The Georgia Board of Elections sent a letter last week seeking the Justice Department’s intervention ahead of the midterms. If enacted, the board’s last-minute requests would upend the state’s voting system days before early in-person voting begins, providing fresh fuel for false claims of fraud from President Donald Trump and his allies.
Attorney General Todd Blanche, should he decide to get involved, could potentially go from merely defending Trump’s previous election manipulation in court to being an active participant in a whole new assault on democracy.
As we saw in 2020, even the suggestion of malfeasance is enough to bolster efforts to deny an election’s results.
Georgia has remained a key focus for Trump World’s false claims of mass election fraud more than half a decade later. FBI agents even executed a search and seizure warrant in January for Fulton County’s 2020 election records as part of yet another a probe into Joe Biden’s win over Trump. The ongoing struggle has placed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — himself a Republican who refused Trump’s infamous request to “find” 30,000 votes — and the state’s largely pro-Trump election board at odds ever since.
Among other things, the board’s letter asks the Department of Justice to block Georgia’s use of QR codes to tabulate ballots, and force the state to immediately update its voting machines’ software to patch a potential security flaw. (It also takes a swipe at Raffensperger, calling on Blanche to “hold the Secretary of State and any responsible officials accountable” for any potential alteration or destruction of election records that may have occurred.)
As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, state officials have been working to address the latter point, but it’s far too close to the election to make the major changes the board requested without time to ensure an emergency fix doesn’t break something unexpected. A spokesperson for Raffensperger said in a statement that the board’s members are “trying to cause chaos at the 11th hour.”
That may be true given the state’s increasingly purple tilt, and the promising trends for Democrats in this year’s races. But even if the DOJ decides not to heed all the board’s suggestions, any engagement on this front opens the door to a new round of conspiracy theories, should Raffensperger continue to resist. As we saw in 2020, even the suggestion of malfeasance is enough to bolster efforts to deny an election’s results.
The request puts Blanche in a position that he has seemingly worked hard to avoid. He spent nearly two years in courtrooms as a member of Trump’s legal defense team, working across indictments his client faced in Washington, New York and Florida. Only the sprawling conspiracy case against the then-former president and his allies in Georgia for attempting to overturn the state’s election results went forward without Blanche’s participation.
Crucially, Blanche never had to defend Trump’s post-2020 actions at trial. Rather than directly refute the evidence and witness testimony, the defense suggested that presidential immunity for acts taken in office extended not just to civil cases but to criminal cases as well. The Supreme Court ultimately agreed, leaving it to the lower courts to determine which actions in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were “official acts” and which could be prosecuted — but Trump’s electoral victory in 2024 rendered the issue moot.
Trump rewarded Blanche’s loyalty by naming him deputy attorney general, rising to the top spot after his predecessor’s departure this spring. As the ACLU documented in July, he’s been part of an ongoing assault on election integrity, having “overseen escalating tactics to improperly obtain election records, intimidate election officials, and interfere with state election administration.”
What he hasn’t done, however, is offer a full-throated claim that Trump won the 2020 election. Blanche somehow avoided being asked whether he believed Biden won during his confirmation hearing. But during a Fox News interview ahead of his Senate confirmation, he balanced a refusal to admit that Trump lost to Biden with managing expectations from MAGA true believers:
“It takes a lot of work to uncover what happened in 2020,” Blanche stated. “It takes a lot of old, good-old-fashioned law enforcement, police work, which is what we’re doing, and we have great prosecutors working on it as well, and I assure the American people that as soon as we have something to say for it — whether it’s charges, whether it’s a report, whether it’s the results of an investigation — the American people will learn about what we uncovered,” he added.
Since then, Blanche has mostly stayed out of FBI Director Kash Patel’s way as he has resuscitated the Georgia investigation and reassigned hundreds of agents onto the case. He has instead provided cover for the probe to continue, waving off suggestions of impropriety. During a visit to Atlanta last month, the attorney general defended the Fulton County raid to local reporters as necessary for an ongoing criminal investigation: “There is this idea that we’re doing it for nefarious purposes. We’re not.”
Giving full credence to the election board’s requests would be more likely to result in actual disenfranchisement and questionable results than leaving the status quo in place. The best thing for Blanche to do would be to let this request sit on his desk until early voting begins, before lamenting that it’s too late for the department to act. He could even throw in a promise to investigate the matter more fully after November for good measure.
But if Blanche chooses to ignore the board’s requests, he risks facing Trump’s wrath. The Atlantic reported Friday that Trump is still expecting indictments of his political enemies to come from the FBI’s probe and that without them, “Patel’s and Blanche’s jobs would be on the line.” (Several FBI officials told The Atlantic that its reporting was “false” and defended Patel without denying the FBI’s focus on re-investigating the 2020 election.)
Should Blanche acquiesce to the Georgia election board’s letter, his position would likely be a little more secure — but American democracy would be left that much more vulnerable.
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