Todd Blanche has an important choice to make: The Georgia Board of Elections sent a letter last week seeking the Justice Department’s intervention ahead of the midterms. If enacted, the board’s last-minute requests would upend the state’s voting system days before early in-person voting begins, providing fresh fuel for false claims of fraud from President Donald Trump and his allies.
Attorney General Todd Blanche, should he decide to get involved, could potentially go from merely defending Trump’s previous election manipulation in court to being an active participant in a whole new assault on democracy.
As we saw in 2020, even the suggestion of malfeasance is enough to bolster efforts to deny an election’s results.
Georgia has remained a key focus for Trump World’s false claims of mass election fraud more than half a decade later. FBI agents even executed a search and seizure warrant in January for Fulton County’s 2020 election records as part of yet another a probe into Joe Biden’s win over Trump. The ongoing struggle has placed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — himself a Republican who refused Trump’s infamous request to “find” 30,000 votes — and the state’s largely pro-Trump election board at odds ever since.
Among other things, the board’s letter asks the Department of Justice to block Georgia’s use of QR codes to tabulate ballots, and force the state to immediately update its voting machines’ software to patch a potential security flaw. (It also takes a swipe at Raffensperger, calling on Blanche to “hold the Secretary of State and any responsible officials accountable” for any potential alteration or destruction of election records that may have occurred.)
As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, state officials have been working to address the latter point, but it’s far too close to the election to make the major changes the board requested without time to ensure an emergency fix doesn’t break something unexpected. A spokesperson for Raffensperger said in a statement that the board’s members are “trying to cause chaos at the 11th hour.”
That… https://www.ms.now/opinion/todd-blanche-georgia-elections-board-raffensperger