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The Wirecutter Show, available wherever you get podcasts. From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. At the Democratic National Convention, party officials are celebrating polls showing that Kamala Harris is now competitive with Donald Trump in every major swing state across the country. Today, the story of how Republican officials in one of those swing states have taken over an obscure, unelected board to lay the groundwork for challenging a potential Harris victory this fall. My colleague, nick Corisaniti, explains. It's Thursday, August 22nd. Nick, we're talking to you from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but you're not there primarily to cover Kamala Harris's nomination. Instead, you have been focused for a couple of years now on the Republican election strategy for this election.

Yeah. So what I've been focused on, really, over the past four years, since the 2020 election and the efforts of Trump and his allies to overturn his loss, is this growing movement on the right to disrupt and erode and destabilize the American electoral process.

A movement that really never went away, even though many people stopped paying attention to it.

Exactly. This has been very much alive and very much active, just more in the shadows. This is a loose network of political operatives, of activists, of lawyers, of local organizations and national organizations, of conservative think tanks, and sometimes even state Republican parties. They've been trying to find weaknesses in the American electoral infrastructure. They've got a couple of strategies that they've really deployed over the past four years to help get them there.

Such as what?

One of them has just been changing laws regarding voting, changing how votes are cast, changing vote-by-mail strategies, changing who governs the electoral process. But as we head into 2024, what's really come into focus is this obsession with the certification system in the American electoral process.

Just explain that, the certification system.

So the way it's been described to me by other election experts is that when it comes to these officials' role in the certification process, it's almost like a scorekeeper in a basketball game. They're watching as different points are scored, they're tallying it up. When you get to the end of the game, they look backwards and say, Okay, all these points, let's make sure all these points add up to the final score. Okay, it does. This person won, this person lost. Here it is. It's official. There's no going back and investigating, was there a foul committed in the second quarter? Was the toe on the line in the third quarter that should have been a three instead of a two? That was the referee's job at the time. The scorekeeper just tallies the score and people who set the scores. And that's where these local election officials fit in to the certification process. Their job is designed to be very important but very simple. Make sure the numbers add up and sign off on the results.

Right.

But over the past four years, these loose networks of conservative election activists and Republican-aligned groups have been trying to redefine and even Can we make this certification process itself in places all over the country.

Where do they find that certification can be challenged and where they could maybe play a big role in sowing doubts around this year's election.

They've tried this wherever they can, but with little success. They've tried it in Arizona, they've tried it in Nevada, in Michigan, and Yet each time, they've been running up against settled case law that protects the certification process. Now, what some of these activists and organizations have tried to do is change that law. That's what brings us to Georgia.

Why Georgia?

Georgia was a big surprise in 2020. When President Biden won that by 12,000 votes, it was the first Democrat to win in generations. Yet former President Trump wouldn't believe it. There was countless allegations of suitcases full of ballots, corrupted machines, all disproven multiple times. It's long been this fever swamp of doubts about elections that have festered now for four years. But this election is looking different. For a long time, President Biden was trailing foreign President Trump significantly in the state. But with Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, it's suddenly very close. Trump cannot afford, really, to lose Georgia. If he loses Georgia, he has a very slim, if any, path to winning the presidency. And that's refocused a lot of the attention on the long-standing effort in Georgia to find vulnerabilities to ensure against a possible loss. In just the past few months, they've had some of their most notable successes in infiltrating or influencing the electoral process in Georgia.

What does that success look like exactly?

Well, this really begins with the takeover of the Georgia State Election Board, a five-member board. Now, in the beginning of this year, the board was pretty split. It takes three votes to pass a new rule. The majority of the board members were either more moderate Republicans voting to either preserve the status quo or improve rules along with one Democrat. Then there were these other two members who were proposing new rule changes. One of whom Dr. Janice Johnson is a very close ally of those right-wing networks. We uncovered recordings of her participating in their meetings, but they didn't have the votes to get these new rules through. So the effort to really change that makeup starts in February. These two members proposed a rule that would effectively get rid of mail-in in the state. They got shot down by the three majority. And the key vote is cast by a man named Ed Lindsay. He's a former Republican state legislator, and he really becomes the central target of this campaign designed to force him to leave the state election board. And it's not just the activists who are going after him. It's Trimble Line think tanks.

It's the state party. It's local Republican County officials. Eventually, after months of this pressure campaign, the dam breaks in May and Ed Lindsay steps down. The speaker of the Georgia House appoints his replacement, a woman named Janel King, who, it becomes clear with the next few meetings, will be siding with those other two members on the board. And so suddenly, that three-two split swings in the other direction. And these more right-wing members find themselves in a position of power with the ability to pass new rules and regulations.

And what does this new three to two majority start to accomplish and pass as a result?

The most significant thing that they did, and that's really happened in Georgia for the right-wing election, activists Network, happened a few weeks ago when the state board of election issued a rule saying that local election officials at the county level could conduct a reasonable inquiry as they were certifying the election. That's all they said. But when you read between the lines there and you think about everything that's happened with certification and the questions that came up in 2020 and since then, it seemed like a permissible window that could give local election officials the authority to say, I have doubts about this election, or I don't want to certify, or I need to see more evidence. We get into a situation where they could be running out the clock and missing very important deadlines that could create chaos, uncertainty, or move something to the courts.

nick, how do the three conservative board members who pass this new rule describe it and defend it?

I've I've talked to some of them, and I've watched hours of these state election board meetings. The way they frame it is that we should all want investigations and ways to double check our election results to make sure they're secure. We're not changing the deadlines that say you must certify by this state. So they defend it as a step towards transparency. But what a lot of election experts and Democrats and even some Republicans including the Republican Secretary of State in Georgia, said was, this will only lead to more questions. Perhaps nothing confirmed their fears more that this was a plan to destabilize election certification in the event of a Trump loss than former President Trump's own words at a rally in Atlanta earlier this month. Well, thank you.

I'm thrilled to be back in in the great state of Georgia. I love Georgia.

Where he called out by name the three members of the Georgia State Election Board.

Janice Johnson, Rick Jeffries, and Janel King, Three people are all pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory. They're fighting.

And one of them was in the audience.

Are they here? Where are they?

Right in front of the Trump podium, Janice Johnston stood up and waved to the crowd.

Thank you. What a job. Thank you.

And their response was an extensive ovation. Thank you.

Well. So here you have former President Trump blessing seemingly what these three conservative board members are up to, seeming to encourage them to keep going and appearing to connect the work that they're up to with his own campaign and political future in this election.

I think it's important to take a quick step back and just think about how bizarre it is that a presidential candidate knows the names of local election officials in a state so well that he has to call them out by name and say that they're helping to fight for his victory. I've been covering presidential campaigns now for over a dozen years, you as well, Well, Michael, I can't ever remember hearing anything like that before.

Right, because it's never happened before. A president has never taken an interest in the mechanics of the certification of an election before an election. In in a state like Georgia, the way Donald Trump now has.

Exactly. And so it sends up a warning signal, not just for people in Georgia, but really anyone across the country, Democrat, Republican, an election official, anyone who's concerned about this presidential election and people's willingness to accept its results.

We'll be right back.

I'm Susan Lee. I'm a researcher and fact checker with The Daily. What I do is make sure details in our episodes are accurate. I also spend a lot of time reviewing pretty much anything a guest on the show says. Let's say they're describing the color of someone's sweater. If I find out this person actually wore a blue sweater instead of a red one, I have to make sure that we address it. I guess some might think that this stuff is trivial, but for us, every single fact in an episode matters. We all make mistakes. We're all human. But my job is to be that extra layer. The Daily is part of the New York Times. We do everything we can to make sure we get the facts right. Subscribers make it possible for us to do that. If you want to subscribe to the New York Times, go to nytimes. Com/subscribe.

So, nick, I want to play out a scenario with you for this fall and how the story you've been telling us so far might become the worst-case scenario that a lot of people fear. Let's say it's election day and these Georgia Board of Election rules are in place, the results come in, and they are extremely close. Maybe Kamala Harris is up by 5, 6, 7,000 votes in Georgia, and maybe the whole election rests on Georgia. Paint the picture of what this might look like.

This would exactly be the nightmare scenario that Democrats and election officials are concerned about across the country. So local election officials in Georgia have to certify the election by November 12th. Now, with these new rules in place, imagine a county or two in Georgia, and it doesn't even have to be Fulton County or a county that would make it determinative. It could just be any county, raise their hand and says, I've got evidence of fraud, or even, I have concerns, and I need to investigate this fraud. And they continue their investigation, and they blow past that deadline. We're into our first legal gray area here. And now we're getting media attention. And now the Trump campaign and Republican allies are making this a story and a political story. And it creates this movement similar to what we saw in 2020. But I think what everyone has to remember about 2020 is there was a real vacuum of evidence. So what these laws and these local officials would be doing is creating at least that veneer of evidence. So now we're heading towards December 11th, which is the federal deadline to certify slates of electors to the Electoral College.

If we're still in this gray area, you could see a Secretary of State or a governor saying, Well, the election is not certified. I don't know what I can do here. Missing that deadline furthers the political legitimacy of the doubts being spread by right-wing allies. Then we're in a pretty precarious position heading into Congress's certification of the Electoral College, which happens on January sixth. Now there's pretext for, say, multiple senators or members of the House to say, Well, there's evidence in Georgia, and who knows if that's all that we know about. There could be more. It becomes, again, this political movement using these veneers of evidence to possibly throw into question the results in Congress. That's how it could spiral to a really dangerous place. But it has to miss all of these checkpoints and lawsuits and places where courts could come in to get to that.

Well, let's talk about those checkpoints and potential places where such a scenario would stop in his tracks and what Democrats, the Harris campaign, and mainstream Republicans who don't want this scenario to happen can do and are doing to try to ensure that this doesn't come to pass.

Well, one big thing that they did in the aftermath of January sixth was Democrats and Republicans in Congress passed a new law, the Electoral Count Reform Act, that sought to shore up any vulnerabilities in the federal congressional certification. Now, this is the first presidential election where that law will be in place. While it may have set a slightly earlier or tighter deadline for federal certification, it also took away a lot of different avenues to try and penetrate or alter or undermine that process. It remains to be seen exactly how it functions and how it will be challenged. But they're also trying to find very explicit case law, state law that contain words like, You shall certify an election. Shall means must, to make it so clear in precedent that there's no wiggle room. You shall certify, and the election must go forward.

I assume they're doing that because they want to present that information to a judge in order to shut down any effort to question the election results.

Exactly. The courts become the avenue to force these local election officials or whoever is refusing to certify, to certify the election. They have evidence of this working in the past at the state level. Arizona, there's been challenges to certification in the past, and the court has ruled pretty clearly, no, you must certify. The same thing is It happened in multiple states across the country. There's a good body of evidence and legal precedent that these local election officials must certify. There's no discretion. Basically, that means that if we were to go back to our scorekeeper analysis, you're the scorekeeper and tally up the scores and send them to us. If there's issues, we have other means of investigating that or taking it to court.

What else are those worried about this scenario doing at the moment?

Well, I think you can look at just how big the legal effort and the legal teams are getting on both sides. Let's start with the Democrats. They've hired hundreds of lawyers, both at the national level working within the Harris campaign and the DNC. Then they've worked with local lawyers in multiple battleground states who have expert knowledge and ability to work within state law. They say it's the biggest legal team they've ever assembled. On the Republican side, they've also been staffing up this massive legal team within the RNC. They call it their election integrity unit. And what they've been doing at the moment is filing a lot of litigation that could be used as possible evidence of a problematic election, talking about cleaning voter rolls or challenges to absentee ballots that arrive after the election day, but were postmarked before. Similar arguments that we heard in 2020, now they're bringing them beforehand. What this amounts to is this legal arms race, where lawyers on both sides are prepping for this post-election litigation battle that really is happening at a scale that we haven't seen before.

nick, I'm curious what people expect might be the role of, in the case of Georgia, the state's two most important Republican elected officials, the governor, Brian Kemp, the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger, who four years ago stood up pretty courageously in the face of concerns from members of their own party and said, No, everything looks to be quite kosher here, and they tried to shut down the efforts to object the results. Do people anticipate that those two officials will do the same this time around? And might that be the thing that ultimately closes out this effort to question the results?

Well, it certainly could. Secretary of State Raffensberger has been outwardly critical of the state board of elections already. He's issued statements saying that they're changing rules too close to the election, which is making it impossible for local election officials to keep up, which could create errors. He's taking their own election integrity argument and using it against them, saying that this is actually making our election less secure. As for Governor Kemp, he's been very clear since 2020 that he's not willing to break the law. So if any of these certification battles come down to a court saying he must certify, he'll do that. He's a very conservative governor. He was supportive of the new voting bills that a lot of Democrats and election experts said was suppressive. But he's also pushed back when Trump has really targeted him on voting, including recently where he said, Why are you attacking me? You need to go win an election, essentially.

I want to just level set with you for a minute. It seems from everything you've described here that this strategy in Georgia is very likely to rear its head because all that has to happen is that a single local official needs to raise their hand and say, under these new state election board rules, I have concerns. This cycle, this scenario you as I've described, gets triggered. We don't know how far it will go, how long it will play out, but it seems quite likely that some version of this scenario could happen.

If the rule set by the state election board survives the likely legal challenge is coming and is still in place in November, then yes, I think we can probably expect at least one county or one of the local election officials to raise doubts and start that cycle of uncertainty that quickly moves into the political arena. That's where it's most potent.

Right. As you've explained here, what will feel a little bit different this time around, 2024 from 2020, is just how successful these election deniers have become at putting themselves in the positions of power, of themselves becoming the scorekeepers as they are with the Georgia State Elections Board. If they start to raise the questions, then it will mean these high ranking scorekeepers saying that something is wrong, somebody cheated. And that may, without any evidence at all, carry real weight with those inclined to doubt the results.

Exactly. I think when we look at polling and we ask what was for a very long time a simple question to answer, do you trust the results of elections? We've seen a large percentage of Republican voters say no. An AP ATI poll about a year ago found that only 22% of Republican voters had a high confidence that votes in the upcoming presidential election would be counted accurately compared to 71% of Democrats.

Which means about 80% of Republicans don't have faith in elections.

Don't have high confidence that votes in the upcoming presidential election will be accurate. We've seen, really, since the 2020 election, an intensely partisan focused on what were once very apolitical bureaucratic positions. Now these are going to be contested, and there's going to be recruitment for these It's also very hard to quantify because we're talking about tens of thousands of offices across the country. It's a scale that we can't comprehend. Where all the little vulnerabilities could be or where all the little efforts to put someone on an election board who's not going to act in good faith. That's perhaps the unfortunate future of where this leads us.

Well, nick, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Mit disclosed that its first incoming class to be admitted since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action experienced a precipitous drop in the percentage of Black, Hispanic, and Pacific Islander students. Compared to the class of 2027, which was admitted before the ban, in the class of 2028, the percentage of enrolled Black students at MIT dropped from 15% to 5%, and the percentage of Hispanic and Latino students dropped from 16% to 11%. But the percentage of Asian-American students rose from 40% to 47%. The increase in Asian-American students is notable because the Supreme Court's ban on affirmative action was based in part on a lawsuit claiming that elite universities have discriminated against Asian-American applicants by holding them to a higher academic standard than other groups. And...

Soon and very soon, we're going to be teaching our daughters and sons about how this child of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, two idealistic, energetic immigrants, immigrants, how this child grew up to become the 47th President of the United States. That is the best of America.

On the third night of the Democratic Convention, Oprah Winfrey called on independent and undecided voters to cast their ballots for Kamala Harris. And Harris's running mate, Governor Tim Walls, delivered a blistering critique of Donald Trump and Trump's plans for a second term. It's an agenda nobody asked for. It's an agenda agenda that serves nobody except the richest and the most extreme amongst us.

And it's an agenda that does nothing for our neighbors in need. Is it weird? Absolutely. Absolutely. But it's also wrong, and it's dangerous.

Today's episode was produced by Olivia Nat Asta Chhatharvedi, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Patricia Willens, with help from Lexie Diao and Michael Benoît. Was fact-checked by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Dan Powell, Cory Schreppel, Roni Misdo, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landfuck of WNDY. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bivarro. See you tomorrow.