Georgia On Our Minds
By Mark Van Proyen
October 26, 2024
Honoré Daumier, “A Meeting of Lawyers,” c. 1860, oil on wood, 7 1/2 x 9 1/2”.
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.
Soon after most of you read this, the 2024 election will take place. No doubt, in the days and weeks following, the media will be full of post-election autopsies, excuses, blame narratives and pleas for cooler heads to prevail, as is always the case. But it may not be clear who actually won the Presidential tally. This is because the machinery for undermining the will of the people was already in place long before the election, activated into overwrought frenzy after a narrow Harris victory. The plan is the same as it was in 2020: create enough chaos in the vote tabulation process to force the House of Representatives to take matters into its own hands by having each State delegation cast a single vote on the electoral outcome, thereby disenfranchising the more populous states while privileging predominantly rural states.
This would be the ultimate amplification of the already pernicious imbalance in the antiquated electoral college, which, combined with gerrymandered congressional districts, already hands advantage to the Republicans. The statistic that is worth remembering is that, when state populations are squared up on a percentage basis with relative electoral college influence, it takes three California voters to equal one voter in many low-population states such as Montana. Because she would be constitutionally required to preside over a final electoral certification in the same election in which she was a candidate, Vice-President Harris will be in an awkward, if powerful, position. And we have not forgotten Al Gore’s gracious concession in a similar situation after the election of 2000-2001 was settled in a one-shot ruling by the ever-partisan Supreme Court.
Philip Guston,”Flatlands,” 1970, oil on canvas, 70 x 114 1/2”. Courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
This time around MAGA loyalists are already positioning themselves on county and state election boards of all of the swing states, making ridiculous demands about such things like having each vote counted by hand, or anything else that might delay or reverse the announcement of an outcome unfavorable to them. A recent Reuters report has identified 37 deniers of the 2020 election who have positioned themselves on the election boards of the largest counties in five of the seven swing states. A recent article in Rolling Stone puts that number at 70 deniers. In Georgia, a new law encourages citizens to make an unlimited number of complaints about voting irregularities, all requiring official investigation. The plan is once again to flood the zone with manufactured disputes leading to uncertainty, so much so that the courts that would normally adjudicate such disputes could never hope to get the job done by January 20, 2025, especially as any appeal to the hyper-partisan Supreme Court will almost certainly fall on deaf jurisprudential ears.
The downward spiral began with the disastrous Citizens United decision of 2010, where the court held that the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other associations. This made it impossible to track dark money’s impact on the political process while also establishing the dubious doctrine of corporate citizenship. The trajectory of bad SCOTUS decisions ranging from Dobbs v. Jackson (2022), declaring Roe v. Wade unconstitutional, to Trump v. United States (2024), expanding Presidential immunity, are logical developments of the earlier Citizens United decision. And as irony would have it, it was the Republicans who historically complained about the Court’s “legislating from the bench,” even as they are the ones who are doing exactly that now. Of course, it is those same hypocritical Republicans who make so much noise about upholding the Constitution while working overtime to undermine its core values, but that is where we are at.
Gregory Crewdson, “Untitled,” 1999, chromogenic print, 50 x 60”. Courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
All of this is neatly summarized in a recent documentary, titled “Vigilantes Inc.,” directed by David Ambrose, based on work done by investigative reporter Greg Palast, who went to Georgia to get the story behind the story. In this case there is a lot going on, much more than simply packing county election boards with MAGA stooges. Palast is an old-school investigative reporter of the kind that has almost disappeared in our own troubled times of newspaper extinctions, political perfidy, and abject celebrity worship.
The film’s title refers to a rebranding of the Ku Klux Klan, currently engaged in widespread programs of election sabotage and voter intimidation. Georgia Senate Bill 202 (adopted in 2021) opened the floodgates of electoral skullduggery by making mail-in voting almost impossible and severely limiting ballot drop boxes. It also makes providing food and water to people waiting in line to vote a crime. Aside from the packing of election boards with MAGA loyalists, it also allows any Georgia citizen to file an irregular voting complaint about any other voter, detailing how some individuals have generated hundreds of such complaints, essentially all of which are dismissed after routine investigations. But each of these investigations takes time, and that is the real point.
In Georgia and some other swing states, Republicans are also organizing squadrons of “poll watchers” numbering in the thousands, all engaging in various efforts to make voting more difficult for those members of the electorate not inclined to vote Republican. These are classic Jim Crow-era shenanigans that would never pass muster after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but now seem very much of a piece amid the new SCOTUS order.
Swoon, “Recovery Diaspora,” 2013, mural in The Bowery, New York. Courtesy of Groundswell, NYC.
Near the end of “Vigilantes Inc.”, those people are given poetic voice by a group of African American women toiling at an antebellum plantation, singing ancient songs about a better future, while Rosario Dawson gives a heartrending voice-over narration. The thought that Georgia might be the state that tips the national election is not lost on anyone who watches the film.
“Vigilantes Inc.” has its heroes and villains. Palast is the principal hero, garbed like a film noir detective while asking innocent sounding Columbo questions of neo-Confederate dullards. At one point, he and his film crew are invited into the McMansion home of Pamela Reardon, a county supervisor candidate in Cobb County, Georgia, the same district represented in Congress by Margolrie Taylor Greene. Reardon was a major sponsor of SB 202. After falling for a few gotchas, Reardon realizes that Palast has boxed her into admitting that she was motivated by racism, at which point she throws Palast out of her house.
Frederick Remington, “The Dry Camp,” 1907, oil on canvas, 27 3/7 x 45”. Courtesy of the Fort Worth Museum.
Another hero is Stacy Abrams, who lost a close race for Governor in Georgia. Abrams organized a turn-out-the-vote effort that led to Biden winning that state in 2020, as well as getting two Democrats elected to the Senate that same year, handing leadership of the Senate to the Democrats. She offers a sobering assessment of the implications of SB 202, warning that it could become a national model if Trump is certified as President.
The chief villain in “Vigilantes Inc.” is Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who seems to be eyeing a 2028 presidential run. Kemp is also a supporter of SB 202, although he has been shrewd in creating just enough distance between himself and Trump to seem like a “rational Republican” in the Nikki Haley mode. Closer examination reveals that, despite his 2020 resistance to Trump’s effort to steal votes in Georgia, he is no such thing.
