There’s a Reason the Election Went So Smoothly

As the late Trump fan Charlie Daniels noted, Georgians are accustomed to repulsing visitors offering Mephistophelian bargains. So when Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to talk about the state’s signature-matching law, Raffensperger didn’t flinch.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Raffensperger, who is Georgia’s top elections official, said that Graham asked whether he could discard all mail ballots in counties with higher rates of signature mismatch. Raffensperger believed Graham, a close ally of President Donald Trump, wanted him to throw out legal ballots, which Raffensperger can’t do, but which stunned him anyway. (Graham denied that he wanted to toss legal ballots, but acknowledged discussing the law. As to why he was nosing into a matter over which he has no jurisdiction, the senator said that the future of the country hangs in the balance, which makes no sense; even if Trump won Georgia, which he won’t, he’d lose the election.)

Raffensperger is no liberal hero “state-sponsored voter intimidation.”