THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALSUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020 N 23said. “And in some cases, we didn’t have
a chance to check the power with respect
to the machines, and the wattage.” That
led to electrical failures at some sites.
Confidence has waned in Mr. Raf-
fensperger and in Fulton’s leadership.
One Democratic lawmaker in Fulton,
Josh McLaurin, sought to give lawmak-
ers greater oversight over the county’s
elections, but the move stalled in the
State Senate.
Mr. Marvin, who was troubled by the
lack of scanners when he voted in the
Democratic primary at Park Tavern,
said, “I don’t blame the people working
there, they had to deal with grumpy vot-
ers — and we weregrumpy.” It was “a
management problem,” he added, that
“goes all the way to the top, which is the
secretary of state of Georgia.”
Checking the Check Marks
One challenge lingered after the polls
closed: how mail-in ballots were being
counted. The Coalition for Good Govern-
ance is reviewing how Dominion scan-
ners count such ballots and is consider-
ing suing the state, said the group’s exec-
utive director, Marilyn Marks.
“You’d be surprised how big the X’s
and check marks are that don’t get
counted,” she said.
Workers examining mail-in ballots
stumbled across the uncounted votes in
the days after the primary, discovering
that the Dominion scanners were pro-
grammed to ignore marks that filled in
less than a certain percentage of a bal-
lot’s black-outlined oval. The secretary of
state’s office said the percentage thresh-
olds used by Georgia “were the same
ones certified” by the federal Election
Assistance Commission.
But Kristen Muthig, an agency
spokeswoman, said there was no federal
standard. “It varies at the state and local
level and by the various equipment,” she
said.
Mr. Raffensperger’s aides seemed un-
sure of the threshold, saying at various
points that it was 12 percent, 13 percent
or 14 percent. In Colorado, by compari-
son, any black-colored ballot ovals that
are less than 9 percent filled in are auto-
matically not counted by scanners.
In Georgia’s Morgan County, Jeanne
Dufort, a former textile importer who
served on an appointed vote review pan-
el — and who has challenged state voting
practices in the past — reviewed 150 bal-
lots and counted about 20 unrecorded
votes.
Adam Shirley, working on a similar
panel in Athens-Clarke County, said his
group reviewed 76 ballots and found 12
that included votes clearly visible to the
human eye that had not been counted by
the scanners. Mr. Shirley, a science
teacher, worries about what could hap-
pen statewide in November.
“If you start talking about a few hun-
dred votes per county, times 159,” he said,
“that could swing the election.”The Next ElectionTo Ms. Abrams, the Democrat who has
become the state’s most visible voting-
rights advocate, election problems were
foreseeable, as was the fact they would
not be foreseen.
“He had months to get this election
right,” she said of Mr. Raffensperger. “He
rescheduled the primary twice and he
still failed.”
“He, of his own volition, invested in a
complicated machine, a purchase that he
inadequately prepared the counties for
adoption of,” she added. “He did not pro-
vide support when counties raised their
hands and raised their voices saying,
‘We are concerned about the deployment
of these brand-new machines in whatwill likely be among the most con-
tentious elections we’ve had in 20
years.’ ”
Since the primary, only limited action
has been taken. Legislative remedies
were derailed after Republicans tried to
bar counties from mailing out ballot ap-
plications. (“That sent the bill into the
ditch,” said Mary Margaret Oliver, a
Democratic member of the state House.)
Echoing President Trump, state Re-
publicans have argued, without evi-
dence, that mail-in voting is a recipe for
widespread fraud. This spring, David
Ralston, the speaker of Georgia’s House,
opposed sending out mail-in ballot appli-
cations amid the pandemic, saying it
would “be extremely devastating to Re-
publicans and conservatives.”
Mr. Raffensperger was asked in the in-
terviews whether he was concerned
about his office’s poor relations with
Black voters. “I believe that I’ve been
very open-minded and fair,” he said, not-
ing that he had demonstrated some vot-
ing machines at the King Center in Atlan-
ta, a foundation run by the family of the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “When-
ever we can reach out to groups, we’ve
been very proactive.”
Some of Georgia’s best hopes might
come from outside government. The At-
lanta Hawks NBA franchise recently an-
nounced that its State Farm Arena would
become an early-voting location for Au-
gust’s primary runoff and the general
election, potentially accommodating 250
voting machines. (State law restricts
Election Day voting to local precincts.)
Evan Malbrough, a 2020 graduate of
Georgia State University, has started re-
cruiting and training a cavalry of college
students to be Atlanta poll workers.
Spurred by what he calls a desire to “fix
voter suppression,” he recently founded
the Georgia Youth Poll Worker Project,
figuring that students would be more
adept at voting technology than typically
older poll workers.
“It’s like when you live with your par-
ents, and they got a new phone or a new
TV, and you have to set it up,” said Mr.
Malbrough, who knows from experience
— he lives with his parents, and has also
been a poll worker. “Even without train-
ing, I feel like most young people could
intuitively fix a lot of these issues.”
In DeKalb, Mr. Thurmond, the chief
executive, hopes to avoid a repeat of
what he calls the “meltdown” in June.
Under his plan, poll workers will be des-
ignated “front-line workers” and receive
hazard pay. He is looking for new polling
places with greater electrical capacity.
For Mr. Thurmond, a former state la-
bor commissioner who is one of the few
Black people ever elected statewide, the
struggle over voting is personal.
“It’s embedded in the DNA, here in
Georgia, to suppress — first to deny, and
then to suppress — the African-Ameri-
can vote,” he said. “It’s a sad and embar-
rassing part of the political history of the
state of Georgia. It’s unfortunate that in
2020 we’re still engaged in this fight.”AUDRA MELTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESMs. Handel’s successor, Brian Kemp, aggressively purged more than 1.4 mil-
lion Georgians from the voter rolls. He was subsequently elected governor.
AUDRA MELTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESOn Sunday, President Trump
declined in a television interview
to say whether he would accept
the results of the 2020 election.
On Monday, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
suggested Mr. Trump was com-
plicit in foreign meddling in the
American political system, citing
his past overtures to Russia and
Ukraine, as he raised broader con-
cerns about election interference.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump raged
baselessly on Twitter that voting
by mail could “lead to the most
corrupt election in our nation’s
history.” And on Thursday, Mr. Bi-
den suggested that Mr. Trump
might “try to indirectly steal the
election by arguing that mail-in
ballots don’t work.”
Their comments, though on the
overlapping theme of the election,
are not comparable. Mr. Trump
has long issued falsehoods about
voter fraud, and even some Re-
publicans say he appears to be
seeking the option to question the
legitimacy of an election outcome
he finds unfavorable.
Even as Mr. Biden has consis-
tently told voters about the threat
he believes Mr. Trump poses to
the country, he is now warning
nearly as loudly about election in-
terference, concerns that are
rooted in intelligence community
assessments and Mr. Trump’s own
statements.
But the result — a series of ex-
traordinary charges over the
course of a week — amounted to
the clearest sign yet that, nearly
100 days before Election Day, the
presidential race is now not sim-
ply a fight over character, compe-
tence or even vicious personal at-
tacks, but is also about one of the
fundamental pillars of American
democracy: free and fair elec-
tions, and faith in the outcome.
In their own sharply divergent
ways, each presidential candidate
sought to drive a narrative around
the election’s legitimacy.
Mr. Trump claimed, without evi-
dence, that mail-in voting leads to
fraud and pre-emptively cast
doubt on the credibility of the out-
come, appearing to set up reasons
to discount the results if he is un-
happy with them, some govern-
ment and campaign veterans
said.
Mr. Biden, meanwhile, empha-
sized the threat of foreign interfer-
ence with new fervor and warned
in sharp and dramatic terms that
his opponent might seek to dis-
rupt the election.
A week of sounding the alarm
on whether the electoral process
is trustworthy started on Sunday,
when Fox News aired an inter-
view in which Mr. Trump declined
to say whether he would accept
the results of the election, echoing
remarks he made in 2016.
“You don’t know until you see,”
Mr. Trump said, asked if he was a
“gracious” loser. “It depends. I
think mail-in voting is going to rig
the election. I really do.”
Pressed further on whether he
would accept the results, Mr.
Trump said, “I have to see.”
The comments shocked and
alarmed veteran lawmakers and
security experts.
“It’s stunning,” said former Sen-
ator Carol Moseley Braun, Demo-
crat of Illinois, adding that “the
whole idea of our democracy is
peaceful transfer of power.”
“I’ve never seen anything like
it,” she continued. “This is totally
divorced from any norms we’ve
ever had in this country, ever.”
Chuck Hagel, who was a Repub-
lican senator from Nebraska be-
fore joining the Obama adminis-
tration and serving as defense
secretary, said Mr. Trump ap-
peared to be “putting in doubt the
legitimacy of our election on Nov.
3.”
“If that isn’t a very disturbing,
clear signal that we may have a
problem, I don’t know how much
more of a blinking red light you
need,” he said. “Safe, secure, fair,
honest elections really is the holy
grail of our democracy. If we can’t
trust that or don’t believe in those
results, we’re no better than Rus-
sia or China or Venezuela. We’re
no better than any authoritarian
government.”
Mr. Trump, who has himself
voted by mail before, had no
precedent on which to base his re-
marks about mail-in voting, said
Tom Ridge, who served as home-
land security secretary in the
George W. Bush administration.
“I regret that the president
would try to undermine the legiti-
macy and question the outcome of
the election based on some hypo-
thetical abuse of absentee ballots”
with “absolutely” no basis in his-
tory, said Mr. Ridge, a former Re-
publican governor of Pennsylva-
nia and a Trump critic. “When you
listen to the president, you begin
to wonder, is he more — is he wor-
ried about the legitimacy of the
electoral process, or is he worried
about losing?”On Monday, Mr. Biden released
one of his sternest warnings to
date about foreign interference in
the election. He has begun receiv-
ing intelligence briefings, he has
said, and his advisers are on
guard about potential meddling
that could unfold in the home-
stretch of the campaign, as are
some congressional Democrats
who released a new warning on
Monday. This week four years
ago, hacked Democratic emails
were released into public view.
And in July 2018, the special coun-
sel Robert S. Mueller III indicted
12 Russian intelligence officers in
the hacking of the Democratic Na-
tional Committee and the Clinton
presidential campaign.
“I am putting the Kremlin and
other foreign governments on no-
tice,” Mr. Biden said in the state-
ment. “If elected president, I will
treat foreign interference in our
election as an adversarial act that
significantly affects the relation-
ship between the United States
and the interfering nation’s gov-
ernment.”
At a fund-raiser that night, he
directly linked Mr. Trump to the is-
sue. “He knew full well of Russian
involvement in the election in ’16,”
Mr. Biden said, going on to add,
“He’s done nothing. He sought
help. Just like he sought help to
get the Ukrainians to say things
about me that weren’t true and got
him impeached.”
A spokesman for the Republi-
can National Committee, Steve
Guest, criticized the Obama ad-
ministration’s record on con-
fronting Russia and said Mr. Bi-
den is making a “scurrilous accu-
sation” against Mr. Trump.
The morning after Mr. Biden’s
fund-raiser, Mr. Trump was pre-
occupied with a different facet of
elections.
“Mail-In Voting, unless
changed by the courts, will lead to
the most CORRUPT ELECTION
in our Nation’s History!” he
tweeted. “#RIGGEDELEC-
TION.”
Voter fraud in the United States
is exceedingly rare, and was not
an area of increased concern dur-
ing the presidential primaries.
Some Republicans believe the
president is right to focus on mail-
in ballots, but not always for the
false assertions of widespread
fraud that he alleges. Rather,
some are concerned about the lo-
gistics of the practice on what may
be an unparalleled scale amid the
pandemic. Dramatic increases in
vote-by-mail New York City, for
example, did come with chal-
lenges in last month’s primary
election.
“It’s not just the president,” said
Lawrence Tabas, the chairman of
the Republican Party of Pennsyl-
vania. “There are thousands,
thousands of people on both sides
who have complained about mail-
in ballot processes. It depends on
what your state law is.”
Representatives for the R.N.C.
and the Trump campaign said in
statements that they saw chal-
lenges with mail-in voting.
Mr. Guest, the spokesman for
the R.N.C., expressed concerns
about “chaos” from what he cast
as a rushed vote-by-mail process,
even though plenty of voters on
both sides of the aisle have been
voting by mail for years.
“Republicans want to make
sure every valid vote is counted
and our elections are free from in-
terference, fair, and transparent,”
he said.
There are also many Republi-
can officials and campaign strat-
egists who strongly support vot-
ing by mail and are worried about
the political consequences of Mr.
Trump’s attacks on the process.
And the Biden campaign
spokesman Andrew Bates re-
ferred to a news media report that
noted the Trump campaign’s en-
couragement of absentee voting
despite the president’s language.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to “encroach
on that sacred American right”
are “abhorrent to the vice presi-
dent,” he said.
Mr. Biden has argued for
months that Mr. Trump may move
to disrupt the election through
any means necessary, culminat-
ing with his warning on Thursday
about the president “indirectly”
stealing the election, and he has
discussed in detail sweeping
Democratic efforts aimed at voter
protection.
He has also frequently raised
the issue of foreign meddling in
American elections.
But it was on Monday, at the
fund-raiser, that Mr. Biden was
most blunt about why he was
growing increasingly vocal about
threats to the election system,
which he called a “violation of our
sovereignty.”
“It’s going to be tough,” he said
of confronting the issue of foreign
interference. “There’s not much I
can do about it now except talk
about it.”At the Top of the Ticket,
Little Trust in the Election
Trump Baselessly Rages About Voter Fraud,
While Biden Warns of Foreign Interference
By KATIE GLUECK