Bookman: Deference to Trump delusion leaves Georgia in election law limbo

Donald Trump can never admit that he lost an election, anywhere, at any time, under any circumstance. And I’m not just talking about swing states like Georgia. Take California, for instance. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump lost California by 20 points.  No shame in that, right? California is one of the most liberal states […]

Donald Trump can never admit that he lost an election, anywhere, at any time, under any circumstance. And I’m not just talking about swing states like Georgia.

Take California, for instance. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump lost California by 20 points.  No shame in that, right? California is one of the most liberal states in the country, and is also the home state of his opponent, Kamala Harris. Of course Trump lost it.

But according to Trump, he won California. Or rather, he lost California only because the election had been “rigged” against him. He not only won the state, he says he won it “by a lot.” 

In one sense such talk is so ridiculous as to be almost funny. In another sense, it has real consequences, because Republicans being Republicans, they are forced to pretend to believe whatever Trump tells them to believe. And here in Georgia, based on no more evidence than he had to claim that he won California, Trump continues to tell them that he won the state in 2020.

So Georgia Republicans have to pretend that’s true, and try to do something about it.

Two years ago, Georgia’s GOP legislators pretended it was true by passing a new law requiring a whole new way of casting and counting ballots, touting the new system as necessary to prevent the fraud that didn’t happen in 2020. They set a deadline of this summer to have the new system in place and running in time for the upcoming midterm elections.

Then, to prove just how serious they were about election integrity, they neglected to authorize the funds needed to buy the new machines and train elections staff on the new system that they had mandated. Here we are, less than three months from the deadline that they themselves wrote into state law, and not a damn thing has been done.

Wait. 

It gets worse.

State legislators gathered in Atlanta in January for the latest session of the General Assembly. They were here in January, February, March and into April, knowing full well that the deadline was looming and could never be met. All they needed to do was pass a bill delaying the deadline that they themselves had set, while authorizing money to pay for that new equipment and training.

They did neither.

To review:

They invented an election-fraud problem that didn’t exist, then they claimed to have fixed the election fraud problem that didn’t exist, then they failed to fund their solution to the problem that didn’t exist, thus creating an actual major, real-life problem, and then they refused to fix that problem of their own making.

And these people make fun of how Fulton County runs elections?

Legislators have now gone home, back to their districts. Leaders of the House and Senate, along with Gov. Brian Kemp, say they may try to call them back into special session before the July deadline to fix things.

Or, they say, maybe not.

“Maybe not” means they’ll dump the problem they created onto the laps of state and federal judges. “Maybe not” means they’ll be able to whine later about the unfairness of whatever solution those judges impose. “Maybe not” means even more election chaos, and even more public doubt about the credibility of the electoral process. They have to know how irresponsible they would be to do that.

Or maybe not.