Republicans Ramp Up Vote Suppression and Voter Challenges in the Lead Up to November 2024 Presidential Election

By Mary Alice Miller
Remember Georgia? You know, that time on January 2, 2021 when former President Donald, now convicted felon, Donald Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (Republican) and asked him to find enough votes to overturn the state’s 2020 election results to Trump’s favor?       

“All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” said Trump to Raffensperger during that call. “Because we won this state, and flipping the state is a great testament to the country.”

Democracy dodged a bullet that time with Raffensperger’s refusal, but some other entities in the Georgia Republican apparatus are not as ethical.
On January 7, 2021, two Republican local elections officials and a former member of the elections board welcomed a computer forensics team into a Coffee County, Georgia, elections office. The team accessed voting equipment and imaged hard drives containing sensitive voting software, compromising the security of that state’s voting system. This unauthorized access occurred days after a state runoff election for the U.S. Senate.

More than two years later, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and several other individuals were indicted for racketeering to commit election fraud. In October 2023, Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to reduced charges of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties.

Not chastened by these events, the Georgia GOP is bent on skewing election results in other ways.
The Georgia State Election Board has made several controversial changes to election rules, arguably exceeding the board’s authority.
Three precinct poll officers must independently hand count every physical ballot removed from the scanner at the conclusion of voting to ensure the number of ballots matches the machine count. If local election board members identify a discrepancy between the number of ballots cast and the total number of voters, “no votes shall be counted from that precinct,” pending an investigation.

The rule changes could delay or obstruct the certification of Georgia’s election results.
Counties must report the results of all absentee ballots by an hour after polls close.
In addition, homeless people must now use the county voter registration office as their address.

Georgia is not alone in devising tactics to suppress voting access, integrity, and certification.
A recent Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington (CREW) report found efforts to weaponize the election certification process in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, where county officials unlawfully refused to certify elections in 2020.

The report, Election Certification Under Threat, suggests legal remedies available to state and federal authorities, as well as voters, to protect certification at the county level. These include emergency court orders to compel compliance with the law, criminal charges to punish and deter misconduct, and legal procedures to remove obstructionist officials from their county positions.

Attorney Marc Elias is concerned about the 2024 presidential election. Elias, who has served as general counsel for the John Kerry and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns and currently runs the Elias Law Group, provides counsel for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, was recently interviewed by New Yorker Magazine’s radio program.

Elias won virtually every case Trump brought to challenge the 2020 election. He fears that this time, the assault on the democratic process could be much more effective.
“Donald Trump will declare victory at some point either before the polls close or certainly before the ballots are counted. Donald Trump is more desperate than he was before.

He was willing to instigate a violent insurrection,” said Elias. “Now he faces the prospect of four criminal indictments, two of which are in federal court. He believes his ticket to personal freedom rests on winning the White House.”

“The second thing is that I expect that you will have immediate claims on the Republican side that the ballot counting needs to stop and that ballots still being counted are fraudulent,” Elias added.

Elias laments, “I think the biggest thing we have seen them do is to drive good election officials and workers out of election administration and replace them, in many instances, with bad election officials and election deniers. Election-denying officials are in power in many of the swing states.”

Elias pointed to election deniers who “are suing states to strike down laws that prohibit the harassment of election officials.”
“It’s somewhere between insidious and insane,” Elias said. “I think we sometimes become immune to the abnormality of Donald Trump. One of the worst pieces of advice we got was to take him seriously, but not literally. I believe Donald Trump is going to say after the election day in 2024 that he won all 50 states.”

One of the big tactics that Elias said he is worried about is mass voter challenges.
“The Republican party reacted to Donald Trump’s loss in the days afterward by filing 364,000 challenges in connection with those Senate elections,” said Elias.

He pointed to another 100,000 challenges in Georgia in 2022, as well as tens of thousands of voters challenged in Texas and Nevada, and mass challenges launched in Pennsylvania and New York.

“These challenges are created on right-wing technology platforms, large data sets, and AI, and they generate these mass spreadsheets of names. They are generated by voter suppression outfits or individuals who are misguided and then submit them to the counties, and it is a real challenge,” said Elias. “We face the possibility in 2024 we will see more voters have their right to vote challenged than in any time since the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Jim Crow South.”

Elias said it is critical that everyone registers, double-checks their registration, has a plan, and goes out to vote.
“It will be good for democracy and good for the country if Kamala Harris wins in a landslide,” Elias said. “That said, we cannot create a two-tier election system in which one candidate has to win by one vote, and the other candidate has to win by a landslide.”