Georgia's voting-rights fiasco

The most ominous provision of the law affects the final step in the voting process: the official count. The new law removes the Georgia secretary of state as chair of the State Election Board and allows the GOP-controlled legislature to handpick his replacement. “This issue is potentially pernicious,” Richard Hasen, a law and political-science professor at UC Irvine, told me. “The reason you didn’t have a total meltdown in Georgia last year is because you had a heroic secretary of state and a group of election administrators behind him who were not willing to mess with the fair counting of the vote. If this law had passed, there would have been other decision makers who would have had power to mess with the vote.” I asked several experts if this provision would have made it easier for Trump to steal the state in 2020. “I don’t think we have any way of knowing,” Hasen said. “It’s an imponderable,” agreed the University of Georgia political scientist Charles S. Bullock III. “Could the GOP-selected chair throw out ballots that have already been tabulated, or turn away people from the polls? I don’t know how it would play out, but it would be very difficult to do, and there would be a court case.” The uncertainty itself is a troubling thing. Across the country, Republican-controlled state legislatures are politicizing the process of voting administration in the aftermath of a close election in which the GOP loser convinced a majority of his supporters that it was stolen by Democratic fraud. That’s plenty eerie.