• Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz are campaigning this week in Georgia, one of the most crucial swing states in this year’s presidential election. Before Harris replaced President Biden on the ticket, the state was looking like a lost cause for Democrats. But recent polls show it’s now back in play. Democrats aren’t dealing with a level playing field, though. Most recently, the state’s Republican-controlled election board approved a new rule requiring counties to delay certification of votes if there are any discrepancies in the voting process. Democrats sued to block the change on Monday, saying it could lead to “mass disenfranchisement of eligible, registered Georgians.” ProPublica reporter Doug Bock Clark breaks down what’s happening in Georgia.
• And in headlines: Special Counsel Jack Smith is asking a federal appeals court to revive former President Donald Trump’s federal documents case, Trump is once again threatening to back out of the Sept. 10 presidential debate on ABC, and more than a million doses of the polio vaccine have arrived in Gaza.

Show Notes:

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Josie Duffy Rice: It’s Tuesday, August 27th. I’m Josie Duffy Rice. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And I’m Tre’vell Anderson and this is What a Day. The show happy to report that the Trump Harris debate may not happen because Trump’s own campaign is demanding that his mic be muted when it’s not his turn. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Imagine your candidate being such a liability that you’re like, make sure his mic is off as much as possible. That feels normal. 

Tre’vell Anderson: We don’t want to hear him no way.

Josie Duffy Rice: That’s true. Keep it off the whole time as far as I’m concerned. [laughter] [music break]

Tre’vell Anderson: On today’s show, special counsel Jack Smith asks a federal appeals court to reinstate charges against former President Donald Trump in his classified documents case. Plus, the reunion you didn’t know you needed. 

Josie Duffy Rice: But first, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, are campaigning in Georgia later this week. The two are taking a bus tour around southern Georgia, and the vice president will then finish things up with a rally in Savannah on Thursday. Before Harris replaced President Biden on the ticket, the state was looking like a lost cause for Democrats, but it’s now very much in play. The latest polling from FiveThirtyEight has Vice President Harris trailing Donald Trump by less than a percentage point. 

Tre’vell Anderson: But Democrats aren’t dealing with a level playing field in the swing state. Last month, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, created a controversial website that was technically supposed to be for people to cancel their voter registration after moving out of the state. But a glitch on the site quickly allowed anyone to access private information that could be used to cancel other people’s voter registration. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Tech? Not really our thing in Georgia, you know. And in addition to that, last week, the state’s Republican controlled election board passed a new rule which will require counties to delay certifying votes if they encounter any discrepancies in the voting process. Experts say minor discrepancies happen all the time, and that the new rule will add unnecessary delays to the voting process. On Monday, the Democratic National Committee, along with the Democratic Party of Georgia, sued the state election board, arguing the rule could lead to, quote, “mass disenfranchisement of eligible registered Georgians.” To learn more about these last minute changes to Georgia’s elections, I spoke with Doug Bock Clark, a reporter for ProPublica covering the South. He started off by explaining more about the county’s certification rule. 

Doug Bock Clark: What this rule does is it gives power to county election board members to arguably decide if they want to certify electoral results from their counties. Now, historically, certifying electoral results has not been a controversial thing. There’s over 100 years of Georgia case law. There’s tons of national case law that when an election is done, the certification of it is a mandatory act, not a discretionary one. But what this rule does is it tries to allow county election board members, many of whom are conservatives, the ability to not certify or to delay certifying if they have doubts about the results. 

Josie Duffy Rice: So how is the board, which consists mostly of Republicans, justifying the need for these changes? 

Doug Bock Clark: The Republican members of this board are really pointing to questions that they have about the 2020 election. You know, many of them have outside of their capacity as board members, have questions of the results of that election and have been very involved in denying its validity in different ways, shapes and forms. And Trump himself has really responded to this. At a Atlanta rally about a week before the rule passed, or not long before the rule passed, he called each one of these board members out by name and praised them. 

[clip of Donald Trump] I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Georgia State Election Board is in a very positive way. This is a very positive thing, Marjorie, they’re on fire. They’re doing a great job. Three members, Janice Johnson, Rick Jeffries and Janelle King, three people are all pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory. They’re fighting. 

Doug Bock Clark: You know, outside observers to the state election board have felt that Trump is really encouraging these state election board members to change the rules at the last minute for this election. This current majority on the state election board has not actually been in power very long. Until about May it had a much more moderate group of Republicans. There was a third Republican on there who practiced election law, who was a specialist in this. And he actually called the rule that we’re discussing, this rule about certification. He actually described it as illegal while voting it down in a May meeting. But shortly after he did so, he was removed from the board. He is an appointee of the Republican Speaker of the Georgia House, and in his place, a new member who does not have any experience in election administration, um who is a high level official in the Georgia Republican Party, was appointed. And she became the deciding vote to pass this sort of reconstituted version of that certification rule. Just a little while ago in August. 

Josie Duffy Rice: So in reality, how significant are these kind of discrepancies that the board can look into? Um. That county boards will be required to look into. What are we talking about in terms of that could make them unlikely to certify the election? 

Doug Bock Clark: So the rule is triggered by differences between the number of ballots and the number of voters in a precinct. And a precinct is sort of the smallest unit of um the election system. And when you have millions of people voting in Georgia, I think there were five or six million people who voted in Georgia last election. There are going to be some small discrepancies. The ballot gets stuck in a scanner. A memory stick fails to upload, somebody starts the voting process, gets a call that something, and they pick up their kid or something, gets sick, leaves the line, doesn’t finish it. So it is not that uncommon. According to elections experts to have a small discrepancy, one or two across a precinct. And these are normal. But what this rule does is it says if you have one of these discrepancies, you have to investigate it, and you cannot report the results of that precinct until the investigation is sort of complete. And it also gives, you know, the county board members discretion, perhaps about how they want to compute those votes. And so it seems like an arcane thing, but by stopping the counting at that precinct level, you could actually be delaying the vote totals going forward. And even more, because there are more voters, more ballots in large urban Democratic counties. This, according to election experts, is more likely to happen in counties that are really important for the Democrats, like around the Atlanta area. And so it’s a small technical thing. But by inserting that rule, experts are worried that you’re setting up a situation where the votes could be stopped in important Democratic precincts and counties. 

Josie Duffy Rice: You reported that some prominent election deniers secretly pushed for this rule change. Can you tell us about that? What was their role here? 

Doug Bock Clark: Yeah. So I think one of the things that really concerned people about this rule is they just weren’t quite sure where it was coming from. And I noticed in, in a very early version of the rule, there was just one line that had been overlooked elsewhere and that identified that this rule had been submitted, but by what’s called the Election Research Institute. And that’s a group that is led by a woman named Heather Honey and Heather Honey has been involved in a number of efforts linked to what’s called the Election Integrity Network, a nationwide group that has worked to sort of undermine the legitimacy of American elections and to change elections in favor of Republican priorities. The most well-known person who’s in charge of the Election Integrity Network is Cleta Mitchell, who was on the infamous call in which Trump asked the Georgia secretary of state to find him enough votes to win the election in 2020 in Georgia. And so the moment I saw that sort of small connection, I knew that it was time for me to keep digging, and I started to find other stuff as well. 

Josie Duffy Rice: One question I had for you is about Brian Kemp’s role in this. So on Monday, Governor Brian Kemp’s office told the AJC that they’re looking into whether or not he has the authority to remove members of this state Board of Elections due to ethics complaints. What should we take from that? Do you get the sense that that’s actually something he could do, that he really wants to do? And if the makeup of the board changed, would they be able to even change this rule before the election? Like what options are there for the governor? 

Doug Bock Clark: So this is really getting into pretty unprecedented territory at this point. Both the fact that these rules are changing so close to the election, when absentee ballots are able to be requested, and, you know, sort of that process is starting. But also in the fact that you have these three sort of MAGA aligned state election board members who, you know, are doing things which Trump seems to be cheering on. But then you also have the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, and you have the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who have been very explicit in that they do not think that this is a great idea. Um. You know, Raffensperger has come out, his office has issued a very harshly worded statement, you know, just calling these rules misguided, a terrible idea, and, you know, saying essentially that we’re setting up elections in Georgia for failure. It’s not just the certification rule. There’s a whole bunch of rules they’ve passed, um which change the election system in a whole lot of ways. So this certification rule and one other certification rule are an essential part of what they’re pushing back against. And so where this goes, we don’t know yet to be quite honest. You sort of have different groups that are pushing in different directions. 

Josie Duffy Rice: That was my conversation with ProPublica reporter Doug Bock Clark. And that is the latest for now. We’ll get to some headlines in a moment, but if you like our show, make sure to subscribe and share with your friends. [music break]

[AD BREAK] 

Josie Duffy Rice: Let’s get to some headlines. 

[sung] Headlines. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Special Counsel Jack Smith wants an appeals court to revive the federal documents case against former President Donald Trump. In a filing Monday with the Atlanta based 11th circuit, Smith said the lower court judge who dismissed the case, Judge Aileen Cannon, had ignored decades of precedent in doing so. Cannon tossed the documents case against Trump last month, claiming that Smith had been improperly appointed by the Justice Department. But in his filing, Smith said that decision, quote, “deviated from binding Supreme Court precedent.” The case centers on whether Trump illegally mishandled classified government documents at the end of his presidency by stashing boxes of them at his Mar-A-Lago home in Florida. It’s unclear when the 11th Circuit will make a decision in the case, but it could eventually end up at the Supreme Court. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Meanwhile, Trump is once again threatening to back out of the upcoming presidential debate scheduled for September 10th on ABC. During a campaign stop Monday, Trump criticized ABC for being, quote, “the worst of all networks.” 

[clip of Donald Trump] I said, why am I doing it? Let’s do it with another network. I want to do it. You know, I won because of debates. Ask Biden. [laughter]

Tre’vell Anderson: Yikes. Later during a speech in Detroit, Trump went even further when he said, quote, “if there’s a debate.” The September 10th meeting between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is so far the only debates scheduled between the two candidates before the election. We should note this isn’t the first time Trump suggested he may pull out of the debate with Harris. He floated the idea earlier this month, saying he’d only take part in a debate on Fox, which had never been agreed to. A bunch of new polls show Harris with the lead nationally and in some swing states. 

Josie Duffy Rice: More than 1.2 million doses of the polio vaccine arrived in Gaza on Monday, and millions more are on the way. Officials are working to avoid a potential outbreak in a densely populated region, after Gaza’s health ministry reported its first case of polio in 25 years. A ten month old baby became partially paralyzed earlier this month after contracting the virus. Local health officials said that they hope to begin administering the vaccine on Saturday, but conducting a successful vaccination campaign will prove difficult amid Israel’s war on Gaza. Officials for the World Health Organization and Unicef say that aid workers need at least a week long ceasefire, or what they called a polio pause, to vaccinate more than 600,000 Palestinian children, a measure Hamas said it would support amid stalled negotiations for a permanent ceasefire. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And finally, Stacy London and Clinton Kelly, the former hosts of TLC’s What Not To Wear, announced that they’re reuniting for a new fashion reality show. Many remember London and Kelly from their 12 season tenure of throwing out people’s closets and teaching people the hard and fast rules of fashion. The duo is now partnering with Prime Video for a series called Wear Whatever the F You Want, and they made clear in a statement that the show would be less focused on imposing strict rules and more about refining someone’s sense of style. Kelly and London wrote, quote, “these days we have zero interest in telling people what to do based on society’s norms, because there are no more norms.” Josie, I need to know, are you tuning in? 

Josie Duffy Rice: I am tuning in immediately as soon as it comes out. I’m so excited. My mom’s really excited. The whole family’s excited. It’s going to be great. That was an amazing show. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Listen. Come on for some, you know, multi-generational family viewing. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Yes. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Okay. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Yes, we’re very intellectual. And we will be watching the new What’s Not to Wear. 

Tre’vell Anderson: [laugh] I love that for us. And those are the headlines. 

[AD BREAK]

Josie Duffy Rice: That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, ask what kind of vengeful God would send us Judge Aileen Cannon and tell your friends to listen. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And if you’re into reading and not just reports of Donald Trump’s lead shrinking in Georgia like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Tre’vell Anderson. 

Josie Duffy Rice: I’m Josie Duffy Rice. 

[spoken together] And dress us Stacy and Clinton. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Please. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Or like, maybe I should dress them. No shade because you know, Josie, I be out here styling and profiling on them, if I do say so myself. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Wait, that’s a good show idea. Where people redress Stacy and Clinton, that’s a good idea. [laughter]

Tre’vell Anderson: Listen. Give me my producer credit. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Oh. It’s yours. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Bill Lancz. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. Our producer is Michell Eloy. We had production help today from Ethan Oberman, Greg Walters and Julia Claire. Our showrunner is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.