With just a month to go before Election Day, Sabrina German considers herself an essential worker for democracy. The director of voter registration in Chatham County, Georgia, Germany, is in the spotlight as she works to comply sweeping changes to state election rules in this critical state of the battlefield.
“The first three words in the preamble are: ‘We the People,’ meaning that we, as public servants, work for the people to ensure that they have a fair choice and a voice for the candidates they want. “We choose,” German said.
The overhaul in Georgia has many fronts, from the Republican majority on the state election board to the Georgia Legislature, which has allowed individuals to file a flurry of protests against the voter rolls.
German said she had a thousand challenges related to voter registration in just one county.
Lawyer Colin McRae, chairman of the non-partisan County Registration Board (on which he served for 20 years), said: “It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out the agenda behind some of the challenges,” he said. “In a recent batch of names submitted to us, hundreds of students were involved. And it didn’t take much investigation to figure out that all of the students whose registration was challenged all attended Savannah State University. [a] historically black university.”
Although these issues may seem local, they have national political significance; and former President Trump has weighed in on the campaign trail, praising Republicans on Georgia’s election board. “They’re on fire,” he said. “They’re doing a great job. Three members. Three people are all pit bulls fighting for fairness, transparency and victory. They’re fighting.”
‘Sunday Morning’ has reached out to Trump’s praised members of Georgia’s election board. They have long defended their work, and one member told us that the controversy over their efforts was “manufactured to suit another agenda.”
What’s happening in Georgia is just one example of how election problems are roiling the country. And the question remains: Do recent changes in state election laws address this issue? Real problems? Or is it just politics?
David Becker, a CBS News contributor who directs the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research in Washington, D.C., said: “I’ve been looking and researching the quality of our voter rolls for about 25 years now, and there is no I have no doubt that our voter rolls are as accurate today as they have ever been.”
So what fuels the suspicion of voter rolls? “We see that a lot of their claims about the election are just driven by the outcomes,” Becker said. ‘It’s not about the actual process.
‘The electoral lists are public. They could have challenged these things in 2023, 2021 or 2019. They wait until just before the elections, which indicates that they are not really interested in cleaning up the lists. What I’m really trying to do is clear the way for claims that elections were stolen after their candidate has supposedly lost.”
The 2020 election continues to cast a long shadow. State officials like Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, are bracing for new elections.
On January 2, 2021, Raffensperger received an infamous phone call from then-President Trump asking if he would ‘find’ votes so Trump could win. “All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, and that’s one more vote that we have because we won the state,” Trump said in a recorded conversation.
Raffensperger resisted pressure to do so not certify the 2020 elections in Georgia. When asked if he would resist pressure again, he said: “I will do my job. I will follow the law, and I will follow the Constitution.”
Raffensperger will again oversee and certify Georgia’s elections. Asked whether he believes the elections board’s proposed changes are necessary, Raffensperger said, “No. Not one.”
Raffensperger says voting is safe in Georgia. When asked why election board members keep changing the rules, he said: “I think many of them are living in the past and cannot accept what happened in 2020.”
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Carol Anderson, an author and voting rights activist who teaches at Emory University, said, “One of the things about voter suppression is that it always looks harmless, it always looks reasonable, but it’s not. What’s happening in Georgia with voting rights is that there’s a huge demographic change taking place. So you have a growing African American population. You have a significant and engaged Asian American population.
“And so it’s a power struggle between a vision of a new Georgia and … the vision of old Georgia, our old ways,” she said.
Sabrina German of Chatham County said she thinks about leaving every day because of the pressure on election workers. German may be tired, but she and Colin McRae say their experience in 2020 has prepared them for what comes next.
McRae said he took it personally when Donald Trump asked the secretary of state to “find” 11,000 votes to put him above Joe Biden. “Of course we took it personally; any criticism of the system is criticism of the individuals who make up that system,” McRae said. “Once again, the truth will come out. The truth will win.”
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Story produced by Ed Forgotson. Editor: Carol Ross.
Robert Costa
