Friday Round Up! 9/20/24

Georgia on my mind...but for worrying reasons.

I’m keeping this short since I am catching a flight back to the East Coast from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I gave a talk to the OK Bar Association Women in Law Conference. I had not been to Tulsa before and found the town, and the people, incredibly charming. Shout out to the Sooner State!

Back in the Peach State, however, things are not so fine. Yesterday, the three Trump-aligned members on the Georgia state election board voted to require that all ballots cast on Election Day be hand-counted. Yes, you read that right. What that means is that not only will precincts be unable to report totals in a timely manner, but that ballots will be handled by a bunch of people before the totals are officially recorded. According to The Guardian:

One of the primary concerns from elections directors is about how the change in procedure would create a chain-of-custody problem in voting centers. Currently, precinct officials never touch a cast ballot. After a voter completes a ballot by touchscreen, their ballot is printed and then the voter places it in a tabulator which scans it and deposits it into a sealed box.

The rule change would have poll workers unseal that box, count ballots by hand and then return ballots to a container to be sealed again. The process introduces the potential for counting errors that would delay a count. State law – which legislators changed in 2021 – requires counties to have a complete tabulation by 11.59 on election day.

I mean, what could go wrong? As Renato and I discussed in this week’s podcast, this is only one of the many rules that the Trump-majority has proposed (and now passed), including one requiring that would allow local board members to initiate a “reasonable inquiry” into voting (no criteria is provided for what would justify such an inquiry), setting the stage for questions to be raised about voting results before they are even in. The hand counting of ballots plays into this ambiguity, since experts note that hand tabulation is less accurate and reliable than machines. Oh, and just as an aside, one of these election board members attended a Trump rally recently and got a shout out from Trump. So good times.

The one ray of hope is pending litigation over these rules, and whether the election board exceeded its statutory authority in adopting them. Georgia’s attorney general believes they do, so it’s possible that they won’t be in effect by Election Day…though I suppose that might turn on how high these issues end up going on appeal, if you catch my drift. Renato and I discuss these possibilities…but first we look at what the heck is going on the Georgia RICO case and whether it even matters anymore:

Articles worth reading:

• Some interesting analysis following the explosion of dozens of pagers in Lebanon last week — it turns out that there are international laws about booby traps. This NPR piece gives a good overview and you can take a look at the many law of war questions raised by the covert operation in Just Security

Upcoming events:

• Zoom Office Hours, Friday, September 27, 9-10 a.m. We’ll discuss the latest. Zoom link will be sent three hours before the discussion. This will not be recorded.

• Freedom Academy Book Club with Yale Professor Jason Stanley, author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, Date/Time TBA (late October/early November). I’m soooooo excited that my friend and colleague Jason Stanley will be joining us to discuss his new book, which was released just last week! We’ll have this book discussion right before the election, to remind us what’s at stake. The Freedom Academy Book Club discussions are open to all paid subscribers and recordings of the talks are posted afterwards in case you can’t make it live.

For the flight home, I’m about to crack open The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 by Tim Madigan. I’m sad that I don’t know more about this history and never learned about it in school. Never too late to catch up.

Quote on the side of the Greenwood Rising Historical Center in downtown Tulsa, memorializing the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in which thousands of white residents destroyed 35 square blocks in the Greenwood district known as “Black Wall Street”