He asserted that more than 12,000 votes had been switched there from him to Joe Biden on Election Night. “It was like a miracle!” Trump bellowed, stretching his arms sarcastically after the rallygoers booed.
It also was completely untrue.
Trump devoted less than a minute of his screed to that particular allegation, but it was enough to unleash a cascade of problems roughly three hours to the south in Macon-Bibb County. Threats and intimidation. The elections supervisor’s resignation. A controversial search for a permanent replacement that ended up in court.
The job remains unfilled just days before the November midterms, putting an interim elections supervisor in charge at a time when there’s more pressure on the system and the people who run it than ever before.
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The tumultuous 2020 presidential election and its misinformation-filled aftermath overwhelmed many local elections supervisors. They’ve quit in droves around the country, chased away by harassment, burnout, stress, a blizzard of time-consuming public records requests from election deniers, and, in multiple states, new election rules that made the already difficult and often thankless job too much to handle.
The turnover has been dramatic in the tightly contested states that decided the presidential election two years ago: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
A Globe analysis of those states, along with Massachusetts, found that about 30 percent of top local election officials have left their jobs since 2020. That was a significant increase compared to the 18 percent turnover in the two years after the 2016 presidential election. In Georgia, at least 57 of the state’s 159 county elections supervisors — about 36 percent — have left since 2020. That’s up from the roughly 21 percent who left the jobs after the 2016 presidential election.
It’s not surprising. Georgia arguably has been the eye of the political storm in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The state has been rocked by controversy after controversy, and may, once again this year, prove to be pivotal in deciding which party will control the US Senate.
Nowhere, in other words, is there a greater need for an experienced, nonpartisan corps of local elections officials. And in Georgia, that corps has been severely depleted as early voting has already begun ahead of another crucial Election Day on Nov. 8.
President Biden won the state by just 11,779 votes, an upset that drew the wrath of Trump and his supporters. A barrage of unproven fraud allegations followed and spurred death threats against elections officials, an ongoing criminal investigation into potential election interference in Georgia by Trump’s allies, and a new more restrictive state election law that has triggered protests and boycotts.
After helping swing the 2020 presidential election to Biden, the state held a Senate runoff election in early 2021 that delivered narrow control of the chamber to the Democrats. Georgia will be in the spotlight again on Nov. 8, when its closely contested Senate race once more could be a majority-maker — and possibly force election workers here to go into overtime again with a Dec. 6 runoff if neither candidate tops 50 percent as required by state law.
“It’s like the world’s watching Georgia,” said Deidre Holden, the elections supervisor in Paulding County and the former co-president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials. “Some people can’t…
Read More: In the wake of Trump’s lies, a brain drain of local election experience in Georgia