly got to work. State election board meetings became election denial symposiums, where conspiracy theorists spoke for hours about their demands for investigations and rule changes. Anyone can introduce a rule to the board, but in recent months, almost all of the new rules proposed have come from the network of election skeptics that includes some of the people who held a prayer vigil at the state Capitol in October. Between September 2022 and May 2024, no new rules were introduced. Since then, election denial activists and officials have introduced 31 rules for the board to consider. Of those, 15 have passed or are under consideration by the board. 

Days after Trump’s August visit to the state, the board passed its first controversial rule change. It came from Adams, the Fulton County election board member who served as a poll watcher with Johnston in 2020 and had refused to certify the state’s May primary election. Adams works with the Tea Party Patriots, which helped organize the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection. She also serves as regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election and was on the call in which Trump demanded Raffensperger reverse Biden’s victory. Finally, Adams is a member of a state network of activists and officials called the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. The rule Adams introduced, which was eventually blocked by a state court, could have allowed local officials to refuse to certify election results if a “reasonable inquiry” determined that fraud had occurred. The rule did not spell out what a “reasonable inquiry” entailed, and voting rights advocates warned that it could be used as a pretext by GOP officials not to certify the results if a Democrat won Georgia. 

At another contentious board meeting a few weeks later, Grubbs, the GOP chair of Cobb County, introduced a rule that allowed county election board members to request a virtually unlimited amount of records and documents relating to voting machines and vote tabulation before certifying results—what became known as the “examination” certification rule. The measure, which passed 3–2, was a welcome addition to officials like Adams in Fulton County and David Hancock in Gwinnett County, both of whom had demanded scores of records before refusing to certify results in recent years. 

In abstaining from a vote to certify the results of both a May primary and a runoff election in June 2024, Adams said she had not received election records and documents she wanted to inspect for evidence of fraud. Cathy Woolard, at the time the Democratic chair of the Fulton County board, said Adams had received extensive records and documents related to the collection and tabulation of votes.

“Julie asked for these things with great authority, but she has no idea what she’s looking at,” Woolard told Mother Jones. “When she gets the records, she goes outside in the hallway and calls somebody. I can’t quite figure it out; the only thing I can come up with is, they just want to be right. They want to be right for Trump so they can say, ‘See, I told you guys, you cheated.’ Nothing of the sort happened.” (Adams did not respond to a request for comment.) This has led Democratic officials and voting rights groups to allege that Adams and her fellow election deniers at the local level are coordinating with national Republicans to enact skewed rules that could rig the state for Trump. Adams continues to push for more power to refuse to certify results as part of a lawsuit she filed with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. 

“Here’s what I think they really want,” Woolard says. “I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.” 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario. I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.”

Finally, in late September, just weeks before early voting began, the state election board approved another rule that would have required poll workers to “reconcile” the number of ballots cast on Election Day with the number of voters who checked in at every precinct in the state. This time-consuming task—referred to as a hand count—would have slowed the tallying of returns throughout the state, Raffensperger said. He accused the board of engaging in “activist rulemaking” and, along with Attorney General Chris Carr, also a Republican, said the board was both acting outside of its authority and passing rules that were in direct conflict with Georgia election law. 

The board’s MAGA majority had overstepped the law. Amid a national outcry, its rule changes were blocked by Fulton County judges as early voting began. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the Georgia State Supreme Court declined to reinstate the rules before November. 

Trump supporters throughout Georgia denounced the state Supreme Court’s decision. McKoon, the state GOP chair, called the rules “common sense” on X, claiming they would enhance election security. He blamed “Democrats and their allies” for the court’s ruling, even though the court is composed solely of conservative justices. 

But court rulings can do only so much to restrain a movement that has already shown how far it will go to undermine democratic norms. 

Hancock said in an email that Gwinnett County had passed its own ordinance requiring the release of a lengthy list of documents that he and other election board members could inspect before certifying results in November. 

“Even if the policy is somehow revoked, I will still be looking at these documents,” Hancock vowed in the wake of a judge’s decision that the “examination” certification rule conflicted with Georgia election law. (He did not respond to a request to explain his comments.)

Despite a separate court ruling in October reaffirming that election certification is mandatory for county officials, Tindall Ghazal worries that some counties under the sway of pro-Trump activists could still attempt to refuse to certify results “in a bad-faith way.”

A nightmare scenario in which numerous county election board members refuse to certify results could require Carr, the attorney general, to step in, filing court orders known as writs of mandamus to force officials to certify. Carr has tried to have it both ways when it comes to pro-Trump election deniers, his critics say. He sent a letter to the State Election Board saying many of its rules were illegal, including the hand-counting rule. But an attorney in Carr’s office also defended the state election board in a separate lawsuit over the certification rules that were challenged by Democrats. Moreover, Carr shielded Kemp from responsibility over the board when Democrats alleged ethics violations on the part of Johnston, Jeffares, and King in a lawsuit. In a motion to dismiss the suit, Carr wrote that Kemp didn’t have the authority to consider removing the members. 

“He’s less solid” than Raffensperger, state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, said of Carr. “He’s not an election denier, however, he’s planning to run for governor and has to contend with that base who believes the election was stolen.”

Widespread certification refusals could cause Kemp to miss a crucial federal deadline on December 11. That’s the day Kemp will have to certify slates of presidential electors for whoever wins Georgia’s popular vote. Unlike in 2020, when Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to defeat Biden, it could be Kemp, who has backed Trump’s presidential bid despite the abuse he has received from the former president, getting a call from Trump urging him not to certify Harris electors. 

Missing the December 11 deadline is one of the scenarios that might allow congressional Republicans to reject certification of a Harris win—and install Trump regardless of how Americans voted, according to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), an election law expert and former member of the congressional January 6 committee. 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario,” Raskin said in an interview. “I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.” If Georgia misses the deadline to certify its electoral votes, depriving either candidate of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where a majority of House delegations, not a majority of members, choose the winner. Because Republicans control a majority of those delegations, that could allow them to install Trump as president in a disputed election. 

Courts have dulled the Georgia election board’s fangs for the moment. But in the longer term, the threats to fair elections continue. The trio of Johnston, Jeffares, and King appear to be laying the groundwork to potentially take over election administration in Fulton County, the epicenter of past and ongoing election lies. The board could also pressure Georgia’s General Assembly to enact more voter suppression laws or give them the power to certify election results instead of the secretary of state. Recently, Johnston was voted vice chair of the board.

“Despite a judge blocking their unconstitutional rules changes, the MAGA board members continue plotting ways to plunge our election into chaos,” said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a progressive voting rights organization. 

Johnston has already sown distrust about the results in Fulton County, questioning the legitimacy of a monitoring team that is overseeing election administration there as part of the county’s punishment for erroneously double-counting ballots in 2020. (About 3,600 ballots were double-counted in Fulton County in 2020 but were found not to have changed the results of the election.) Johnston had proposed her own monitoring team that would oversee elections in Fulton, what Flugrath called an attempt to “force partisan monitors onto the county, with the ultimate goal of undermining confidence in the election, to provide Trump fodder to claim fraud if and when he loses.”

Instead, the county chose a monitoring team that includes Ryan Germany, a former staffer in Raffensperger’s office, who is a frequent target of election deniers because he defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election and debunked conspiracies about ballot counting in Fulton. “Will the Ryan Germany Monitoring Team account for all absentee ballots?” Johnston posted on X.

Perhaps most importantly, the board could amplify disinformation spread by Trump and his MAGA allies, like US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has falsely claimed that voting machines “switched” votes during the state’s early voting period. In reality, the incident Greene referenced happened as a result of a Republican voter who made an error on her own ballot, but Greene’s post on X went viral nonetheless, garnering nearly 4 million views.

Election deniers at the county level—influenced by the likes of Greene and members of the state board—could use false claims of fraud to refuse certification in defiance of the law, furthering the distrust of the election process that Trump’s movement has weaponized so successfully. 

“The only reason not to to certify is to provide fodder for an election challenge and for the disinformation grist mill,” Tindall Ghazal says. “Disinformation is what led to January 6.” 

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified a member of the prayer circle gathered at the Georgia capitol.

On October 8, about two dozen conservative activists gathered in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol, where a meeting of the state election board was taking place. A US Army veteran named Richard Schroeder, from Hall County, in the northeastern part of the state, led the group in prayer. Schroeder, who testified that day, was a regular presence at the board meetings, where he has spread debunked claims about election security and once identified himself as a poll worker in charge of tabulating votes. 

Schroeder first asked God for forgiveness for allowing the “evil” of migrants and transgender people to permeate the country. Then he turned to voting machines. 

“Nobody’s got more votes than President [Donald] Trump ever in the world,” Schroeder said. He and other members of the prayer circle wore shirts that read “IYKYK dvscorp08!,” referring to an alleged password to Georgia’s voting machines that was obtained by right-wing election deniers and spread online. 

“Our votes have been stolen,” he continued in prayer. “The Dominion voting machines have taken our God-given dominion and have been selecting winners—not electing winners.”

“Amen,” responded David Hancock, a member of the Gwinnett County board of elections. 

The activists were part of a small but influential network of election deniers who had successfully convinced the board’s pro-Trump majority to launch probes into unfounded claims of election fraud. They also persuaded the board, which issues guidance to county election officials and investigates problems with the voting process, to pass a series of controversial rules in the runup to the November election that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox recently deemed “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” In August, Trump had touted the trio of sympathetic board members by name at a campaign rally, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” 

The rules would have led to the spread of misinformation and could have been used as a justification not to certify results, Democrats and voting rights advocates warned. The changes also would have slowed the counting of votes, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “Everything we’ve been fighting for since 2020 has been to give the voter quicker response, quicker results,” Raffensperger said on October 14, noting that one of the board’s rules, requiring a hand count of ballots on Election Day, could have delayed the reporting of results into the wee hours of the morning. “Really, that just becomes a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.” 

Democrats and election watchdogs breathed a sigh of relief when Georgia courts blocked the Trump-inspired rules, including two that would have given local election officials more power to attempt to block certification. But they should not rest easy, as significant peril still remains. At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state. And over the past four years, Trump-aligned election deniers have asserted their power throughout local GOP organizations, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog.

Together, these MAGA Republicans could throw the election in Georgia—and thus the nation—into disarray. Officials at the county level, for instance, could still attempt to refuse to certify the results if Kamala Harris carries Georgia, while the state election board could amplify false allegations and launch bogus investigations supporting Trump’s inevitable claims of a stolen election. And those are just a couple of the nightmarish scenarios that could unfold next week.

Whatever transpires in the November 5 election, the radicalization of the board into a nakedly partisan arm of Trump’s election denial machine shows that our democratic system rests on a knife’s edge. What took place in Georgia can—and is—happening throughout the country. The takeover of much of Georgia’s election apparatus offers a distressing vision of the future if Trump returns to the White House, one in which the federal government is run by zealots whose only qualification is their fealty to Trump. 

“That’s exactly what Project 2025 is all about,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the state election board’s lone Democrat. “It is about replacing the bureaucrats within the federal government with political employees whose sole requirement for the job is loyalty to the president.” Tindall Ghazal points out that some of those people “don’t understand and don’t care about what the law requires. They’re completely unconstrained in their actions.”

The path to this troubling reality began on election night 2020, when Republican activists began spreading claims of widespread voter fraud. Believing that Trump ballots had been thrown out, a crowd gathered at an election office in Griffin, the seat of Spalding County, an hour south of Atlanta. Led by a county commissioner who filmed election workers through the glass, some in the crowd eventually climbed into a dumpster to find the supposedly discarded ballots. In Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, Salleigh Grubbs, the Cobb County GOP chair, chased a truck she believed contained shredded ballots. In an Atlanta ballot-counting facility, plastic bins under a folding table were labeled the infamous “suitcases full of ballots” that supposedly flipped the election in favor of Joe Biden. In the small town of Douglas in south Georgia, a county election board official claimed that voting machines had flipped votes. The state became ground zero for election fraud claims. 

None of it proved true. The dumpster in Griffin contained no ballots—just empty ballot envelopes that had been thrown away by election workers. The truck in Marietta did not have shredded ballots, Grubbs eventually discovered. The boxes under the table in Atlanta didn’t hold ballots for Biden that were double-counted to seal his victory over Trump. Instead, they just held regular ballots that were opened when workers were told by the secretary of state’s office to stay late and count more votes. The Dominion voting machines Grubbs and others prayed over never actually flipped votes—in Douglas or anywhere else—but they were broken into by local officials and attorneys working on behalf of Trump.

At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state.

From these debunked origins, the claims of a stolen election grew, spreading to include other outlandish allegations of a plot that supposedly involved Italians and Venezuelans hacking voting machines and the forgery of untold thousands of ballots that were placed in drop boxes by “mules.” 

Top Georgia election officials repeatedly discredited claims of a stolen election, as did multiple legal proceedings and court judgments. Three separate counts of ballots reaffirmed Biden’s 2020 victory. Voting-machine companies won major settlements against Fox News and Newsmax for airing false claims about their machines. A Fulton County judge threw out a lawsuit filed by DeKalb County Republicans challenging the security of the state’s voting machines. Two Georgia poll workers in Fulton County won a $148 million defamation judgment against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading the myth of “suitcases” of ballots. Jenna Ellis, another top lawyer for Trump, took a plea agreement in a wide-ranging election interference case and admitted she made false statements about illegal ballots being counted. 

Nonetheless, Trump-aligned Republicans throughout the state and nation began amplifying these claims and calling for investigations. They also got to work making sure “the steal” couldn’t happen again, beginning at the local level, where influential figures like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn were encouraging Trump supporters to take over local election boards. In 12 counties, local representatives in the state legislature passed laws that remade county election boards in favor of Republicans. One of the bills, HB 769, transformed the Spalding County board of elections from a mundane government body on which Black Democrats held a majority to an activist board controlled by white Republicans who amplified Trump’s election lies. 

When Spalding County officials first heard about HB 769 in the spring of 2021, they were confused. Typically, when the county’s representatives in the state legislature introduce a bill that affects the county, local officials are part of the process. But that wasn’t the case with this measure, which changed how the members of the board of elections were chosen. The board had always been essentially split between the parties—Democrats got two appointments and Republicans got two, with the foursome then choosing a fifth member to serve as chair. But HB 769 changed that—the board’s fifth member would now be chosen by local judges in a closed-door process and secret vote. In May 2021, the judges chose Republican Jim Newland, giving election deniers control over the board. 

Two of the new Republicans—Ben Johnson and Roy McClain—believed Trump had rightfully won the election. Johnson is a Trump-supporting QAnon fan and Elon Musk aficionado who frequently posts on Facebook about various right-wing culture war grievances and conspiracies, including that voting machines were subject to hacking and fraud. McClain has pushed for automatic hand recounts of all elections and in 2023 made a public showing of his refusal to certify results while privately signing off on certification, fulfilling his legal duty while maintaining his MAGA bonafides. Both Johnson and McClain were involved in a brief but failed effort in August 2021 to hire an Atlanta law firm to help them access voting machines in their hunt for evidence of election fraud. The plan was nixed when Raffensperger’s office warned them that it would be illegal to allow a third party to access election equipment.

Even in counties where election boards weren’t overhauled to favor Republicans, election deniers still had a presence. In Fulton County, home to Atlanta, two election deniers sit on the election board. Boards in the Atlanta metro counties of Cobb, DeKalb, Floyd, and Gwinnett also include skeptics who, while not holding a majority, frequently amplify misinformation about elections. By early 2024, at least 21 election deniers were in place on election boards in nine counties.

As election deniers won seats on election boards, they also gained power in local GOP chapters. In Spalding County, Republicans who refused to go along with Trump’s claims of a stolen election were pushed out of the local party. There and elsewhere, Republicans refused to give campaign funds raised from donors to Gov. Brian Kemp for his unwillingness to toe the line on Trump’s lies about election fraud, said Mary Braun, a Republican in Spalding County who told Mother Jones that Johnson and some local party members had a “vendetta” against her for opposing the false claims spread by her colleagues. (Johnson and other members of the Spalding County election board, along with its election supervisor and county attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers set their sights on perhaps the biggest prize of all, the state election board. In March 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tucked a provision into a sweeping new voter suppression bill that removed Raffensperger as chair and a voting member of the board, a previously obscure body of appointed officials whose meetings were scantly attended and typically mundane. Raffensperger had become a leading target of election deniers for defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election and refusing Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory. In addition to removing Raffensperger, Georgia lawmakers gave the state election board the authority to investigate the secretary of state for his handling of the 2020 investigation—and virtually anything else the board dreamed up. 

“This was punishment for him not obeying the president and revealing that conversation,” Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic member of the board, said of Trump’s infamous phone call to Raffensperger, pressuring him to overturn the 2020 election.

After ousting Raffensperger, influential state Republicans continued to remake the board in Trump’s image by pushing out establishment Republicans and replacing them with election deniers. In 2022, the Georgia GOP used its appointment to place Dr. Janice Johnston on the board. (Each party gets an appointment to the five-member board, both chambers of the legislature pick a member, and the legislature chooses the chair unless it is out of session, in which case the governor appoints the chair.) A former obstetrician, Johnston served as a poll watcher in Fulton County in 2020 alongside Julie Adams, an election denier who currently sits on Fulton’s election board. Johnston began frequently attending Fulton County board meetings after the election, spreading false claims about the 2020 vote count. 

In January 2024, the state Senate appointed Rick Jeffares, a former GOP state senator, to replace a well-regarded conservative election attorney Matthew Mashburn, who had opposed investigating Raffensperger. Jeffares was handpicked by his neighbor, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a fake elector for Trump in 2020, who said Jones urged him to “be strong” on the board. (Jones did not respond to a request for comment.) Jeffares had spread memes on social media questioning the outcome of the 2020 election, including false claims that dead people had voted by mail, and had few obvious qualifications for the job. The owner of three wastewater treatment companies, Jeffares went on to solicit a director position at the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration through a campaign intermediary while serving in his role on the State Election Board, which Democrats said raised ethical questions about his independence on the board. 

At that point, election deniers were one vote short of a majority on the board. So they began to pressure Edward Lindsey, a lawyer and former Republican member of the state House, who had also voted against bogus investigations into the 2020 outcome, to resign. Lindsey’s term was up in May 2024, but he told Republican House Speaker Jon Burns that he was willing to serve through the election to maintain continuity on the board. 

“I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.”

At a board meeting in February 2024, Johnston introduced a resolution asking the legislature to repeal no-excuse absentee voting, which MAGA Republicans blamed for Trump’s defeat in 2020, and to limit mail voting to those who were disabled, over 75, or out of town. Lindsey voted against it, blocking the resolution from passing. “We should not as a board, only a few months before the 2024 election…start to limit the ability of people to vote, particularly people who find it most difficult to stand in line because of certain life situations,” he said.

That infuriated Trump, who privately told Georgia Republicans that Lindsey had “got to go,” according to Rolling Stone. Local GOP chapters called on Lindsey to step down. In May 2024, Lindsey voted against referring officials in Fulton County to the attorney general for prosecution over their handling of the 2020 election. Election deniers who packed the state board meeting responded with jeers and carried signs that said, “Time to Go Ed!”

A few weeks after that vote, and just days before Georgia Republicans met for their state convention, the House speaker announced he was replacing Lindsey with Janelle King, a conservative media personality with no election experience who was married to a Republican candidate who lost the 2022 GOP primary for US Senate to Herschel Walker. King tweeted on election night in 2020 that she had “questions!!” about the “vote counting process” and later said on her podcast that she opposed no-excuse absentee voting. 

The MAGA takeover over the board was complete. “I believe when we look back on November 5, 2024, we’re going to say getting to that 3–2 election integrity–minded majority on the state election board made sure that we had the level playing field to win this election,” Georgia Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon said at the party’s convention after King was appointed to the board. 

The takeover of the state board went mostly without notice until August, when Trump praised Johnston, Jeffares, and King during his Atlanta rally, saying they were “on fire” while going on a 10-minute tirade against Kemp for refusing to overturn the 2020 election. Johnston sat in the second row and stood and waved to the crowd when Trump name-checked her. (Johnston, Jeffares, and King declined to comment for this article.)

With mainstream Republicans out of the way, the board’s pro-Trump majority quickly got to work. State election board meetings became election denial symposiums, where conspiracy theorists spoke for hours about their demands for investigations and rule changes. Anyone can introduce a rule to the board, but in recent months, almost all of the new rules proposed have come from the network of election skeptics that includes some of the people who held a prayer vigil at the state Capitol in October. Between September 2022 and May 2024, no new rules were introduced. Since then, election denial activists and officials have introduced 31 rules for the board to consider. Of those, 15 have passed or are under consideration by the board. 

Days after Trump’s August visit to the state, the board passed its first controversial rule change. It came from Adams, the Fulton County election board member who served as a poll watcher with Johnston in 2020 and had refused to certify the state’s May primary election. Adams works with the Tea Party Patriots, which helped organize the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection. She also serves as regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election and was on the call in which Trump demanded Raffensperger reverse Biden’s victory. Finally, Adams is a member of a state network of activists and officials called the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. The rule Adams introduced, which was eventually blocked by a state court, could have allowed local officials to refuse to certify election results if a “reasonable inquiry” determined that fraud had occurred. The rule did not spell out what a “reasonable inquiry” entailed, and voting rights advocates warned that it could be used as a pretext by GOP officials not to certify the results if a Democrat won Georgia. 

At another contentious board meeting a few weeks later, Grubbs, the GOP chair of Cobb County, introduced a rule that allowed county election board members to request a virtually unlimited amount of records and documents relating to voting machines and vote tabulation before certifying results—what became known as the “examination” certification rule. The measure, which passed 3–2, was a welcome addition to officials like Adams in Fulton County and David Hancock in Gwinnett County, both of whom had demanded scores of records before refusing to certify results in recent years. 

In abstaining from a vote to certify the results of both a May primary and a runoff election in June 2024, Adams said she had not received election records and documents she wanted to inspect for evidence of fraud. Cathy Woolard, at the time the Democratic chair of the Fulton County board, said Adams had received extensive records and documents related to the collection and tabulation of votes.

“Julie asked for these things with great authority, but she has no idea what she’s looking at,” Woolard told Mother Jones. “When she gets the records, she goes outside in the hallway and calls somebody. I can’t quite figure it out; the only thing I can come up with is, they just want to be right. They want to be right for Trump so they can say, ‘See, I told you guys, you cheated.’ Nothing of the sort happened.” (Adams did not respond to a request for comment.) This has led Democratic officials and voting rights groups to allege that Adams and her fellow election deniers at the local level are coordinating with national Republicans to enact skewed rules that could rig the state for Trump. Adams continues to push for more power to refuse to certify results as part of a lawsuit she filed with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. 

“Here’s what I think they really want,” Woolard says. “I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.” 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario. I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.”

Finally, in late September, just weeks before early voting began, the state election board approved another rule that would have required poll workers to “reconcile” the number of ballots cast on Election Day with the number of voters who checked in at every precinct in the state. This time-consuming task—referred to as a hand count—would have slowed the tallying of returns throughout the state, Raffensperger said. He accused the board of engaging in “activist rulemaking” and, along with Attorney General Chris Carr, also a Republican, said the board was both acting outside of its authority and passing rules that were in direct conflict with Georgia election law. 

The board’s MAGA majority had overstepped the law. Amid a national outcry, its rule changes were blocked by Fulton County judges as early voting began. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the Georgia State Supreme Court declined to reinstate the rules before November. 

Trump supporters throughout Georgia denounced the state Supreme Court’s decision. McKoon, the state GOP chair, called the rules “common sense” on X, claiming they would enhance election security. He blamed “Democrats and their allies” for the court’s ruling, even though the court is composed solely of conservative justices. 

But court rulings can do only so much to restrain a movement that has already shown how far it will go to undermine democratic norms. 

Hancock said in an email that Gwinnett County had passed its own ordinance requiring the release of a lengthy list of documents that he and other election board members could inspect before certifying results in November. 

“Even if the policy is somehow revoked, I will still be looking at these documents,” Hancock vowed in the wake of a judge’s decision that the “examination” certification rule conflicted with Georgia election law. (He did not respond to a request to explain his comments.)

Despite a separate court ruling in October reaffirming that election certification is mandatory for county officials, Tindall Ghazal worries that some counties under the sway of pro-Trump activists could still attempt to refuse to certify results “in a bad-faith way.”

A nightmare scenario in which numerous county election board members refuse to certify results could require Carr, the attorney general, to step in, filing court orders known as writs of mandamus to force officials to certify. Carr has tried to have it both ways when it comes to pro-Trump election deniers, his critics say. He sent a letter to the State Election Board saying many of its rules were illegal, including the hand-counting rule. But an attorney in Carr’s office also defended the state election board in a separate lawsuit over the certification rules that were challenged by Democrats. Moreover, Carr shielded Kemp from responsibility over the board when Democrats alleged ethics violations on the part of Johnston, Jeffares, and King in a lawsuit. In a motion to dismiss the suit, Carr wrote that Kemp didn’t have the authority to consider removing the members. 

“He’s less solid” than Raffensperger, state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, said of Carr. “He’s not an election denier, however, he’s planning to run for governor and has to contend with that base who believes the election was stolen.”

Widespread certification refusals could cause Kemp to miss a crucial federal deadline on December 11. That’s the day Kemp will have to certify slates of presidential electors for whoever wins Georgia’s popular vote. Unlike in 2020, when Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to defeat Biden, it could be Kemp, who has backed Trump’s presidential bid despite the abuse he has received from the former president, getting a call from Trump urging him not to certify Harris electors. 

Missing the December 11 deadline is one of the scenarios that might allow congressional Republicans to reject certification of a Harris win—and install Trump regardless of how Americans voted, according to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), an election law expert and former member of the congressional January 6 committee. 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario,” Raskin said in an interview. “I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.” If Georgia misses the deadline to certify its electoral votes, depriving either candidate of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where a majority of House delegations, not a majority of members, choose the winner. Because Republicans control a majority of those delegations, that could allow them to install Trump as president in a disputed election. 

Courts have dulled the Georgia election board’s fangs for the moment. But in the longer term, the threats to fair elections continue. The trio of Johnston, Jeffares, and King appear to be laying the groundwork to potentially take over election administration in Fulton County, the epicenter of past and ongoing election lies. The board could also pressure Georgia’s General Assembly to enact more voter suppression laws or give them the power to certify election results instead of the secretary of state. Recently, Johnston was voted vice chair of the board.

“Despite a judge blocking their unconstitutional rules changes, the MAGA board members continue plotting ways to plunge our election into chaos,” said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a progressive voting rights organization. 

Johnston has already sown distrust about the results in Fulton County, questioning the legitimacy of a monitoring team that is overseeing election administration there as part of the county’s punishment for erroneously double-counting ballots in 2020. (About 3,600 ballots were double-counted in Fulton County in 2020 but were found not to have changed the results of the election.) Johnston had proposed her own monitoring team that would oversee elections in Fulton, what Flugrath called an attempt to “force partisan monitors onto the county, with the ultimate goal of undermining confidence in the election, to provide Trump fodder to claim fraud if and when he loses.”

Instead, the county chose a monitoring team that includes Ryan Germany, a former staffer in Raffensperger’s office, who is a frequent target of election deniers because he defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election and debunked conspiracies about ballot counting in Fulton. “Will the Ryan Germany Monitoring Team account for all absentee ballots?” Johnston posted on X.

Perhaps most importantly, the board could amplify disinformation spread by Trump and his MAGA allies, like US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has falsely claimed that voting machines “switched” votes during the state’s early voting period. In reality, the incident Greene referenced happened as a result of a Republican voter who made an error on her own ballot, but Greene’s post on X went viral nonetheless, garnering nearly 4 million views.

Election deniers at the county level—influenced by the likes of Greene and members of the state board—could use false claims of fraud to refuse certification in defiance of the law, furthering the distrust of the election process that Trump’s movement has weaponized so successfully. 

“The only reason not to to certify is to provide fodder for an election challenge and for the disinformation grist mill,” Tindall Ghazal says. “Disinformation is what led to January 6.” 

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified a member of the prayer circle gathered at the Georgia capitol.

On an unusually warm Thursday afternoon three weeks before Election Day, Joe Sheehan, a Democratic candidate for the Wisconsin Assembly, took me on a tour of his hometown of Sheboygan, an industrial city of 50,000 on Lake Michigan that calls itself the “Malibu of the Midwest” and is best known for its bratwurst. We stopped on Superior Avenue, a wide, tree-lined street that runs east-west across the city, from the lake toward the countryside.

“This is one district,” Sheehan said, pointing to the north side of the block. He walked 10 feet to the other side of the street. “This is another district. Ta-da, gerrymandering!”

Both sides looked identical, with maple and oak trees and two-story homes festooned with Halloween decorations and blue Harris-Walz yard signs. But in 2011, when Republicans drew new redistricting maps in secret to give themselves lopsided majorities in the legislature, they split the city of Sheboygan in half at Superior Avenue to attach both parts to the surrounding redder rural areas. Sheboygan had been represented by a Democrat in the Assembly in all but four years between 1959 and 2011, but ever since it has elected two Republicans, becoming a poster child for the gerrymandered maps that were regarded as among the worst in the country.

Last year, however, a progressive majority took over Wisconsin’s Supreme Court and struck down the skewed lines. The Republican-controlled legislature reluctantly passed new maps proposed by the state’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, which gave both parties a roughly equal chance of winning control and dramatically increased the number of competitive races. Democratic-leaning Sheboygan, which Joe Biden carried by 8 points in 2020, became whole again and is now one of the 15 seats Democrats need to win to regain control of the state Assembly (the lower house) for the first time in a decade and a half.

“Wisconsin was not a democracy by any meaningful definition of that word. This year, Wisconsin is a democracy. Whoever gets more votes, will probably get more seats.”

Sheehan is running for office for the first time at 66. He served for 20 years as the superintendent of Sheboygan-area schools, but came out of retirement to help Democrats regain control of the Assembly after new maps were put in place. “That’s a huge part of me running,” he told me. “Previously, when the city was split up, Democrats had a really hard time winning because their vote was split up. Now their vote isn’t.”

Sheehan has a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache and describes himself as a Tim Walz Democrat, “not formal, more of a coach-teacher type.” His first TV ad shows him in the classroom talking, much like Walz, about the importance of free breakfast and lunch for kids, which his opponent, GOP Rep. Amy Binsfeld, voted against. He’s the type of home-grown and authentic candidate that Democrats believe can help end 13 years of hard-edged GOP control of the state.

While the presidential race consumes virtually all of the country’s political oxygen, there’s a tremendous amount at stake at the state legislative level in 2024 as well. Democrats are vying to retake or maintain control of legislative chambers in more than half of the presidential battlegrounds, including Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

The new lines in Wisconsin represent a sea change in one of the country’s most important toss-up states. Democrats have won 14 of the past 17 statewide elections in Wisconsin, but Republicans control 65 percent of seats in the Assembly and 67 percent of seats in the state Senate, just short of a supermajority in both chambers. “For over a decade, we had maps in Wisconsin that made it more likely that Republicans would have two-thirds supermajority than Democrats would have a majority in an almost perfectly 50–50 state,” said Rep. Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in the Assembly.

This seemingly voter-proof advantage gained through gerrymandering gave legislative Republicans a green light to entrench their power through tactics like voter suppression, dark money, and stripping Democrats of power, while the size of their inflated majorities allowed them to block, with little accountability, popular policies on issues like abortion rights, health care, gun restrictions, and education. “For more than a decade, Wisconsinites knew the victor in the state legislative races in advance,” said Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “Wisconsin was not a democracy by any meaningful definition of that word. This year, Wisconsin is a democracy. Whoever gets more votes, will probably get more seats.”

In 2022, there was just one true toss-up Assembly race in the state, according to the Milwaukee-based journalist Dan Shafer, despite competitive elections for virtually every statewide office. Now, under the new lines, there are 10 districts that Biden won by 2 points or less. “We absolutely believe there’s a path to a Democratic majority here,” said Neubauer, while admitting that picking up 15 seats to regain control “is a lot to flip in one year.” (Only half of the state Senate is up this cycle, so 2026 is the earliest it could flip to Democrats.) But even if Democrats simply reduce the GOP’s advantage, that will bring the legislature more in line with the purple nature of the rest of the state. “What the gerrymander did was prevent the voters from holding Republican legislators accountable for the decisions that they were making in Madison,” said Neubauer. “I really do see these fair maps starting to restore the democratic process in Madison and hopefully increasing bipartisan work.”

Wikler believes that legislative candidates like Sheehan represent a “secret weapon” for Democrats up and down the ballot this year. Democrats recruited candidates in 97 of the state’s 99 Assembly districts and the increase in the number of competitive races could boost Democratic turnout, he argues, which could make the difference in a state that is regularly decided by 20,000 votes or less in presidential elections.

“There’s always these moments in the Fast & Furious movies when Vin Diesel hits the nitrous and pulls into the lead, and that nitrous super boost this year for Democrats could be the state legislative races,” he said.

The progressive group Run for Something, which recruits candidates for downballot races, calls it the “reverse coattails” effect. The group studied seven battleground states in 2020, including Wisconsin, and found that when Democratic state legislative candidates ran for office in districts where Republicans previously ran unopposed, the Democratic vote share for the top of the ticket increased by anywhere from 0.4 percent to 2.3 percent.

Wikler predicts there’s a small but significant number of potential Democratic voters in the state who are disillusioned by national politics but will vote in state races because of issues like Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban or cuts to public schools. “It’s not a huge number, but it doesn’t take a huge number of people to tip statewide elections in Wisconsin,” he said. “If you turn out a few hundred more voters in a handful of key state legislative districts that could add up to the statewide margin of victory in the presidential race in the state that tips the entire Electoral College.”

He’s betting that candidates like Sheehan can break through stereotypes of the party in a way that Harris might not be able to do, like the one splashed on a giant red-and-white sign I saw when I drove into Sheboygan: “Kamala wants to do to Wisconsin what she did to California.”

Few voters will perceive Sheehan as a California liberal, however. His yard signs are green, the color of his beloved Green Bay Packers, and the campaign material he gives to voters has the team’s schedule on the back. “That’s one thing they won’t throw away,” he said.

As Sheehan knocked on doors in Sheboygan, his crossover appeal became evident—but so did the difficulty of automatically translating his support to the rest of the Democratic ticket. He turned off Superior Avenue and passed a gray house adorned with colorful Halloween decorations, including a severed head that looked all too real. Darbie Magray, a welder who wore a purple-and-blue tie-dye sweatshirt, yelled out that she’d already voted by mail for Sheehan. She is the type of swing voter Democrats need to win if they hope to flip the legislature and carry the state—a registered Independent who is skeptical of Trump but still not sold on Harris. “I don’t like Donald Trump at all,” she said, as her son precariously climbed on the porch railing to attach a head on a skeleton. But she wasn’t a fan of Harris, either. “I don’t like some of the things she’s done either,” she said. “I don’t like that she let all these immigrants come over.”

Magray wouldn’t say which candidate she supported for president, but she openly expressed her admiration for Sheehan, citing his support for public schools and vow to protect abortion rights. “I just think he’s the best candidate,” she said.

Sheehan said he’s knocked on 3,000 doors in Sheboygan and talked to 40 voters who said they’ll vote for him and Trump. “What they told me is, ‘Joe, it sounds like you’re listening to me and want to get along,’” he said.

“If you turn out a few hundred more voters in a handful of key state legislative districts that could add up to the statewide margin of victory in the presidential race in the state that tips the entire Electoral College.”

After knocking on doors, he took me to his favorite bratwurst restaurant, Northwestern House, a former brothel next to the railroad tracks. The owner gave him a dap as he entered and said he’d voted for him. So did a number of other elderly white patrons who didn’t look like your stereotypical wine-drinking, latte-sipping, Zoom-watching Harris voter. Sheehan ordered a double brat sandwich with butter and brown mustard, a Sheboygan staple, with a side of tater tots—the type of meal that would put most candidates to sleep. “You got a familiar face,” a man visiting from Janesville told him. “You’re either running for something or a car dealer.” When Sheehan said he was running for Assembly, the man told him, “You got a friendly face. Good luck.”

With so much polarization in politics these days, maybe a friendly face eating brats is exactly what could swing the balance of power in a battleground state that will be decided by the smallest of margins.

In 2010, as Democrats were preoccupied with passing Barack Obama’s legislative agenda in Washington, Republicans blindsided them by picking up nearly 700 state legislative seats. This “shellacking,” as Obama called it, gave the GOP the power to draw four times as many state legislative and US House districts as Democrats in the subsequent redistricting cycle, including in critical swing states like Wisconsin.

Democrats have been playing catch up at the state level ever since. They unexpectedly picked up chambers in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania in 2022, but remain at a significant disadvantage, with Republicans controlling 56 legislative chambers compared to 41 for Democrats.

The States Project, an outside group that supports Democratic state legislative candidates, is focusing on nine states in 2024: flipping GOP-held chambers in Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin; defending new Democratic majorities in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania; preventing GOP supermajorities in Kansas and North Carolina to preserve the ability of Democratic governors to veto legislation; and winning a Democratic supermajority in Nevada that could override the vetoes of the state’s Republican governor.

Major national developments, including Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election at the state level and the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, have underscored the importance of state legislative races. “2024 is potent combination of state legislatures posing a risk to a free and fair presidential election and state legislatures having been handed a fundamental constitutional right,” said Daniel Squadron, co-founder of the States Project.

In addition to the weighty issues state legislatures decide—from voting laws to abortion rights to gun control to book bans—their balance of power is often decided by a handful of votes. New Hampshire Republicans won a majority in the state house by 11 votes in three races in 2022. Control of the Virginia House of Delegates was determined by a coin flip in 2017.

Despite the outsize importance of state legislative chambers—and the fact that Republicans have used their power over state politics to roll back so many hard-won rights—Democrats continue to pay less attention to these races than Republicans.  

On October 10, one day after the Harris campaign announced that it had raised a staggering $1 billion, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) warned that it was $25 million short of money needed for “essential voter contact tactics,” including funding for TV ads, mailers, digital outreach, and door-knocking programs, despite receiving $2.5 million from the Harris-Walz ticket.

“The latest data from the field shows our party’s collective effort to win key state legislative races could fall short this cycle without a significant increase in financial support to close essential funding gaps in the final weeks of this election,” wrote DLCC President Heather Williams. “Right now, our internal data suggests we may be on an eerily similar trajectory to the 2020 election outcomes—when Democrats narrowly won the White House and took full control of Congress, yet lost more than 100 Democratic legislative seats and two chamber majorities in the states.”

Those resources are especially vital because Democrats are less likely to vote for downballot races than Republicans, who tend to vote straight-ticket for all contests. That could end up costing Democrats control of pivotal swing chambers. “It’s no secret we are still working to tell the story of what I would say is an ‘and’ strategy,” said Williams. “Democrats need to care about what is happening in the White House and the Congress and the states.”

When I asked Squadron, a former New York state senator, if state legislative races were getting enough attention amid the presidential race, he responded, “The answer is an emphatic no! Enough attention relative to the ability to impact electoral outcomes? No. Enough relative to their impact on people’s lives? No. Enough attention relative to their role in preserving a liberal democracy in this country? No.”

Even though many Democratic candidates, including Harris, have focused their campaigns on issues like abortion and fair elections, a shocking number of Democratic donors and voters still don’t seem to understand that states are far more likely to decide these issues than the federal government, especially in the wake of recent Supreme Court decisions embracing states’ rights.

“Structurally, state legislatures don’t get the attention that top of the ticket races do,” said Squadron. “There continues to be a fundamental belief, especially among Democrats, that the federal government is a greater source of harm or improvement in people’s lives than state governments in a way that just isn’t accurate.”

But deep-pocketed GOP donors do understand the importance of investing at the state level.

Two GOP megadonors, Elizabeth Uihlein (whose family has bankrolled much of the election denial movement) and Diane Hendricks (the state’s richest woman), donated $4.5 million last month to Wisconsin Assembly Republicans, giving them a $2.5 million advantage over Assembly Democrats. Republicans changed Wisconsin law in 2015 to allow unlimited donations to legislative campaign committees—one of the many ways in which they undermined the democratic process under GOP Assembly Leader Robin Vos to entrench their power. “We have no one who can write us a $1 million check,” Neubauer said. “That puts us at a competitive disadvantage.”

But what Democrats lack in money, they hope to make up in old-fashioned shoe leather. Compared to past elections, where GOP control of the legislature was predetermined, Neubauer said she’s “seen incredible enthusiasm in Sheboygan and the other districts that were significantly gerrymandered under the old maps. People are thrilled to have the opportunity to compete in a competitive election at the legislative level.”

After I visited Sheboygan, I drove an hour north to Green Bay, where Harris was holding a campaign rally across the street from Lambeau Field. Wikler spoke first to the crowd of 4,000 supporters. One of the biggest applause lines of the night came when he referenced the state legislative races. “We finally have fair maps in the state of Wisconsin!” he said to cheers. “We can make Robin Vos the minority leader in the state Assembly and Greta Neubauer the majority leader.”

Few voters nationally could name these people, but everyone at the rally in Wisconsin understood the stakes.

A state judge on Wednesday blocked seven rule changes passed in recent months by the pro-Trump majority on the Georgia State Election Board, finding the board “lacked constitutional authority” to enact them.

It was the third ruling in two days that dealt a blow to election deniers in the state. On Tuesday, a different judge in Fulton County, Robert McBurney, held that county election boards must certify election rules and also blocked a new rule requiring a hand count of ballots on Election Night for the 2024 election, which election officials feared could delay vote counts and sow distrust in the election process.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox went further in Wednesday’s ruling, permanently blocking the hand count requirement, along with other new rules requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying election results and giving county officials access to “all election-related documentation.” Democrats, voting rights groups, and even some Republicans feared that these rules could be used by GOP county officials as a pretext not to certify the election results if Vice President Kamala Harris carried the state. Cox also blocked rules expanding the areas where partisan poll watchers can monitor the vote counting process and new signature and ID requirements for dropping off an absentee ballot at a drop box. Collectively, Cox found that the state board violated the Georgia Constitution and usurped the legislature’s power to set election procedures.

The rule changes were challenged by a former Republican state legislator and a Republican board member in Chatham County. They represented increasing Republican opposition to the actions of the election board’s three MAGA-aligned members, who Trump praised as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory” during a rally in August.  

The court decisions blocking the board’s new rules are an emphatic setback for the election denial movement in one of the country’s most important battleground states. However, the elevation of 2020 skeptics to the board—and their subsequent actions—have gone a long way toward legitimizing conspiracy theories in the state. “The SEB’s work is already done,” Democratic state senator Jason Esteves wrote on X Tuesday. “They’ve laid the groundwork for MAGA to doubt and challenge the election in Georgia.”

A Georgia judge on Monday blocked a controversial rule passed by the Trump-allied majority on the Georgia State Election Board requiring the hand count of ballots on Election Night. Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney declared that the new ruled had been enacted too close to the election. McBurney invoked the January 6 insurrection in his order enjoining the eleventh-hour change that had led to fears among election officials that results could be delayed and ultimately not certified by pro-Trump officials.

“The public interest is not disserved by pressing pause here,” McBurney wrote. “This election season is fraught; memories of January 6 have not faded away, regardless of one’s view of that date’s fame or infamy. Anything that adds uncertainty and disorder to the electoral process disserves the public.”

It was the second decision in a day by McBurney that upheld democratic norms and handed a major loss to election deniers in the state. Earlier on Monday, McBurney ruled that county election officials were required to certify election results.

The hand count rule was passed on September 20, less than two months before the election, and was set to go into effect just as early voting began. Election officials expressed widespread concern that the new mandate would delay election returns and potentially lead to new inaccuracies in the count, which could then be weaponized by Trump and his allies to sow distrust in the voting process and pressure election officials not to certify the result if Kamala Harris carried the state.

“A rule that introduces a new and substantive role on the eve of election for more than 7,500 poll workers who will not have received any formal, cohesive, or consistent training and that allows for our paper ballots—the only tangible proof of who voted for whom—to be handled multiple times by multiple people following an exhausting Election Day all before they are securely transported to the official tabulation center does not contribute to lessening the tension or boosting the confidence of the public for this election,” McBurney wrote. “Clearly the SEB believes that the Hand Count Rule is smart election policy—and it may be right. But the timing of its passage make implementation now quite wrong.”

McBurney blocked the rule only for the 2024 election. It’s not the only controversial rule change passed by the pro-Trump majority on the election board. They also created new rules requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying election results, and giving county officials access to “all election-related documentation.” Those changes will be challenged in court in a separate lawsuit on Wednesday.

McBurney’s orders, which could go a long way toward ensuring a free and fair election in Georgia, were issued as the state saw record turnout on the first day of early voting, with more than 300,000 voters casting ballots.

A Georgia judge ruled on Tuesday that county election boards are required to certify election results—a major victory for democratic norms and a big loss for election deniers seeking to subvert the 2024 election.

“No election superintendent (or member of a board of elections and registration) may refuse to certify or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance,” Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney wrote in a response to a lawsuit filed by Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County Board of Elections who voted against certifying the May presidential primary. Adams works for an election denial group founded by conservative activist Cleta Mitchell, a Trump lawyer who helped spearhead the effort to overturn the 2020 results and filed her lawsuit with the support of the Trump-allied America First Policy Institute.

McBurney’s opinion is especially significant because the MAGA majority on the Georgia State Election Board has passed a series of controversial eleventh-hour rule changes that Democrats, voting rights groups, and even some Republicans worry could be used as a pretext not to certify the election outcome if Vice President Kamala Harris carries Georgia. That includes mandating a hand-count of election day ballots, requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying election results, and giving county officials access to “all election-related documentation.” Any attempt to refuse to certify the results, even if unsuccessful, could be weaponized by Trump and his allies to sow distrust about the voting process. (Those rule changes are also being challenged in court.)

In his opinion, which came as in-person early voting kicked off in Georgia, McBurney addressed the consequences if Georgia election officials attempt to defy the law. “If election superintendents were, as Plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so—because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud—refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” he wrote. “Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen.”

At a pair of fundraisers on Tuesday, Gov. Tim Walz called for abolishing the Electoral College. “I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go,” he told Democratic donors at the home of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “We need a national popular vote.”

The Harris campaign said that it did not support Walz’s position and the New York Times wrote that his statement risked “rocking the boat for the Harris campaign as it tries to deliver a message focused on economic concerns, abortion rights and the threat of former President Donald J. Trump.” Trump’s campaign posted on X, “Why does Tampon Tim hate the Constitution so much?”

But the Democratic vice presidential nominee is right—the Electoral College should be abolished. Sixty-three percent of Americans agree with that position, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll.

Here are five reasons why the Electoral College “needs to go”:

It’s fundamentally undemocratic

Every sports fan knows that the team that scores the most points wins the game. But that’s not how America elects its president. The US is the only major democracy where you can lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College (or that even has an Electoral College). Not only is the Electoral College out of step with the rest of the world, no other major elected office in America, at the federal or state level, uses a similar system. It violates the most basic notions of “one person, one vote.”

It excludes the vast majority of Americans from counting

The seven swing states that will decide the 2024 presidential election represent 15 percent of the country’s population. That leaves 85 percent of Americans with little incentive to vote for the nation’s highest office, whether you’re a Republican in California or a Democrat in Tennessee. That impacts down-ballot races as well and depresses voter turnout across the country.

It’s unrepresentative of the country

As I reported in April:

The tiny handful of battleground states are whiter and more Republican than the rest of the country. Eighty-three percent of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in the 2020 election were white, according to the New York Times, compared with 69 percent of voters elsewhere. Wisconsin, the tipping-point state in 2020, is also 3.5 points redder than the country as a whole. University of Texas political scientists estimated in 2019 that in a 50–50 popular vote election, the Republican candidate had a 65 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

It incentivizes election rigging

Joe Biden won the popular vote by 7 million votes in 2020 but carried the three closest states in the Electoral College by just 44,000 votes. Trump never could have attempted to overturn the results—and there would have been no insurrection­—if the United States had a system in which every vote mattered equally in presidential elections.

The system remains dangerously vulnerable to partisan manipulation. Just recently, the Trump campaign tried to change the way Nebraska allocated its electoral votes, which could have led to a tie in the Electoral College, throwing the election to the House and leading to a full-blown constitutional crisis. The plan failed when one Democrat-turned-Republican state senator opposed the move. It’s never a good thing when the fate of American democracy comes down to one state rep from Omaha.

It’s racist and antiquated

Most of the founding fathers, who wanted to protect the power of an elite, white male, propertied minority, opposed the direct election of the president. Both the small states and the slave states argued that a popularly elected president would threaten their influence. As I write in my book Minority Rule, Virginia’s James Madison, the most influential drafter of the Constitution, said at the Constitutional convention that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” way to choose the president, according to a record of the debates. But, he added, “there was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.”

The South would be at a major disadvantage in a popular election, Madison was admitting, because its enslaved population could not vote. Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, who had initially proposed a popular election of the president, then recommended a complicated alternative where electors—either chosen by the states or the voters—would select the president. The number of electors a state received would be based on their representation in both houses of the legislature, which gave a huge boost to the small states because of equal representation in the Senate and to the slave states because of the three-fifths clause in the House. Even though electors now generally follow the will of their state’s voters, the Electoral College remains biased toward the same groups it favored at its inception.

There are two ways to get rid of the Electoral College. A Constitutional amendment requires the support of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of states, a very heavy lift in today’s polarized political climate. A constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College almost passed in 1970 with huge bipartisan support, but it was filibustered by racist Southern senators who believed that previously disenfranchised Black voters would have more power in a direct popular election.

Then there’s the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. It needs 270 electoral votes to go into effect and currently has the support of states with 209 electoral votes. Last year, Walz signed legislation adding Minnesota to the compact.

He was right then, and he’s right now. Democrats can’t credibly run on protecting American democracy if they continue to support the most undemocratic part of America’s political system.

At a pair of fundraisers on Tuesday, Gov. Tim Walz called for abolishing the Electoral College. “I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go,” he told Democratic donors at the home of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “We need a national popular vote.”

The Harris campaign said that it did not support Walz’s position and the New York Times wrote that his statement risked “rocking the boat for the Harris campaign as it tries to deliver a message focused on economic concerns, abortion rights and the threat of former President Donald J. Trump.” Trump’s campaign posted on X, “Why does Tampon Tim hate the Constitution so much?”

But the Democratic vice presidential nominee is right—the Electoral College should be abolished. Sixty-three percent of Americans agree with that position, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll.

Here are five reasons why the Electoral College “needs to go”:

It’s fundamentally undemocratic

Every sports fan knows that the team that scores the most points wins the game. But that’s not how America elects its president. The US is the only major democracy where you can lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College (or that even has an Electoral College). Not only is the Electoral College out of step with the rest of the world, no other major elected office in America, at the federal or state level, uses a similar system. It violates the most basic notions of “one person, one vote.”

It excludes the vast majority of Americans from counting

The seven swing states that will decide the 2024 presidential election represent 15 percent of the country’s population. That leaves 85 percent of Americans with little incentive to vote for the nation’s highest office, whether you’re a Republican in California or a Democrat in Tennessee. That impacts down-ballot races as well and depresses voter turnout across the country.

It’s unrepresentative of the country

As I reported in April:

The tiny handful of battleground states are whiter and more Republican than the rest of the country. Eighty-three percent of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in the 2020 election were white, according to the New York Times, compared with 69 percent of voters elsewhere. Wisconsin, the tipping-point state in 2020, is also 3.5 points redder than the country as a whole. University of Texas political scientists estimated in 2019 that in a 50–50 popular vote election, the Republican candidate had a 65 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

It incentivizes election rigging

Joe Biden won the popular vote by 7 million votes in 2020 but carried the three closest states in the Electoral College by just 44,000 votes. Trump never could have attempted to overturn the results—and there would have been no insurrection­—if the United States had a system in which every vote mattered equally in presidential elections.

The system remains dangerously vulnerable to partisan manipulation. Just recently, the Trump campaign tried to change the way Nebraska allocated its electoral votes, which could have led to a tie in the Electoral College, throwing the election to the House and leading to a full-blown constitutional crisis. The plan failed when one Democrat-turned-Republican state senator opposed the move. It’s never a good thing when the fate of American democracy comes down to one state rep from Omaha.

It’s racist and antiquated

Most of the founding fathers, who wanted to protect the power of an elite, white male, propertied minority, opposed the direct election of the president. Both the small states and the slave states argued that a popularly elected president would threaten their influence. As I write in my book Minority Rule, Virginia’s James Madison, the most influential drafter of the Constitution, said at the Constitutional convention that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” way to choose the president, according to a record of the debates. But, he added, “there was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.”

The South would be at a major disadvantage in a popular election, Madison was admitting, because its enslaved population could not vote. Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, who had initially proposed a popular election of the president, then recommended a complicated alternative where electors—either chosen by the states or the voters—would select the president. The number of electors a state received would be based on their representation in both houses of the legislature, which gave a huge boost to the small states because of equal representation in the Senate and to the slave states because of the three-fifths clause in the House. Even though electors now generally follow the will of their state’s voters, the Electoral College remains biased toward the same groups it favored at its inception.

There are two ways to get rid of the Electoral College. A Constitutional amendment requires the support of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of states, a very heavy lift in today’s polarized political climate. A constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College almost passed in 1970 with huge bipartisan support, but it was filibustered by racist Southern senators who believed that previously disenfranchised Black voters would have more power in a direct popular election.

Then there’s the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. It needs 270 electoral votes to go into effect and currently has the support of states with 209 electoral votes. Last year, Walz signed legislation adding Minnesota to the compact.

He was right then, and he’s right now. Democrats can’t credibly run on protecting American democracy if they continue to support the most undemocratic part of America’s political system.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp made his first appearance of the 2024 election with Donald Trump on Friday. The event marked another key moment of support by Kemp for Trump’s presidential bid, despite the vitriol Trump has directed at him and his family.

The two appeared together at a relief shelter in the east Georgia town of Evans, which was badly damaged last week by Hurricane Helene. “I want to thank President Trump for coming back to our state again for the second time to tour storm damage and keep a national focus on the state as we recover,” Kemp said.

In 2020, Trump relentlessly pressured Kemp to overturn the election. After Kemp refused, Trump spent years going after him: He tried to oust Kemp in 2022 by endorsing his primary Republican opponent, and this summer criticized him as “the most disloyal guy I’ve ever seen” and “very bad for the Republican Party” during a 10-minute tirade at a rally in Atlanta.

While Friday’s speech was not an official campaign event, Kemp’s appearance with Trump will be used by the ex-president to boost his campaign in the tight battleground state. “Your governor is doing a fantastic job, I will tell you that,” Trump said while surrounded by emergency relief supplies, such as bottled water, toilet paper, and diapers, contradicting his earlier Kemp criticisms. “We’re all with him and with everybody.”

Trump used the event to further weaponize the aftermath of Helene and repeat false claims about the Biden administration, saying there had been a “terrible response from the White House.” During an appearance in Valdosta, Georgia, earlier in the week, Trump claimed Biden had not talked to Kemp, even though the governor said he spoke with Biden and the president offered the state whatever it needed to rebuild.

Kemp’s willingness to prop up Trump stands in opposition to former Vice President Mike Pence, who has refused to endorse Trump‘s campaign after the ex-president incited an insurrection that tried to kill him in 2021. Even before Friday’s speech, Kemp had already helped Trump in other ways: He spoke alongside JD Vance last month at a fundraiser for a conservative Christian group backing Trump.

What’s more, Kemp signed a sweeping voter suppression law in 2021 that will make it harder for Democratic-constituencies to vote in November in numerous ways, including reducing access to mail ballots, slashing the number of ballot drop boxes, adding new ID requirements, and allowing unlimited challenges to voter eligibility. An analysis by the Atlanta Journal Constitution last week found that these restrictions put more of a burden on Black voters than white ones.   

One notable provision of the law removed Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who defended the 2020 results, as chair of the state election board. Three election denier allies of Trump have since taken over the board’s majority and passed a series of rules that could plunge the 2024 vote count into chaos and give GOP officials a pretext not to certify the results if Kamala Harris carries the state. Democrats have asked Kemp to investigate these MAGA board members for ethics violations, but Kemp has not done so.

Georgia Democratic State Sen. Nabilah Islam Parkes filed suit against Kemp in late September to force him to take action against the board. “State law is clear, Kemp has a duty to act,” Parkes wrote on X, “but he’s abdicated responsibility.”

Donald Trump’s claim that non-citizens are crossing the Southern border and registering to vote in US elections has become a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, even though every major study shows that non-citizen voting is exceedingly rare.

But a lawsuit filed last month shows that those false assertions of voter fraud are leading to real world instances of qualified voters being blocked from casting a ballot.

On August 13, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, an election denier who supported Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 results, announced that his office had identified 3,200 alleged noncitizens who had registered to vote in the state and had begun removing them from the voter rolls. He said the names were pulled from a list of individuals who had received noncitizen identification numbers from the Department of Homeland Security. Even then, he conceded that “it is possible that some of the individuals who were issued noncitizen identification numbers have, since receiving them, become naturalized citizens and are, therefore, eligible to vote.”

On September 27, the Department of Justice sued Alabama, arguing that Allen’s actions were in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which prohibits the removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of an election. That so-called quiet period exists “to mitigate the risk that errors in systematic list maintenance will disenfranchise, confuse, or deter eligible voters by ensuring that they have adequate time to address errors and understand their rights,” the Justice Department wrote in its lawsuit.

But the timing of the purge wasn’t the only issue. According to the DOJ, of the 3,251 individuals identified as noncitizens by Alabama, 717 had proven their citizenship and re-registered to vote after ending up on the secretary of state’s list. That meant the eleventh-hour voter purge had an error rate of more than 22 percent. The DOJ said that in Alabama “potentially several hundred or even thousands more registered, eligible voters from the list—U.S. citizens—remain in inactive status, stand to be harmed, and risk disenfranchisement just weeks before the upcoming federal election.”

Crackdowns on alleged non-citizen voters frequently ensnare naturalized US citizens or even those who have been citizens since birth, due to sloppy methodology by partisan election officials. William Pritchett of Montgomery County told NPR he’d received a letter from the state recently saying his registration was being canceled even though he was born in Alabama and has always been a US citizen.

In 2019, Texas attempted to remove nearly 100,000 alleged noncitizens from the voter rolls. Trump claimed the state’s list proved that “Voter fraud is rampant.” But election officials quickly uncovered that many of the supposed noncitizens targeted for removal were actually naturalized US citizens. A federal judge halted the purge, the Republican Secretary of State was forced to resign, and his director of elections admitted in legislative testimony that 25,000 US citizens were wrongly targeted.  

The Texas debacle should have been a cautionary tale. But instead Trump and his allies continue to double down on outright lies and accelerate their voter suppression efforts, even though they’ve yet to uncover any evidence of non-citizen voting or registration on even a minor scale.

What’s more, Republican-controlled legislatures have placed initiatives on the ballot in eight states this November mandating that only US citizens can vote in state elections. That is already the law, but these ballot initiatives would further Trump’s lies about voter fraud and could lay the groundwork for future restrictions on ballot access that could stymie eligible voters, such as requiring proof of citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote. And the conservative group Look Ahead America just posted billboards in Arizona and Nevada of a man in handcuffs with the tagline, “if you are not a citizen, voting is a crime.” That could intimidate legal voters in Latino communities, suggesting they may be hassled if they show up to vote and that this might even affect relatives who are not documented.

Republicans are pushing these tactics despite the fact that they continue to fail to dig up instances of widespread voter fraud. Trump’s own “commission on election integrity,” which the president formed after he claimed he lost the popular vote in 2016 due to 3 million illegal votes, disbanded without finding any proof of voter fraud. More recently, the North Carolina board of elections last month announced it had removed 750,000 ineligible registrations from the state’s voter rolls since the beginning of 2023, mostly because people had moved, died, or hadn’t voted in recent elections. Yet, as this major investigation, the board uncovered only nine potential non-citizens who were registered to vote—out of 7.7 million total voters in the state.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp made his first appearance of the 2024 election with Donald Trump on Friday. The event marked another key moment of support by Kemp for Trump’s presidential bid, despite the vitriol Trump has directed at him and his family.

The two appeared together at a relief shelter in the east Georgia town of Evans, which was badly damaged last week by Hurricane Helene. “I want to thank President Trump for coming back to our state again for the second time to tour storm damage and keep a national focus on the state as we recover,” Kemp said.

In 2020, Trump relentlessly pressured Kemp to overturn the election. After Kemp refused, Trump spent years going after him: He tried to oust Kemp in 2022 by endorsing his primary Republican opponent, and this summer criticized him as “the most disloyal guy I’ve ever seen” and “very bad for the Republican Party” during a 10-minute tirade at a rally in Atlanta.

While Friday’s speech was not an official campaign event, Kemp’s appearance with Trump will be used by the ex-president to boost his campaign in the tight battleground state. “Your governor is doing a fantastic job, I will tell you that,” Trump said while surrounded by emergency relief supplies, such as bottled water, toilet paper, and diapers, contradicting his earlier Kemp criticisms. “We’re all with him and with everybody.”

Trump used the event to further weaponize the aftermath of Helene and repeat false claims about the Biden administration, saying there had been a “terrible response from the White House.” During an appearance in Valdosta, Georgia, earlier in the week, Trump claimed Biden had not talked to Kemp, even though the governor said he spoke with Biden and the president offered the state whatever it needed to rebuild.

Kemp’s willingness to prop up Trump stands in opposition to former Vice President Mike Pence, who has refused to endorse Trump‘s campaign after the ex-president incited an insurrection that tried to kill him in 2021. Even before Friday’s speech, Kemp had already helped Trump in other ways: He spoke alongside JD Vance last month at a fundraiser for a conservative Christian group backing Trump.

What’s more, Kemp signed a sweeping voter suppression law in 2021 that will make it harder for Democratic-constituencies to vote in November in numerous ways, including reducing access to mail ballots, slashing the number of ballot drop boxes, adding new ID requirements, and allowing unlimited challenges to voter eligibility. An analysis by the Atlanta Journal Constitution last week found that these restrictions put more of a burden on Black voters than white ones.   

One notable provision of the law removed Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who defended the 2020 results, as chair of the state election board. Three election denier allies of Trump have since taken over the board’s majority and passed a series of rules that could plunge the 2024 vote count into chaos and give GOP officials a pretext not to certify the results if Kamala Harris carries the state. Democrats have asked Kemp to investigate these MAGA board members for ethics violations, but Kemp has not done so.

Georgia Democratic State Sen. Nabilah Islam Parkes filed suit against Kemp in late September to force him to take action against the board. “State law is clear, Kemp has a duty to act,” Parkes wrote on X, “but he’s abdicated responsibility.”

Donald Trump’s claim that non-citizens are crossing the Southern border and registering to vote in US elections has become a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, even though every major study shows that non-citizen voting is exceedingly rare.

But a lawsuit filed last month shows that those false assertions of voter fraud are leading to real world instances of qualified voters being blocked from casting a ballot.

On August 13, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, an election denier who supported Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 results, announced that his office had identified 3,200 alleged noncitizens who had registered to vote in the state and had begun removing them from the voter rolls. He said the names were pulled from a list of individuals who had received noncitizen identification numbers from the Department of Homeland Security. Even then, he conceded that “it is possible that some of the individuals who were issued noncitizen identification numbers have, since receiving them, become naturalized citizens and are, therefore, eligible to vote.”

On September 27, the Department of Justice sued Alabama, arguing that Allen’s actions were in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which prohibits the removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of an election. That so-called quiet period exists “to mitigate the risk that errors in systematic list maintenance will disenfranchise, confuse, or deter eligible voters by ensuring that they have adequate time to address errors and understand their rights,” the Justice Department wrote in its lawsuit.

But the timing of the purge wasn’t the only issue. According to the DOJ, of the 3,251 individuals identified as noncitizens by Alabama, 717 had proven their citizenship and re-registered to vote after ending up on the secretary of state’s list. That meant the eleventh-hour voter purge had an error rate of more than 22 percent. The DOJ said that in Alabama “potentially several hundred or even thousands more registered, eligible voters from the list—U.S. citizens—remain in inactive status, stand to be harmed, and risk disenfranchisement just weeks before the upcoming federal election.”

Crackdowns on alleged non-citizen voters frequently ensnare naturalized US citizens or even those who have been citizens since birth, due to sloppy methodology by partisan election officials. William Pritchett of Montgomery County told NPR he’d received a letter from the state recently saying his registration was being canceled even though he was born in Alabama and has always been a US citizen.

In 2019, Texas attempted to remove nearly 100,000 alleged noncitizens from the voter rolls. Trump claimed the state’s list proved that “Voter fraud is rampant.” But election officials quickly uncovered that many of the supposed noncitizens targeted for removal were actually naturalized US citizens. A federal judge halted the purge, the Republican Secretary of State was forced to resign, and his director of elections admitted in legislative testimony that 25,000 US citizens were wrongly targeted.  

The Texas debacle should have been a cautionary tale. But instead Trump and his allies continue to double down on outright lies and accelerate their voter suppression efforts, even though they’ve yet to uncover any evidence of non-citizen voting or registration on even a minor scale.

What’s more, Republican-controlled legislatures have placed initiatives on the ballot in eight states this November mandating that only US citizens can vote in state elections. That is already the law, but these ballot initiatives would further Trump’s lies about voter fraud and could lay the groundwork for future restrictions on ballot access that could stymie eligible voters, such as requiring proof of citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote. And the conservative group Look Ahead America just posted billboards in Arizona and Nevada of a man in handcuffs with the tagline, “if you are not a citizen, voting is a crime.” That could intimidate legal voters in Latino communities, suggesting they may be hassled if they show up to vote and that this might even affect relatives who are not documented.

Republicans are pushing these tactics despite the fact that they continue to fail to dig up instances of widespread voter fraud. Trump’s own “commission on election integrity,” which the president formed after he claimed he lost the popular vote in 2016 due to 3 million illegal votes, disbanded without finding any proof of voter fraud. More recently, the North Carolina board of elections last month announced it had removed 750,000 ineligible registrations from the state’s voter rolls since the beginning of 2023, mostly because people had moved, died, or hadn’t voted in recent elections. Yet, as this major investigation, the board uncovered only nine potential non-citizens who were registered to vote—out of 7.7 million total voters in the state.

Democrats filed a lawsuit on Monday against a new rule passed by the pro-Trump majority on the Georgia state election board requiring the hand count of ballots on Election Day, which Democrats and voting rights groups worry could delay election results and be used as a pretext by Republican officials not to certify a Democratic victory.

“If the Hand Count Rule is allowed to go into effect, the general election will not be orderly and uniform—large counties will face significant delays in reporting vote counts, election officials will struggle to implement new procedures at the last minute, poll workers will not have been trained on the new Rule because it was adopted too late, and the security of the ballots themselves will be put at risk,” the lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Party of Georgia states.

The hand count requirement was adopted on September 20—six weeks before the general election—by the three MAGA-aligned members of the state election board, despite warnings by the state’s Republican attorney general and secretary of state that it was likely illegal. County election officials also told the board the rule could delay election results and lead to distrust of the counting process, which the Trump campaign could weaponize to pressure county officials not to certify the results if Kamala Harris wins the state.

The board’s MAGA majority, who Trump praised as “pit bulls” during a rally in Atlanta in August, have passed a series of controversial rule changes at the behest of election deniers that could plunge the vote-counting process into chaos in the state. In August, they also passed rule changes requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and granting them access to “all election-related documentation,” which Democrats, in a separate lawsuit, argued could delay election certification and result in the “mass disenfranchisement of eligible, registered Georgians.” That lawsuit will receive a hearing in state court on Tuesday. A Republican-led group has also filed suit against the board’s new changes.

The Harris campaign is supporting the Democrats’ lawsuits.

“We agree with Georgia’s Republican Attorney General and Secretary of State: This rule is unproductive and unlawful, and we are fighting it,” Harris deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said in a statement. “Democrats are stepping in to ensure that Georgia voters can cast their ballots knowing that they will be counted in a free and fair election.”

Democrats filed a lawsuit on Monday against a new rule passed by the pro-Trump majority on the Georgia state election board requiring the hand count of ballots on Election Day, which Democrats and voting rights groups worry could delay election results and be used as a pretext by Republican officials not to certify a Democratic victory.

“If the Hand Count Rule is allowed to go into effect, the general election will not be orderly and uniform—large counties will face significant delays in reporting vote counts, election officials will struggle to implement new procedures at the last minute, poll workers will not have been trained on the new Rule because it was adopted too late, and the security of the ballots themselves will be put at risk,” the lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Party of Georgia states.

The hand count requirement was adopted on September 20—six weeks before the general election—by the three MAGA-aligned members of the state election board, despite warnings by the state’s Republican attorney general and secretary of state that it was likely illegal. County election officials also told the board the rule could delay election results and lead to distrust of the counting process, which the Trump campaign could weaponize to pressure county officials not to certify the results if Kamala Harris wins the state.

The board’s MAGA majority, who Trump praised as “pit bulls” during a rally in Atlanta in August, have passed a series of controversial rule changes at the behest of election deniers that could plunge the vote-counting process into chaos in the state. In August, they also passed rule changes requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and granting them access to “all election-related documentation,” which Democrats, in a separate lawsuit, argued could delay election certification and result in the “mass disenfranchisement of eligible, registered Georgians.” That lawsuit will receive a hearing in state court on Tuesday. A Republican-led group has also filed suit against the board’s new changes.

The Harris campaign is supporting the Democrats’ lawsuits.

“We agree with Georgia’s Republican Attorney General and Secretary of State: This rule is unproductive and unlawful, and we are fighting it,” Harris deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said in a statement. “Democrats are stepping in to ensure that Georgia voters can cast their ballots knowing that they will be counted in a free and fair election.”

In June, Ohio held a special election to fill an open congressional seat in a district that voted 72 percent for Donald Trump in 2020.

On Election Day, former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Maureen O’Connor drove the length of the sprawling 200-mile district, which Republicans drew two years ago to dilute the influence of Democratic voters and boost their own power. Crisscrossing 11 counties and four media markets, she started at the fairgrounds in rural Marietta, on the West Virginia border; followed the Ohio River through the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains; stopped in Steubenville, near Pennsylvania; and ended at a polling site in urban Youngstown.

Although Democrats performed much better than expected, the outcome of the race was never in doubt. GOP state Sen. Michael Rulli, a grocery store owner who called himself “the Trump candidate,” won easily. “This was drawn to make the 6th Congressional District as favorable to a Republican as possible,” a dismayed O’Connor said after. “That’s the definition of gerrymandering.”

O’Connor, 73, has short gray hair and an affinity for pearls, with the tough, no-nonsense demeanor of a former prosecutor. She’s been a Republican for four decades, serving as the first female chief justice in Ohio and the longest-tenured female statewide politician. But, now retired, she was traveling the state like a Johnny Appleseed for democracy, rallying voters against gerrymandering and taking on leaders of her own party, who have aggressively used the tactic to give Republicans lopsided majorities in the legislature and the state’s US House delegation. (Nationally, gerrymandering gives Republicans an advantage of 16 House seats, according a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice.) She was visiting the 6th District to collect signatures for an initiative on the November ballot that would create a citizens redistricting commission to draw district maps free from political interference. “The system doesn’t work because of the involvement of the politicians,” O’Connor told me. “Let’s get politicians out of the mix and return that power, like it was at the beginning of the country, to ‘we the people.’”

“This is part of a larger story of whether we truly have a representative democracy and how the rules are being written in a way where people don’t have as much of a say. And so the response has been people turning to the ballot measure process.”

Half of all states allow citizens to place constitutional amendments and other initiatives on the ballot, and the importance of direct democracy extends well beyond Ohio. The initiative and referendum process originated at the turn of the 20th century, when Jim Crow was firmly entrenched in the South and robber barons held sway over much of the North and West, leading to growing complaints that democratic institutions were no longer responsive to popular demands. “I believe in the initiative and the referendum, which should be used not to destroy representative government, but to correct it whenever it becomes misrepresentative,” former President Teddy Roosevelt said when he visited Columbus, Ohio, in 1912 to endorse an effort to amend the state’s constitution through ballot initiatives.

Direct democracy does not always lead to good public policy—see Brexit, for example. Special interests and ideologues have often hijacked the ballot initiative process, putting complicated issues before voters that could be better handled by the legislature. But in hyper-gerrymandered states like Ohio, the only way to ensure that the will of the majority is followed is to override representative democracy and go directly to the people. This strategy has taken on renewed urgency in response to recent US Supreme Court decisions taking away fundamental rights, from the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. These initiatives can garner support across party lines in a way that is otherwise impossible in a highly polarized partisan political climate.

Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, seven states have voted directly on abortion, and in all seven—red and blue alike—abortion-rights advocates have won. This year, voters in 10 states, a record number, will vote on whether to enshrine protections for reproductive rights, including in battlegrounds such as Arizona, Florida, Montana, and Nevada. “Dobbs gave people a real clear example of rights that we thought were guaranteed not being secure,” says Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), a progressive advocacy group. “Right now, in a number of states, this is the only way to protect reproductive rights.”

This election cycle, voters will weigh in on 153 statewide measures, including 57 initiated by citizens, according to BISC. In addition to fighting gerrymandering and protecting reproductive rights, they will have the opportunity to adopt ranked-choice voting (Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon), enshrine no-excuse absentee voting (Connecticut), protect marriage equality (California, Colorado, Hawaii), and raise the minimum wage (Alaska, California, Massachusetts, Missouri).

Not all these measures will lead to progressive policies. State-level Republicans are also using the initiative process to advance their own priorities, such as tougher immigration laws, private school vouchers, and new voting restrictions. Meanwhile, they are also pushing proposals that would make it harder for citizen-led groups to get future initiatives on the ballot.

At a time when so much attention is focused on the presidential race, what happens at the frequently overlooked bottom of the ballot will be just as consequential. If Trump regains power, states will become the last line of defense for protecting fundamental rights. And if Kamala Harris wins and Democrats recapture both houses of Congress, the states can once again become “laboratories of democracy,” in the words of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, showing how to regain freedoms that have been ripped away by Republicans in Washington and a regressive Supreme Court.

“This is part of a larger story of whether we truly have a representative democracy and how the rules are being written in a way where people don’t have as much of a say,” Fields Figueredo says. “And so the response has been people turning to the ballot measure process where they can to make decisions that govern their lives.”

The fight against gerrymandering is personal for O’Connor.

In 2015, 71 percent of Ohio voters approved the creation of a redistricting commission that was supposed to stop gerrymandering in the state. It included the state’s most powerful politicians—the governor, secretary of state, auditor, and leaders of the state legislature—and tasked them with ending “the partisan process” for drawing state legislative maps. Three years later, an even larger percentage of Ohio voters approved a similar initiative applying to congressional districts.

But when Republicans on the commission, which had a 5–2 GOP majority, drew new legislative maps after the 2020 census, they flagrantly ignored this assignment. The lines they approved gave Republicans a supermajority in both chambers of the legislature—67 percent of seats in the state House and 69 percent in the state Senate. GOP members of the commission laughably asserted that because Republicans had won 13 of the past 16 statewide elections, they were entitled to up to 81 percent of legislative seats, even though Republican candidates hadn’t gotten anywhere close to that percentage of votes statewide.

Under O’Connor’s leadership, the Ohio Supreme Court did not buy that argument. By a 4–3 vote, it struck down the maps in January 2022; O’Connor joined her Democratic colleagues to cast the deciding vote.

But Republicans on the redistricting commission, instead of following the court’s orders, kept defying them—not once, but seven times. Every time the court struck down a gerrymandered map, Republicans passed a new one, until a separate federal court stepped in and said there was no time to rectify the gerrymandering before the 2022 election, forcing Ohioans to vote in districts that had been deemed illegal over and over. With a legislative supermajority, “we can kind of do what we want,” bragged commission member Matt Huffman, the Republican state Senate president. And they did, passing one extreme policy after another, from a six-week abortion ban to a bill allowing Ohioans to carry a concealed handgun practically anywhere without a permit or background check to stripping the Republican governor and his health director of the authority to manage the Covid-19 pandemic. Some far-right members of the legislature even floated impeaching O’Connor.

O’Connor grew up as one of eight kids in an Irish Catholic family in suburban Cleveland and rose through the ranks of Ohio politics, from county prosecutor to lieutenant governor, before joining the court in 2002 and becoming chief justice in 2011. She was known for her blunt manner and maverick streak, bucking her party on issues like abortion and criminal justice reform. “When I first met her, I was a bit scared of her, too,” joked former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Yvette McGee Brown, “and the reputation is well-deserved.” In a concurring opinion in the gerrymandering case, O’Connor made clear her disappointment with the GOP-led redistricting commission and outlined how Ohioans could reform the process.

“Having now seen first-hand that the current Ohio Redistricting Commission—comprised of statewide elected officials and partisan legislators—is seemingly unwilling to put aside partisan concerns as directed by the people’s vote, Ohioans may opt to pursue further constitutional amendment to replace the current commission with a truly independent, nonpartisan commission that more effectively distances the redistricting process from partisan politics,” she wrote.

At the end of 2022, O’Connor was forced to retire from the court at age 71 due to term limits. A more conservative justice replaced her, shifting the court’s Republican majority well to the right and ensuring that the gerrymandered legislative maps would not be struck down again. Days after leaving the bench, O’Connor channeled her anger into action, leading a new group, Citizens Not Politicians, in a bid to create what she had called for in her opinion—a citizens redistricting commission divided equally among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans.

Citizens Not Politicians submitted 535,000 valid signatures in July to qualify for the ballot, and this November, Ohio voters could finally end gerrymandering once and for all. “This is the most important thing I’ve ever done,” O’Connor says.

Supporters of the initiative argue that it will bring Ohio’s legislature and US House delegation more in line with the rest of the state, which leans toward Trump and hometown running mate JD Vance, but is more purple than deep red, with a few Democrats, like US Sen. Sherrod Brown, still able to win statewide office.

“It would change the state in a huge way, not because it means Democrats are going to have some guaranteed majority,” says David Pepper, former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines. “What it will mean is a majority that generally leans Republican, quite close, reflecting Ohio’s closeness, but most importantly, because you have the safety valve of fair districts and competitive races, the driving force of Ohio politics will not be the extremists in the statehouse.”

The pushback against direct democracy has been just as fervent as the push for it.

In August 2023, Republicans in the Ohio Legislature forced a vote on a ballot initiative, known as Issue 1, that would have made it much harder to pass future initiatives. It called for changing the threshold for passing a ballot measure from a simple majority vote to a 60 percent supermajority, and it required organizers to gather signatures from 5 percent of voters in all of the state’s 88 counties instead of the 44 currently needed. Republicans scheduled the vote in the dead of summer, when many people were on vacation and students were out of town, to try to sneak it through with little public scrutiny.

That move was part of a larger trend. In 2017, BISC tracked 33 bills seeking to alter the ballot measure process. In 2023, lawmakers in 39 states introduced 165 bills to change the process, 76 of which sought to restrict or undermine initiatives. “After the Dobbs decision, conservatives in Republican-trifecta states have doubled down on trying to undermine the will of the people,” Fields Figueredo says.

“You put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out and vote,” former Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum complained.

Republicans claimed the 2023 Ohio initiative was meant to stop “out-of-state special interests,” but one legislator admitted privately that it was designed to preempt passage of an abortion-rights measure that had qualified for the November 2023 ballot, as well as O’Connor’s redistricting reform effort. And, in fact, “out-of-state special interests” were the very people behind the GOP effort. The largest individual donor to the Issue 1 cause was far-right Illinois megadonor Richard Uihlein, who helped bankroll the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection and has funded scores of candidates and groups promoting election denialism. When the bill received a ­hearing­ in the legislature, the only person who testified in favor of it was a representative from a little-known think tank in Florida, the Foundation for Government Accountability, that received nearly $18 million from Uihlein. The foundation, which has led the behind-the-scenes push to limit direct democracy around the country, is affiliated with the State Policy Network, an alliance of conservative think tanks, and it has received more than $5 million from the dark-money network led by Federalist Society Co-Chair Leonard Leo.

The Republicans’ gambit in Ohio backfired spectacularly. The anti-initiative initiative was defeated with 57 percent of the vote, and that November, Ohioans passed new measures enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution and legalizing recreational marijuana by similarly decisive margins. “You put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out and vote,” former Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum complained afterward.

But the popularity of direct democracy in Ohio hasn’t stopped Republicans from continuing to try to undermine it. After the Citizens Not Politicians initiative qualified for the ballot this year, the Ohio Ballot Board, which like the redistricting commission has a Republican majority, grossly misrepresented the intention of the measure. The summary of the ballot initiative adopted by the board implied the measure would encourage partisan gerrymandering rather than curb it, claiming the initiative would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering” and “manipulate the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio.” Shortly thereafter, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) came to Ohio to raise money for the campaign working to defeat the anti-gerrymandering initiative.

Citizens Not Politicians immediately sued the ballot board, asking the Ohio Supreme Court to block the “biased, inaccurate, deceptive, and unconstitutional ballot language.” The board’s chair, GOP Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who lost the GOP primary for US Senate in 2024, is a member of the redistricting commission that repeatedly voted for the state’s gerrymandered maps and previously voiced support for impeaching O’Connor. He was also a leading proponent of the effort to make it harder to amend the Ohio Constitution, which he admitted was “100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution.”

Republicans are using the initiative process to undermine voting rights in other ways, too. Republican-controlled legislatures have placed initiatives on the ballot in eight states mandating that only US citizens can vote in state elections.

“The self-dealing politicians who have rigged the legislative maps now want to rig the Nov. 5 election by illegally manipulating the ballot language,” O’Connor said in a statement at the time. On September 17, in a 4-3 decision, the conservative majority on the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the bulk of the board’s ballot summary.

That’s indicative of how Republicans across the country are responding to citizen-­initiated measures they don’t like. Take Arizona, where voters will consider an initiative that would repeal the state’s near-total abortion ban and establish a constitutional right to the procedure. The Republican-led legislature put 11 of its own initiatives on the ballot, which supporters of abortion rights call a “voter exhaustion tactic.”

Some of them are particularly egregious. After the Arizona Supreme Court reinstated an abortion ban dating back to 1864 earlier this year, abortion-rights supporters targeted two of the justices for removal at the ballot box. So the legislature placed a referendum on the ballot that would eliminate six-year terms for Supreme Court justices and allow them to serve indefinitely if they adhere to “good behavior.” It would apply retroactively to October 31, meaning that if voters decide not to retain the anti-choice justices but also approve the initiative eliminating fixed terms, the judicial election will be effectively nullified.

At the same time, Arizona Republicans are trying to impose new obstacles to getting future citizen-led initiatives on the ballot, like Ohio Republicans attempted last year, following the playbook developed by the Foundation for Government Accountability and the right’s dark-money network. Currently, voters must collect signatures equal to 10 or 15 percent of the vote in the last gubernatorial election to place a statute or constitutional amendment on the ballot. But another referendum advanced by the legislature would require organizers to collect that number of signatures in all the state’s 30 legislative districts, essentially allowing voters in just one district to veto the wishes of the other 29.

A similar law passed in Arkansas last year, increasing the number of counties in which initiative supporters must collect signatures from 15 to 50 of the state’s 75 counties. Voters rejected a nearly identical proposal in 2020, introduced after initiatives raising the minimum wage and legalizing medical marijuana passed over the objections of GOP lawmakers. Arkansas Republicans also blocked an initiative this year that would have overturned the state’s near-­total abortion ban, with the state Supreme Court disqualifying it from appearing on the November ballot because it said organizers did not properly submit an obscure bit of paperwork.

Utah Republicans have gone even further, asking voters to give the legislature the explicit power to undermine the will of the voters. In 2018, Utah voters, like in Ohio, passed a measure creating an independent redistricting commission to draw new legislative maps and ban partisan gerrymandering. But Utah Republicans passed a new bill that effectively repealed the initiative and drew a map that divided Salt Lake City among all four of the state’s congressional districts to prevent Democrats from winning any of them. After the Utah Supreme Court ruled in July that the legislature had violated the state constitution, Republicans authorized a new ballot initiative asking voters to grant the legislature the authority to amend or repeal citizen-led initiatives. Democratic leaders called it a “blatant power grab.”

Republicans were hoping to convince voters to side against their own interests by including a provision banning foreign entities from donating to initiative campaigns, even though legislative leaders could not cite any evidence of that occurring. But as in Ohio, the move to erode direct democracy backfired on Republicans. On September 25, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the measure violated the state constitution and votes for it would not be counted in November.

Republicans are using the initiative process to undermine voting rights in other ways, too. Republican-controlled legislatures have placed initiatives on the ballot in eight states mandating that only US citizens can vote in state elections. The proposals, developed based on model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which connects corporations with conservative state legislators, furthers Trump’s lie that noncitizens are illegally voting in US elections, and could lay the groundwork for future restrictions on ballot access.

When voters have used the initiative process to expand voting rights, Republicans have frequently gutted those efforts. The most notable instance occurred in Florida, where 65 percent of voters in 2018 approved Amendment 4, repealing one of the country’s worst felon-disenfranchisement laws, dating back to Jim Crow. But months later, the GOP-controlled legislature passed another law requiring ex-offenders to pay off all fines, fees, and restitution before casting a ballot, which prevented about 700,000 people from voting even after they had served their time. Voting-rights advocates called it a “modern-day poll tax.” In a highly publicized crackdown on voter fraud that seemed designed to have a chilling effect on voter participation, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ election police force arrested 20 ex-offenders, even though some had no idea they were ineligible to vote. (More recently, the election police force has gone door to door questioning the signatures of people who supported putting an abortion­-rights referendum on the ballot.)

The Amendment 4 fight showed how passing a ballot measure is one thing, but successfully implementing it is another struggle altogether. State and federal supreme courts regularly rule on their constitutionality, and state legislatures often seek to undermine or repeal them.

“Republicans voted for a number of these ballot measures and then went on to vote for candidates that don’t support reproductive rights,” Fields Figueredo of BISC says of abortion-rights initiatives that have passed since Dobbs. “This year, folks are having to do more work to make that connection. To make sure the will of the people is heard, we need to have people in governing power to follow through on what voters did.”

Democrats plan to draw attention to ballot initiatives in 2024 as a way not just to boost turnout for the top of the ticket, but to emphasize the importance of down-ballot races that tend to receive little attention but go hand in hand with the initiative process. That’s a tricky balancing act, because if Democrats promote the initiatives too aggressively, it could limit their bipartisan appeal.

In Ohio, supporters are bullish that the anti-gerrymandering initiative will pass—and survive legislative and judicial attempts to kill it. “Would you rather have citizens draw the maps than the politicians?” asks Pepper, the former Democratic Party chair. “That contrast strikes a really strong chord.”

While top Republicans in Ohio view O’Connor as a Liz Cheney-esque figure, a former leading light of the GOP establishment who became an apostate, she has no regrets about taking on powerful forces in her own party for the good of democracy. “I’m not going to let these misguided, self-serving politicians define what kind of Republican I am,” she says.

The Trump campaign’s eleventh-hour push to rig the Electoral College by changing how Nebraska’s Second Congressional district awards its presidential vote hit a major roadblock on Monday when the key swing vote, state Sen. Mike McDonnell, announced he would not support a winner-take-all system.

“In recent weeks, a conversation around whether to change how we allocate our Electoral College votes has returned to the forefront,” McDonnell, a Democrat turned Republican from Omaha, said in a statement on Monday. “I respect the desire of some of my colleagues to have this discussion, and I have taken time to listen carefully to Nebraskans and national leaders on both sides of the issue. After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from Election Day, is not the moment to make this change.” He said the state’s voters should instead consider a constitutional amendment after the election if they want to change how Electoral College are distributed.

Nebraska is one of two states, along with Maine, that splits how they award their Electoral College votes. Joe Biden carried the state’s Omaha-based district in 2020, but in recent months Trump and his allies undertook an unprecedented pressure campaign to get the state to shift to a winner-take-all system. Trump spoke with state senators recently and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) traveled to Nebraska last week to urge Republicans to hold a special session of the legislature to change how it allocates its votes before November. The Trump campaign was essentially running the anti-democratic playbook it used to subvert the 2020 election, but this time doing so before the election.

That one Electoral College vote in Nebraska looms large because if Kamala Harris wins the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania she will only have 269 electoral votes, one shy of the majority needed to become president. If no candidate gets a majority, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where a majority of state House delegations, not a majority of House members, would select the winner. Republicans currently control a majority of state delegations. I explained the danger of this nightmare scenario last week:

In a contingent election, a majority of state delegations, not House members overall, decide the winner. Under this scenario, the House essentially functions as the Senate, with each state getting one vote for president regardless of population. That means California, with 39 million people, has the same level of representation as Wyoming, with 584,000 people. This structure significantly favors Republicans, who are overrepresented in sparsely populated rural states, and who also drew redistricting maps in key states like Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—giving them control of the House delegations despite the closely divided nature of those states.

A contingent election would amplify the structural inequities built into the US political system. “In the Electoral College, voters in large states have slightly less relative power than their share of the U.S. population would suggest. In a contingent election, this imbalance becomes extraordinary,” noted a report last year from Protect Democracy. “The twenty-eight smallest states control nearly 28 percent of votes in the Electoral College (148)—yet, they control 56 percent of the votes in a contingent election.” (Washington D.C., which has three Electoral College votes, but is not a state, is also barred from participating.)

That could lead to an extraordinarily undemocratic outcome—a candidate could lose both the popular vote and fail to gain a majority of the Electoral College, but become president thanks to House members who do not even represent a majority of the body, let alone a majority of Americans.  

McDonnell was at the center of this pressure campaign because he left the Democratic Party and joined the Republican caucus earlier this year. But he remained president of the Omaha Federation of Labor and has aspirations of becoming the city’s mayor next year. If he helped lead the effort to change the rules to deliver the presidency to Trump, that would hurt him with Democrats in purple Omaha.

Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, praised McDonnell for “standing strong against tremendous pressure from out-of-state interests to protect Nebraskans’ voice in our democracy.” 

“Nebraska has a long and proud tradition of independence, and our electoral system reflects that by ensuring that the outcome of our elections truly represents the will of the people without interference,” Kleeb told the Nebraska Examiner, which broke the news.

However, despite this setback, Trump will continue to exert pressure on Republicans to upend democratic norms when it benefits his candidacy. Just look at Georgia, where the pro-Trump majority on the state election board has adopted a series of last-minute rule changes that could give Republicans a pretext to refuse to certify the election if Harris wins the state.

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.”

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.”

Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is no stranger to voter suppression in Georgia and she sees a “nightmare scenario” for how Republicans could nullify a Democratic victory in the state in November.

In August, after Donald Trump praised three Republican appointees to the Georgia State Election Board by name at a rally in Atlanta, the MAGA-aligned majority on the board passed a series of rule changes—requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and review “all election-related documentation” before certifying an election—that Democrats and voting rights groups fear could lead GOP-controlled boards not to sign off on the results if Kamala Harris wins the state. “The discrete and immediate concern,” says Abrams, who ran for Georgia governor in 2018 and 2022 and founded the voting rights group Fair Fight, “is that this will delay the counting of Georgia’s Electoral College votes.”

If there’s a lengthy dispute over the vote count, Georgia could miss the December 11 deadline for certifying its Electoral College results. If no candidate receives the 270 votes necessary to win the Electoral College as a result, the presidential election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where Republicans control a majority of state House delegations, allowing them to swing the election to Trump.

“It is not just a nightmare scenario, it’s a very real possibility,” Abrams told me recently in Austin, Texas (we did a panel together on September 7 for the Texas Tribune Festival). “There’s a timetable, and that timetable presumes that everything is settled by the federal deadlines that are set. A state’s inability to meet that deadline or refusal to meet that deadline, throws the election to the House of Representatives. That is not the electoral body that should be deciding this election. It should be the people of the state.”

What Abrams is outlining is known as a “contingent election” under the 12^th Amendment. If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral College votes, the House selects the president and the Senate picks the vice president. That’s only happened once in US history for the country’s highest office—in 1824, Andrew Jackson won the Electoral College and popular vote, but the House installed the runner up, John Quincy Adams, as president.

“It’s not just a nightmare scenario, it’s a very real possibility,” Abrams says.

In a contingent election, a majority of state delegations, not House members overall, decide the winner. Under this scenario, the House essentially functions as the Senate, with each state getting one vote for president regardless of population. That means California, with 39 million people, has the same level of representation as Wyoming, with 584,000 people. This structure significantly favors Republicans, who are overrepresented in sparsely populated rural states, and who also drew redistricting maps in key states like Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—giving them control of the House delegations despite the closely divided nature of those states.

A contingent election would amplify the structural inequities built into the US political system. “In the Electoral College, voters in large states have slightly less relative power than their share of the U.S. population would suggest. In a contingent election, this imbalance becomes extraordinary,” noted a report last year from Protect Democracy. “The twenty-eight smallest states control nearly 28 percent of votes in the Electoral College (148)—yet, they control 56 percent of the votes in a contingent election.” (Washington D.C., which has three Electoral College votes, but is not a state, is also barred from participating.)

That could lead to an extraordinarily undemocratic outcome—a candidate could lose both the popular vote and fail to gain a majority of the Electoral College, but become president thanks to House members who do not even represent a majority of the body, let alone a majority of Americans.  

Currently, Republicans control 26 state House delegations, exactly what they need to pick the president in a contingent election, compared to 22 for Democrats, with the rest divided equally. Though a contingent election would take place after the new Congress is seated in early January 2025, Republicans are likely to add another state, North Carolina, where the GOP gerrymandered district lines last year to pick up three or more House seats. “Republicans should have a majority in at least 26 state U.S. House delegations in 2025, even if they do not retain the overall House majority,” writes Kyle Klondike of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. And if Republicans retain the House majority, GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson could use his power to further tilt the rules in Trump’s favor.

Of course, a lot of things must go haywire for Abrams’ nightmare scenario to occur. Georgia law clearly specifies that counties “shall certify” the election returns. Democrats are challenging the state board’s new certification rules in court ahead of the election. And if counties refuse to approve the vote counts after the election, they will almost certainly be forced to certify the results by the courts or other state officials—which occurred when Republicans declined to certify election results in other states in recent elections. And Georgia may not be the tipping point state in the Electoral College anyway.

Jessica Marsden, counsel to the free and fair elections program at Protect Democracy, called a contingent election scenario “extremely unlikely.” She said that while she was alarmed by election deniers taking over state and county election boards in Georgia, she remained confident that top state officials, such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who resisted Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory in 2020, along with state courts, would once again uphold the integrity of the election.

“We’ve looked hard at Georgia law and we think it’s well-established that certification is a ministerial duty,” Marsden explained. “Even with the changes that the state board is trying to make, counties have a deadline and they have to certify by that deadline and state officials, based on our understanding, are ready to hold them to account. I think state officials are going to be all over this problem and will have the tools they need to make sure the election is certified.”

But Abrams’ concerns are not as far-fetched as they might seem given what happened in 2020. Yes, the effort to overturn the election failed. But it did lead to an insurrection at the Capitol. And the election denier movement is much stronger this time around, taking control over key election bodies in states like Georgia. Even if the election results are ultimately certified, any kind of dispute or delay in counting votes could be weaponized by Trump and his allies to disastrous effect.

“The biggest increase in risk post-2020 stems from the concerted, intentional effort to foment distrust in the election system,” Marsden says. “It’s less to me an issue that there are weak points that could be used to overturn election results. My concern is primarily the damage that gets caused along the way by people who have been lied to about the validity of the process.”

Before 2020, Republicans who wanted to subvert fair elections were focused on passing laws that made it harder to vote. But after Trump tried to overturn the election, his allies expanded the voter suppression playbook, shifting from simply limiting access to the ballot to contesting election outcomes, as Georgia clearly indicates.

“Georgia is an incubator for voter suppression and has been for decades now,” Abrams says. “We will not be the only state, and in fact, we’re not the only state, that has seen variations on this certification theme. Those who want to destabilize the system realized that voter suppression has three pieces: Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? Does your ballot get counted? Well, they have done what they can to interfere with the first and the second. The ultimate does your ballot get counted is not allowing the certification of your votes, because that is the final administrative step to a vote actually being counted in an election.”