By Leon Galis
The state of Georgia’s Election Board, which nobody outside the state and hardly anybody in it had ever heard of before this election cycle, is now the talk, not just of the town, but of much of the country. A quick web search on “Georgia State Election Board” pulls up stories from the Washington Post, CBS News, NPR, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, CNN and others.
What brought the Board all this notoriety is its adoption of a flurry of rules it says will bolster voter confidence in the upcoming presidential election, but which critics say will create confusion and chaos, undermining the process. Defenders of the Board’s actions seem largely confined to former President Donald Trump and the three-member majority which voted in the new rules. Critics, on the other hand, include the Board’s non-partisan chairman, its counsel, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, numerous county election officials, plaintiffs in two lawsuits, and Elizabeth Young, Senior Assistant Attorney General in the office of state Attorney General Chris Carr.
The only thing that qualifies me to comment on this is being a registered Georgia voter with enough time on my hands to have read very carefully the letter from General Young. She wrote it at the request of the Board, explaining that she was making an exception to the Attorney General’s usual practice of declining to respond to requests for “unspecified comments” on proposed rules. She did that, she wrote, because several of the Board’s proposals appear to be “easily challenged and determined to be invalid.”
Media attention has focused on General Young’s analysis of the rules she thinks are clearly vulnerable. But what commentators have missed are a few sentences immediately preceding her analysis that look for all the world like a bomb dropped on the Board. She lit the fuse with “…the Board’s authority to promulgate rules and regulations is limited to the administration or effectuation of the statutes in the Georgia Election Code.” No one disputes that, except, perhaps, former President Trump. And here’s the ground zero explosion: “…to the extent that a proposed rule merely mirrors the language of a statute without more, it does not accomplish anything. To the extent that a rule mirrors a statute but adds [to] or alters the statute’s requirements, the rule will likely be subject to an easy legal challenge.”
Let that sink in for a minute. On a fair reading, General Young seems to be saying that in the nature of the case, the Board’s rules and regs are either irrelevant wheel-spinning or “easily [my emphasis] challenged” in court, in other words, illegal.
General Young is careful to characterize her analysis as “informal.” But even so, it seems to be telling Secretary Raffensperger, the elected official charged with the conduct of the state’s elections, and county election boards that they’re all bound by the Georgia Election Code, not the antics of the state Election Board, which rightly belongs in the backwater it’s languished in until this year. I don’t have Secretary Raffensperger’s ear, but if I did, I would tell him that GeneralYoung’s letter is his permission slip to instruct county election boards to ignore the noise coming from the state Election Board and move ahead under the procedures already in place for conducting the election, for which early voting will begin in a mere matter of days.
There would be howls of outrage from people invested in sabotaging the election, such as, for example, the three rogue members of the Election Board bent on assuming legislative powers reserved for the Georgia General Assembly. But Raffensperger has already demonstrated the spine to stare down a sitting president without paying a political price for it.
So what about it, Mr. Secretary? To ordinary civilians like me,it looks like the ball’s in your court exactly where Attorney General Carr’s office put it.
Leon Galis is an Athens native who is retired from the faculty of Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. Since 2008, he has written dozens of columns for local Athens publicatuons, and is a frequent contributor at LikeTheDew.com and Medium.com.Galis is a professor of philosophy emeritus, with broad interests in current events and cultural commentary. You can read additional works by Galis at https://medium.com/@leongalis
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Two days ago (10/16), Judge Thomas Cox, Superior Court of Fulton County, ruled that the flurry of rules promulgated by the State Election Board on 3-2 votes violate the Georgia Election Code enacted by the General Assembly and were also unconstitutional under both the Georgia and the US Constitutions. So Secretary Raffensperger is now free to do what I thought he was free to do all along.
When voters have no faith in the election system, changes must be made. Our current election system is set up so people can cheat and elections and votes can't be fully audited.
Kudos to Georgia Election Board for trying to minimize the cheating.