At an olive grove in a bedroom community in Atlanta, David Perdue promotes a conspiracy theory. The slender, silver-haired former U.S. senator is here to win votes in the Republican primary for Georgia. His pitch is attacking the incumbent, Brian Kemp, for not keeping pace with Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Mr Perdue described the ballots sent by post as “suspicious”. Thousands of people, he warns, may have voted illegally. He says Brad Raffensperger, the Republican official who certified Biden’s victory in the state, must resign. Put him in charge and he will ensure that his party will not lose another federal election, Mr. Perdue promises to the residents of Cartersville, who gathered at this boutique store on their main street with red bricks one night a week. “I want a Republican in the White House in ’24, that is the first goal. “The second thing is that I want the majority of the Senate back,” he said. “The only way to win both is to win the governor’s fight.” Mr Perdue’s term is part of a concerted campaign by Mr Trump and his associates to bring the country’s electoral system under control ahead of the 2024 presidential race. The US does not have a federal election administration, leaving individual states, counties and cities to formulate their own rules and count their own votes. In this year’s election, candidates backing the former president’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen are aiming to win governors and legislative majorities in key states. They are passing a series of restrictive laws that make voting difficult. And they run local commissions that administer polling stations and certify election results, giving them the power to set the rules for voting, remove voters from the lists and reject ballots. All of this raises the prospect that, next time, Mr. Trump or some other defeated candidate could carry out the illegal seizure of power that he attempted unsuccessfully in 2020. “If you have party agents who can control the entire voting process from registration to certification,” says Helen Butler, executive director of a social justice group in Georgia, “there is a chance you could carry out this coup.” Mr Perdue greets supporters at an event on February 2 in Covington, Ga. Campaign literature and registration papers suggest his connection to Donald Trump. Elijah Nouvelage / Reuters states and counties In the weeks since his 2020 defeat, Mr. Trump and his campaign team have urged lawmakers and election officials in many states to reverse the result. In an infamous phone call, he asked Georgia’s foreign minister, Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to surpass Biden’s 11,779-ballot victory in Georgia. All of these efforts failed, as did the January 6 uprising in the Capitol by Trump’s supporters. Since then, the former president and his entourage have focused their efforts on changing the system or taking over. Over the past year, 20 Republican-run states have passed laws that make voting more difficult. Georgia’s enactment is called the Electoral Integrity Act, better known by its legislative name SB 202. The law restricts mail-order voting, which was overwhelming for Democrats in 2020, and sets limits on the number of days and hours for early vote. It also gives the state government the opportunity to fire election officials and assume their powers. In a southern state that has been at the center of the civil rights movement, opponents of SB 202 see it as a nuisance of the age of secession, when the government ousted black citizens. “It’s definitely a game to stop this rising electorate – young voters, black voters, brown voters – from accessing the ballot,” said Aklima Khondoker, 38, chief legal officer of the New Georgia Project, a voting rights group. . “It took 12,000 votes for Georgia to move in a more progressive direction. “They are working to reduce these numbers through various methods that add up the repression of voters and the obstacles on the ballot.” A voter gets a sticker after casting a ballot in Athens, Ga., On November 3, 2020. Joshua L. Jones / Athens Banner-Herald via AP In places where similar laws have been enacted, they have disproportionately kept black, low-income and younger voters out of the polls. All of these demographics lean toward the Democratic Party. A study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, found that in the state’s two most populous counties alone, up to 23,000 people were barred from voting in 2016 following a new law restricting the types of IDs voters could use. Georgia lawmaker Timothy Barr says SB 202 is needed to crack down on illegal voting. He supports another bill that would go even further with the complete ban on ballots. Mr. Barr, who is running for Congress this year, has the slogan “Trump won Georgia” on his campaign signs. “If we lose confidence in the form of voting, I think we will have lost our form of government,” he said. “You know, I think he’s just ripe for fraud.” Mr Raffensperger’s office has repeatedly investigated and dismissed allegations of election fraud. Election officials say SB 202’s obstacles to voting, on the other hand, will be real. Pat Pullar, a member of the electoral council in Clayton County, Atlanta, says the new bill left nearly 300,000 people in its majority black community with just two ballots, up from nine in the previous election. This meant pulling the ballot boxes from traditionally low-turnout areas, making it even less likely that people there would vote. Trump supporters gather outside State Farm Arena in Atlanta on November 5, 2020, as ballots are counted inside. Megan Warner / Getty Images The power of the electoral council became apparent in 2020. Mr Trump’s supporters, said Ms Polar, appeared at board meetings to ask officials to decide that thousands of people in the county did not have the right to vote and should deleted from the directories. There was no evidence to support their claim, he says, and the council rejected it. A different council may have joined. “It restores everyone. “You include people with disabilities, the elderly, young voters,” said Pullar, 70. The control of these electoral councils is another front in the war for the vote. There is a council in each prefecture, and it is responsible for the basic mechanics of elections – maintaining voter lists, setting up polling stations and counting ballots. Last year, the legislature cleared many councils. Where previously they were either non-partisan or appointed by an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, they are now elected by Republican-led county committees or by conservative judges. This led to the expulsion of the Democrats. In Spalding County, Republicans used their majority in the electoral council to cancel early voting on Sundays. Sunday’s vote is a key element in our efforts to get out of the black community. African American churches organize “Souls to the Poll” events to get churches to vote en masse after services. The new president of Spalding’s electoral council also promotes conspiracy theories. Ben Johnson, whose day-to-day job is running an IT company, wrote on Twitter about “ballot files found in the trash” and claimed that an Italian company had used satellites to change the results of the 2020 vote. In one case, he posted a meme suggesting that the United States opposes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because “corrupt” members of Congress have business interests there. Mr. Johnson has tweeted more than a dozen times about QAnon, the bizarre belief that Mr. Trump’s opponents are part of a satanic cult. “I hate to say it, but much of the information provided by Q turned out to be accurate,” he wrote during the 2020 election campaign. Pam Peters, a newly elected member of the Floyd County Electoral Council, has been accused of electoral fraud in the past. In a November 2020 video, she suggested that an election official in her city added votes to the presidential election report after firing polling observers during the counting process. “They really did not want us in the recording room,” Ms. Peters said in the video, which was posted on YouTube by the Tea Party Patriots, a group that helped organize the Jan. 6 demonstrations. “No one can know what this lady was putting in the laptop.” Lincolnton, Ga., Is the seat of Lincoln County. Nicole Craine / The New York Times In Lincoln County, the recently revised board moved late last year to reduce the number of polling stations from seven to one. A 2-hour drive east of Atlanta, amidst a pine forest along the Savannah River, Lincoln is an extensive, rural area with an aging, low-income population. Its 8,000 inhabitants are spread over 670 square kilometers, which means that a single polling station would force some to make a two-hour return trip to vote. For Helen Cavitt-Bennett, 74, a lifelong black woman, she feels that the struggle for access to the vote has come full circle. He remembers a march on civil rights in 1965, the same year he was old enough to vote. As protesters marched through Lincoln, the county’s only city, a mob of white residents attacked. They hit the protesters on the ground, supported trucks in the demonstration and threatened the protesters with weapons. Others dropped the names of the protesters to retaliate later. Ms Cavitt-Bennett says she was later denied a job at the bank because …
