In 2020 no other state produced as much election drama as Georgia. In the end it gave Democrats slender victories that helped them win both the White House and a majority in the Senate, though not before Donald Trump, unsuccessfully, implored Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes”, the number needed to overturn the swing state’s results in his favour. In 2024 Georgia will again find itself taking centre stage—for three reasons.

The first is Mr Trump. After a big win in Iowa, the former president looks as politically robust as ever. Though his legal woes have not alienated Republican voters (rather the reverse), they could yet cause him trouble, not least in Georgia. Last August a grand jury indicted him for running a criminal ring that conspired to overturn the state’s 2020 election. Unlike in the federal cases pending in Washington and Florida, if re-elected Mr Trump could not pardon himself from the Georgia charges (though, according to long-standing policy, he would have immunity while in the White House). Nor could Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor, nix them.

But the case has taken an unexpected turn. On January 8th Fani Willis, the district attorney prosecuting Mr Trump, was accused by one of his co-defendants of having a fling with a special prosecutor she hired. Though the salacious claim is unlikely to disqualify her from litigation, it opens her to allegations of corruption (Ms Willis denies acting improperly in hiring him). Her foes are calling for her to go. That plot twist is unlikely to be the last.

Second, there is the matter of election security. Though Georgia is not home to the country’s loudest election-deniers—its Republican statewide politicians have staunchly asserted that its contests have been fair—fierce debates over election safety are playing out in the courts. A case that has been dragging on for over six years is reaching its end. An Obama-appointed judge will decide in the coming weeks if Georgia must scrap its electronic voting machines. Left-wing plaintiffs argue that the touchscreen ballot-markers are eminently hackable and make paper audits impossible. They point to a breach in Coffee County, where Trump allies copied election software from a rural polling station in January 2021, as proof that bad actors have all they need to do damage in 2024.

Good on paper

To the dismay of the cyber-security professors making the case for a switch to hand-marked paper ballots, Georgia’s most infamous conspiracy-theorists have taken their side. During opening statements the courtroom was packed with Trump apostles keen to tell your correspondent about the counterfeit ballots that flipped elections past. The office of Mr Raffensperger, the defendant, says it refuses to negotiate with election-deniers of left or right, noting that the trial is sowing unsubstantiated distrust of the state’s elections.

On 11 criteria for “fair, accessible, secure and transparent” elections—including, for example, whether a state has early voting and conducts audits—the Bipartisan Policy Centre, a think-tank based in Washington, DC, ranks Georgia best in the country (tied with Colorado). Even some who do not see it that way reckon it is too late to change the voting system before November. “It would cause mayhem,” says Cianti Stewart-Reid, the head of Fair Fight Action, a voting group started by Stacey Abrams, a Democrat who ran for governor in 2018. The case plants the seeds for fights over the validity of the results in November.

Third, voting rights: Georgia’s increasingly diverse electorate makes the state a laboratory for the demographic changes expected across America—and the fights over voter access that come with them. That has catalysed a movement to get unlikely voters registered and to persuade national campaigns to invest in Georgia. The Abrams machine spent $400m doing so in the decade to 2022. But since 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down the pre-clearance regime that gave the federal government authority to monitor election rules in places with historical injustices, Georgia’s Republicans have also been tightening voting laws.

After Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020 the legislature passed SB202, a bill that, among other things, made it illegal to pass out water and snacks to those queuing to vote and allowed individual citizens to challenge the voter registrations of neighbours they suspect are unlawfully registered. Though the law has had a more muted effect than some expected, it has forced Democrats into new battles. According to ProPublica, an investigative outlet, in two years nearly 100,000 registrations were challenged (oddly, 89,000 challenges were filed by just six people). Those who fail to respond to the notices can get kicked off the rolls. In early January Democrats lost in court to True the Vote, a conservative group leading the challenge crusade. Following the decision, its leaders announced the launch of new automated mass-challenge software.

All this amounts to the most dynamic political tug-of-war outside the capital. “Without a doubt there was some sore-loser politics involved, but SB202 addressed real issues as well,” says a Republican who took part in its deliberations. The handful of Georgia judges making decisions on the Trump trial, election security and voting-rights cases have the hard task of distinguishing between political high-jinks and good-faith arguments. Their rulings will matter for all Americans. ■

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