“Democratic legitimacy is on the line in Georgia”

The sober Ned Foley with this important WaPo oped:

The Georgia race is close enough that the democratic legitimacy of the outcome depends on how ballots that have yet to be counted are handled. Stacey Abrams, the Democrat, trails Brian Kemp, the Republican. But if the gap sufficiently narrows as additional ballots are counted, state law would require a runoff.

One might hope that the remainder of the counting process could be straightforward. But Kemp has had every incentive to keep additional ballots from being counted by asserting that some impropriety disqualifies them. And Kemp, who finally resigned Thursday as Georgia’s secretary of state, has been supervising the process of casting and counting the ballots throughout the election.

This is no small matter. With all the concerns of possible cyberattacks on the nation’s voting infrastructure, there was serious anxiety that results this year might not be an accurate reflection of the choices voters made. Moreover, with all the fears that eligible voters might be prevented from casting ballots by various forms of voter suppression, there was a genuine worry that the results might not accurately reflect the will of the electorate for the simple reason that some eligible voters who attempted to participate were unable. (In other words, the output would be inaccurate because some of the inputs were wrongfully missing.)

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