Sam Levine

One of the speakers who really stuck out to me this morning was Milton Kidd, the election director in Douglas county, Georgia.

He was one of half a dozen local election officials to urge the state election board not to enact rules so close to the election. But Kidd also pointed out that the volunteer board – whose members are not election experts – was ignoring the advice of seasoned election experts.

“The idea that you’re not going to listen to the individuals that are charged with conducting elections is absurd to me,” he said. “Most of us have worked decades in these career paths, and to say that we don’t know what we’re talking about, you wouldn’t say that to any other professional.”

“I’ve stayed at a lot of Waffle Houses in my life, but that does not qualify me to operate a Waffle House,” he added.

Sam Levine

We’re now wrapping up the morning public comment session of this meeting.

The overwhelming majority of speakers have urged the board not to adopt the proposed rules, including around half a dozen local election officials who have spoken.

We’re expecting to move on to discussion of the actual new rules shortly.

Sam Levine

Travis Doss, executive director of the Richmond county board of elections in Augusta and the president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, urged the board to stop its rulemaking.

“Now is simply not the time to implement sweeping changes that could create unnecessary confusion and disruption,” he said.

He noted that in previous elections – the 2018 gubernatorial race and the 2020 presidential race – Stacey Abrams and Donald Trump, respectively, said last-minute changes contributed to their loss.

He didn’t mention her by name, but Doss at one point seemed to be appealing directly to Janice Johnston, a retired OB/GYN who is leading the Republican bloc on the board. He said what the board was doing was akin to making changes during the third trimester of pregnancy.

Sam Levine

Brook Schreiner, the election director in Butts county, Georgia, is the first election official to testify at today’s meeting.

Local election officials throughout the state have strongly objected to the way the board has pushed through election rules.

“While we do not oppose many of the rules being processed, the timing could certainly be improved,” she said.

She also laid out how a proposal to hand-count ballots in local precincts “would unnecessarily delay election day tabulation”. She noted that poll managers already have a litany of tasks on election night, including sealing ballots and transporting memory cards.

Sam Levine

We’re now beginning the public comment section of the meeting, which is expected last at least an hour.

John Fervier, the board’s chairman, called it his favorite portion of the meeting, which may have been said somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

Sam Levine

The Georgia state election board meeting has only been under way for a few minutes and you can already see the two factions on the board at work.

Janice Johnston, the state GOP’s representative on the board, went back and forth with John Fervier, the board chair, over two last-minute additions to the agenda. One was to add a petition for rulemaking to the agenda, which Fervier objected to because he said the board hadn’t had proper time to consider it.

Johnston and two other members of the conservative bloc overruled Fervier’s attempt to block the petition from the agenda.

Johnston has seen a meteoric rise from being a citizen activist to essentially being in control of the three-member majority on the board.

Georgia election board considers last-minute changes that could spark voting chaos in swing state

George Chidi

As the Georgia state board of elections convened, Janice Johnston asked the board to amend the agenda to allow a petition for a rule change proposed by Salleigh Grubbs, chairman of the Cobb county GOP, regarding the storage of ballots after the November election.

“We are talking about debating a rule that no member of the public has seen,” said member Sara Tindall Ghazal. The proposed rule was submitted to the board a few weeks ago, board member Janice Johnston said

“Adding the petition at the last minute is not the responsible thing to do,” said chairman John Fervier, noting that the board members could have asked for alterations ahead of the meeting.

Three board members overruled the chairman’s objection. The three – Johnston, Janelle King and Rick Jeffares – were praised by name by Donald Trump at a rally a few months ago.

Here’s more on what the board is considering today, and why it could matter to the outcome of the presidential vote in the state:

George Chidi

Members of Georgia’s state election board held a short press conference ahead of their 9am meeting this morning.

Board member Janelle King asserted that “county board members have always had the right to certify or not to certify”, a statement at odds with legal holdings that the act of certification is “ministerial” and obligatory. “It is not ministerial. It is an option. It is an option because of the legal document each must sign,” King said.

The question of delayed certification is at the heart of objections raised by Democratic lawmakers, the American Civil Liberties Union and others, which are suing the state board of elections to prevent rules they believe will delay certification and potentially create a controversy that denies Georgia voters their delegates in the electoral vote after the November election.

Board member Janice Johnston encouraged Georgians to vote early and in person, instead of mailing absentee ballots this election, citing delays in mail delivery reported in the Atlanta area. She noted that – with the exception of military ballots – absentee ballots must be at the local election office by 7pm on election day.

Those who “desire to use absentee voting, please return the voting ballot directly to the election office”, she said. “If you must rely on the surface mail, please send your voting ballot as early as possible.”

Kamala Harris, who recently reminded the public that she owns a gun, told Oprah during their interview yesterday that “if somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot”.

Here’s the moment:

Harris acknowledged owning a weapon as early as 2019, and mentioned it again during her debate with Donald Trump last week. Her comment to Oprah appeared to be a somewhat rare instance of the relentlessly on-message vice-president slipping: “Probably should not have said that,” Harris said afterwards.

Labelling tweets featuring false claims about election fraud as “disputed” does little to nothing to change Trump voters’ pre-existing beliefs, and it may make them more likely to believe the lies, according to a new study.

The study, authored by John Blanchard, an assistant professor from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and Catherine Norris, an associate professor from Swarthmore College, looked at data from a sampling of 1,072 Americans surveyed in December of 2020. The researchers published a peer-reviewed paper on their findings this month in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review.

“These ‘disputed’ tags are meant to alert a reader to false/misinformation, so it’s shocking to find that they may have the opposite effect,” Norris said.

Participants were shown four tweets from Donald Trump that made false claims about election fraud and told to rank them from one to seven based on their truthfulness. A control group saw the tweets without “disputed” tags; the experimental group viewed them with the label. Before and after seeing the tweets, the subjects were also asked to rank their views on election fraud overall.

The study found that Trump voters who were initially skeptical about claims of widespread fraud were more likely to rate lies as true when a “disputed” label appeared next to Trump’s tweets. The findings meanwhile showed Biden voters’ beliefs were largely unaffected by the “disputed” tags.

You can read the full story here:

Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he hopes Joe Biden will support his plan to end the war with Russia, ahead of a trip to Washington.

Zelenskyy has promised to present his so-called “victory plan” to end the fighting, which has killed thousands, to Biden in the coming days, Agence France-Presse reports.

“I really hope that he will support this plan,” Zelenskyy said during a press conference with EU chief Ursula von der Leyen in Kyiv.

“The plan is designed for decisions that will have to happen from October to December … We would like that very much. Then we believe that the plan will work,” he added.

Zelenskyy will present the plan to the US after a summer of intense fighting, with Moscow advancing in eastern Ukraine and Kyiv holding on to parts of Russia’s Kursk region.

The Ukrainian leader is due to meet Biden and Kamala Harris – while Kyiv also says he plans to meet Donald Trump.

Trump has not confirmed their meeting but says it will “probably” take place. Reuters reports that while Trump and Zelenskyy talked over the phone in July, they have not talked in person since Trump was president.

The Republican nominee has consistently described US aid to its eastern European ally as a waste of money and has declined to say he wants Ukraine to win.

Donald Trump’s sweeping threats if he wins the presidency again to name a special prosecutor to “go after” Joe Biden and take legal action against other foes would subvert the rule of law in America and take the country towards authoritarianism, former justice department officials and scholars have warned.

Trump’s escalating legal threats have targeted “corrupt election officials”, lawyers, donors and others he falsely deems out to steal November’s presidential election, and have popped up variously on his Truth Social platform, at campaign events and at an elite police group he addressed this month in North Carolina.

Trump’s menacing pledges to essentially weaponize the justice department against opponents would mark a sharp break with the Department of Justice’s mission statement, which cites as core values “independence and impartiality”.

Ex-justice officials warn that Trump’s barrage of intimidating verbal assaults are unprecedented, and suggest he would undermine longstanding traditions of justice department independence if he wins the presidency, thus badly undermining the rule of law.

You can read the full story here