Trump is setting the stage to cheat Georgia voters successfully in 2024

After he was recorded on a call to the Secretary of State in which he urged the official to cheat on his behalf, disgraced former president Donald Trump was indicted on racketeering, conspiracy and other charges by a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia.

Eighteen other people, including Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, were also indicted, accused of joining Trump in efforts to unlawfully change the outcome of the election.

The indictment describes those charged as part of a criminal organization that violated the state’s racketeering (or RICO) law. Other charges include making false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, conspiracy to defraud the state and perjury, among others.

Now the Republican nominee for president, Trump is openly moving forward with a scheme to steal the election in Georgia, where Republicans have alterted voting laws to impose burdens on citizens likely to oppose GOP candidates and made last minute rule changes that could aid in absconding with electors in 2024.

“Georgia’s got a good election law,” said Eric Johnson, the former GOP president pro tempore of the Georgia Senate who is part of an organization called Right Count that seeks to shore up conservatives’ faith in elections and debunk misinformation. “People should have all the confidence in the world in it.”

“The more we try to diminish people’s trust in the process, the more problems we’re going to cause,” he said. “I worry that former president Donald Trump is setting it up so that he if he loses, he can blame Georgia again.”

Georgia is not the only state where officials are worried about the prospect of delayed certification.

After Trump’s explicit focus on the Georgia State Board of Elections, they fear he will exert similarly malicious influence in other battleground states.

Janice Johnston, a retired obstetrician who has repeatedly claimed without evidence that falsified data in the state’s largest county tainted President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state.

Republicans and Democrats alike criticized her for making an appearance at a partisan event during a fraught moment of the election cycle, but Johnston refused to respond to requests for comment after she stood to wave amid the accolades from Trump who looked down to her in the second row at the rally.

Along with two fellow board members who form a conservative majority on the five-member board, Johnston was celebrated by name at Trump’s Atlanta rally over the weekend, days before the panel convened to consider new rules for the November election.

To election administrators, democracy advocates and Georgia political figures — including some Republicans — Trump’s comments were unsettling: The board’s work is supposed to be done outside the fray of politics.

The GOP contender suggested that if he loses the state, he would again mount a pressure campaign on the officials responsible for fairly and impartially overseeing elections, just as Trump did during his failed attempt to cheat his way out of a loss in 2020.

The board’s majority enacted a series of changes to state election rules this week, days after Trump singled its members out for praise at his Atlanta rally.

Critics say approving a raft of new rules at this late stage could void valid votes, place onerous burdens on overtaxed election workers and potentially delay the certification of results.

The board met over two days this week to consider a long list of proposed rules, most of which passed with support from the three pro-Trump members — Johnston, Janelle King and Rick Jeffares.

The changes earned cheers and fervent support in public comments from MAGARepublicans, but the board members representing the majority dismissed those whp spoke out against the alterations, calling one of them a “paid Washington lawyer.”

Johnston is a GOP appointee who has served on the board since 2022. King, a former deputy state director of the state GOP, and Jeffares, a former state senator, were appointed by legislative Republicans this year.

Critics said the most disconcerting of the new rules is a provision that allows county-level election boards to demand “reasonable inquiries” if they have questions about the outcome of an election.

The rule does not specify what a reasonable inquiry is, and it places no limits on the time frame of such a probe or what documents a board can demand.

Georgia law requires county boards to certify their results by the Monday following an election, but critics of the new rule say it could prompt partisan county boards of any ideological stripe to misinterpret their power and refuse to certify, thereby slowing the process of state-level certification.

In a presidential election, the calendar for determining which presidential electors will convene and send their votes to Washington is fixed and inflexible, with disruptions having the potential to derail the process.

Megan Bellamy, vice president of law and policy at the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab, which advocates for fair elections, said the rule is extraneous because Georgia law already requires officials to verify the eligibility of voters, compare voting machine totals with the number of voters who check in to vote, launch recounts for close races, and review machine and precinct tallies for accuracy.

Bellamy and others worry that the real purpose of the rule is to sow confusion and hold up legitimate results.

“It’s not that our results shouldn’t be scrutinized,” said Bellamy. “The issue is that ‘reasonable inquiry’ is undefined. It will create this focal point for tensions and argument around what the election results should be, and it will create a controversy at the tail end of the process.”

Johnston said during the meetings that the rule’s purpose was to create more transparency and allow for the identification of irregularities early in the process.

That was no comfort for critics, who fear that the board is setting the state up for a tumultuous and potentially violent aftermath to the election.

In 2020, Trump and his allies staged a coordinated effort to overturn his defeat in seven states, culminating in a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The State Election Board’s misguided actions amount to little more than a solution in search of problem. Despite this activist approach to inject uncertainty into the election process, Georgia law is clear in requiring county election boards to certify their election results on November 12. RightCount is committed to supporting county election officials in upholding the rule of law and their statutory obligations,” said Eric Johnson.

Georgia is not the only state where officials are worried about the prospect of delayed certification.

Now, with Trump’s explicit focus on a state election board, they fear he will exert similar pressure in other battlegrounds.

In 2020, Trump and his allies staged an illegal coordinated effort to overturn his defeat in seven states, culminating in a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The only US president who was convicted of crimes is still facing federal criminal charges for his attempt to defraud the voters of the United States.

The Republican Party gave him his third presidential nomination in as many cycles despite his conviction and the adjudication in other courts that he is a rapist and a fraud.