Coming Down to the Wire in Georgia

They say there are two sides to every story, and that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. But that’s not the case here in Georgia, where the fight over the 2020 Presidential election has transitioned into two high-stakes Senate races on January 5. 

As a field reporter, I’ve seen people screaming that President-elect Joe Biden—aided by a vast conspiracy that includes a zombie Hugo Chávez, the Chinese government, and George Soros—stole the election.

In a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since Bill Clinton ran in 1992, Georgia had mostly been written off as a permanent red state. Then, in 2018, Stacey Abrams ran a competitive campaign for Governor against Brian Kemp, who was then Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brian Kemp. It took years of ground work from voting rights groups, knocking doors, registering people of color and many lawsuits to get to the point that we could even see a thin-margin win for Joe Biden.

As a field reporter, I’ve seen people screaming that President-elect Joe Biden—aided by a vast conspiracy that includes a zombie Hugo Chávez, the Chinese government, and George Soros—stole the election. Among the far-right, in a somewhat surprising twist, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, has also become a key part of the pro-Biden conspiracy. 

The madness of Trump’s lawyers’ desperate attempts at overturning the November election went to a new level this week, when it was revealed that the President personally called on the Secretary of State of Georgia to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we [need].”

It would seem that the conspiracy theories of voter fraud and the rage that the Republican Party has sold to the masses over the years has finally come back to haunt them. Their own voters are now claiming that even the Republican establishment is in on it. And this rage is being led by the President of the United States, via his twitter account. 

Some voters in Georgia are even calling for the January 5 run-off election to be delayed until they can confirm that it will be a “fair election.” Dwayne Smith, from Locust Grove, Georgia spoke to me at a Freedom Works Rally at a city near Atlanta, where he interrupted an Arizona Congressman’s speech demanding to know how, “Congress was going to stop the steal.” The Congressman stammered, not expecting to be flanked on the right at an event organized by the Tea Party.

It appears that the MAGA world is becoming its own political force, moving quickly to outsize the Republican Party. Though Donald Trump lost the election, he’s still providing political momentum to ideologues that were previously relegated to the fringe, such as Catholic fascist Nick Fuentes and his enthusiastic young “Groypers,” who recently called for forming a new party named “America First.” 

Stop the Steal, formed by Ali Alexander, a Roger Stone associate, has been calling on members of Congress to stop the electors from being certified on January 6 and is planning rallies in Washington, D.C., on that day. They’re also doing door-knocking to get out the vote here in Georgia (ironically, while at the same time claiming that there is massive voter fraud in the state).

“It’s up to ‘we the people’ and Donald Trump to save this country from destruction,” Hill says, “And if President Trump leads that, we’ll back that up, but if it’s not President Trump, then we the people need to assert ourselves and do it on our own.”

Later, on December 18, a different crew of highly trained men and women marched on the capitol building. This time, it was a team of voting rights attorneys and activists—with Columbia Law School professor Barbara Arnwine, attorney Tricia “CK” Hoffler, and Black Voters Matter’s Latosha Brown, leading them. They arrived, unarmed, to try to serve paperwork to the Secretary of State Raffensperger and set up a meeting that a Federal judge has requested. The team is working with investigative journalist Greg Palast, and the goal is to get 198,000 Georgia residents back on the voter rolls. 

In 2018, nearly 200,000 voters had been booted off of the rolls because the state claimed that they had moved. Palast was able to confirm through a mailing list maintenance firm that they had not. As of this writing, the Secretary of State’s office has not yet set up the meeting with the group of lawyers. 

But that’s not the only trick that the Republicans are trying to play in the state of Georgia to keep it red. GOP officials were caught closing down early voting locations in Black neighborhoods in Cobb County, which is just outside of the city of Atlanta. They’ve also been investigating Black and Latinx voter registration groups, as well as new registrants that don’t have a car registered in the state. 

The election in Georgia ends the night of January 5, but the fight over the vote will not, especially in Georgia. The Senate seat that Democrat Reverend Raphael Warnock is running for comes up again in 2022, as does the job of Governor in Georgia, which likely means that Democrat Stacey Abrams will begin her campaign for governor at the end of 2021. It’s likely no longer Ohio or Florida that the nation will be watching every four years, but the increasingly embattled peach state.