When it becomes obvious that you made a bad decision, the solution is obvious - lie about what actually happened.  That seems to be the maxim Georgia Republicans are abiding by these days. 

Case in point: the other morning, I was listening to NPR and some GOP state representative or another was on trying to justify the Republican-dominated state legislature taking over the Election Boards of mostly Democratic Fulton and DeKalb Counties due to alleged "election mismanagement."  

"My phone doesn't ring very often," he started off claiming, but when people in his district went to bed on Election Night in 2020 believing that Donald Trump had won the election and then woke up the next morning being told, "No, Joe Biden won," well, he alleged, people in Georgia are smart enough to sniff out a fraud when they smelled one.  There's just no way the election could have changed overnight, he claimed, and "that's when my phone started ringing." He claimed people were calling him, their elected representative, to get to the root of the fraud and set the record straight.  "My phone started ringing," he repeated several times, as if they were what mattered.

His position, he claimed, was that Fulton and DeKalb Counties are so incompetent, so corrupt, and so lazy (white bigot speak for "so black"), that they weren't capable of turning in ballot results in time for the evening news. In the dead of night, he asserted, when no one was watching, they somehow "found" thousands of Biden votes and tilted the election to Biden.  This needs to be looked into, he claimed, and since the counties can't seem to run their own elections themselves, the state needs to step in and take over.

Sounds good (actually, it doesn't, but for argument's sake let's just say it does), but that's all bullshit and not at all what happened last November.  No one, not even Fox News, was calling the election for Trump by the 11:00 o'clock news that night.  Every prognosticator and pundit I heard had been predicting for days that because of the large number of mail-in ballots that year (due to the covids), final results may not be available for several days. What's more, they noted, the early results would be mainly the same-day, in-person votes, which due to Republican misgivings about mail-in voting would be largely for Trump, but as time went on and mail-in votes were unsealed and counted, the results would begin to lean toward Biden.  The only question was, would there be enough mail-in votes to turn the tide from red to blue?

As it turns out, there were, and that's why the "phone started ringing."  If people were naïve enough, or underinformed enough, just to think that Trump's early lead at the polls meant that he had won, well, they went to bed ignorant and woke up informed.

Let's take a moment to go over what actually happened.  The Georgia Primary was originally scheduled to he held on March 24, 2020, but due to concerns about the new coronavirus breaking out across the state and the country, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger postponed the primary from March 24 - first to May 19 and then even later to June 9.  In addition, he mailed out 6.9 million applications for absentee voting (mail-in ballots).  To be clear, Georgia did not mail actual ballots out to everybody as some have claimed (cough, Trump, cough) but just applications to vote by mail if that was our preference.  Since I was over the age of 65 and among the population thought most vulnerable to the covids, the application allowed me the option to choose to vote by mail-in ballot in the June 9 primary, the November 3, 2020 general election, and all the way through to the January 5, 2021 run-off election (if necessary).  

All this, remember, was due to concerns about the covids.  At the time of Raffensperger's first decision to move the primary date, 66 people had tested positive for the covids in Georgia, and one person had died.

While much of the voting in the June 9 primary was conducted by mail, in-person voting suffered major logistical problems and long lines across the state.  These delays and difficulties encouraged even more voters to opt for mail-in ballots in the November 3 general election. Trump and the Republican Party had already started their litany of complaints - all unfounded - about mail-in ballots, so the majority of absentee voters were likely Democrats.  It was because of Republican Raffensperger's decision to mail out absentee ballot applications and Republican consolidation of primary polling places that made in-person voting so unappealing.

Last March, Georgia Republicans passed SB 202, a sweeping new election law that restricts Georgia voters' right to cast a ballot. Famously, the law even prohibits people from providing food or water to people waiting on the long lines that will inevitably form due to these new restrictions.  But most ominously, this new law takes control of the election away from an elected official, the Secretary of State, and gives it to the state election board, which is dominated by Republican appointees. The law allows that state election board to seize control of county election boards wherever it deems necessary. The state board can disqualify voters, move polling precincts, and potentially even refuse to certify an election count. 

I have two more points to make here, each of which will likely piss off people from one or the other parties.  First, while Congress tries to pass legislation to prevent the kind of restrictions on voting rights Georgia has passed, many of these rights did not exist - or were not much exercised - before the covid epidemic.  Last year was the first time applications for mail-in votes were sent out, and while it's a good idea and no fraud has been associated with the mail-in ballots, stopping the SOS from sending them out in the future isn't really taking away something we really had before the pandemic, if we're really honest about it.  While some of, if not most of, the new Georgia legislation does do exactly that, all of it doesn't.  There were things we did in response to the covid epidemic that don't need to be done done in the absence of the virus.

Now while that might piss off my friends on the left, now I'll piss off the right.  The covid epidemic isn't over, largely due to Repulican refusal to wear masks, socially distance, and mostly, to not get vaccinated.  As of today, an average of 3,914 people test positive for the covids in the state each day and there are an average of 11 deaths per day.  So far, 21,033 Georgians have died from the covids. Remember, when Raffensperger postponed the primary and mailed out the absentee applications, there had only been one death and 66 infections.

On the date of the June 9 primary, there was an average of 672 positive tests per day.  On the date of the November 3 general election, there were 1,914 new cases per day.  By the time of the January 5, 2021 run-off election for the Senate, there were 8,162 positive tests per day. As noted above, we now have 3,914 positive tests per day, mostly among the unvaccinated Republicans.

If a cumulative total of 66 positive tests and one death makes in-person voting too risky not to allow absentee voting, then 3,914 positive tests per day (1,172,987 cases to date, 7th worse in the country) most certainly doesn't mean it's now "safe."  Until we get this pandemic under control, we should continue to encourage absentee voting and other safety measures, and not lose sleep over "our phone ringing" from people who don't understand how vote-counting works.