Story · August 12, 2023

Georgia’s fake-elector case was still waiting for charges on Aug. 12

Georgia time bomb Confidence 5/5
★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5
Serious fuckup Ranked from 1 to 5 stars based on the scale of the screwup and fallout.

On Aug. 12, 2023, Georgia’s 2020 fake-elector episode was still in the pre-indictment stage. Fulton County had not yet filed charges. That would happen two days later, on Aug. 14, 2023, when prosecutors returned the Georgia election-interference indictment.

The basic record was already clear by then. Georgia had certified its 2020 presidential result in November 2020. The state’s lawful electors met in Atlanta on Dec. 14, 2020, and cast Georgia’s electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Kamala D. Harris. Separately, an alternate certificate signed by Trump allies was filed with federal authorities as part of the competing-electors effort.

Those documents matter because they show the scheme was not just rhetorical. There was an official result, an official electoral-college vote, and then a rival paper trail that tried to claim the same electors’ authority. The public evidence did not depend on later criminal filings to exist; the filings came later.

That leaves the Aug. 12 date in the right place: not as the day the case broke open in court, but as the day before the court case existed. The legal reckoning in Fulton County arrived on Aug. 14, 2023. On Aug. 12, the story was still sitting in the gap between the record and the indictment.

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