Rosenfeld is the editor of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
The nation's collective political eyeballs, and probably tens of millions of dollars, have now turned toward Georgia. That's not because the presidential outcome is too close to call, since Joe Biden has become president-elect without its 16 electoral votes. It's mostly because the outcome of a highly unusual pair of Senate runoff elections in eight weeks will decide whether Congress will remain divided or switch to Democratic control.
The eyeballs of election administrators have also focused on Georgia — for a different reason.
The upcoming audit of its unofficial election returns will not only decide whether a presidential recount will be conducted. It will also be the most high-profile use yet for a relatively new way of checking the accuracy of returns.
It is called a risk-limiting audit, and it is a barely-tested process in Georgia. Whether the forthcoming audit will be targeted by President Trump's campaign lawyers is an open question. But it will be the highest-profile test yet for an obscure process that was created by statisticians to convey public assurance that vote counts can be trusted.
As of Monday, more than 98 percent of the ballots had been counted and Biden was up by 2 tenths of 1 percent, or 11,000 votes out of 5 million cast. Provisional and military ballots were left to be tallied before Friday's deadline for the 159 counties to finalize and certify the results, totaling the legally cast ballots.
Then comes the RLA. Under a state law enacted last year, it has to happen — and by Nov. 20, when the state result is supposed to be locked down.
"Our hope and intent in working with the counties is to move that earlier," said Gabriel Sterling, a state voting system implementation manager. "And at that point, whoever comes in second, either President Trump or Vice President Biden, either one of them, whoever is in second place, can request that recount."
The audit is an exercise that will assess if the electronic totals from a county's central tabulators match randomly sampled paper ballots. It is based on a statistical formula where auditors set an accuracy level, which is usually 90 or 95 percent. If the manually examined and counted votes from the paper ballots do not match the electronically compiled results, then more paper ballots are randomly pulled until the accuracy level is reached.
A risk-limiting audit typically looks at one race — not every race, importantly — to produce its confidence estimate. In most cases, a noncontroversial contest with a large winning margin is picked, because the formula's math means as a wider margin translates into the need to examine fewer ballots.
For example, in an RLA pilot conducted after the problematic June 9 primary in Fulton County (one of four such tests conducted in the state), county officials only needed to examine 27 randomly chosen ballots to have 90 percent confidence in the electronically totaled results. That number of ballots drawn was small because Biden won 84 percent of the county's Democratic presidential primary, in which 160,000 votes were cast.
When asked how Georgia planned to conduct its RLA after a presidential election, officials said the state would not audit the presidential race but would instead pick a down-ballot statewide contest such as public service commissioner.
"The algorithm will then say, in County A, Precinct 22, pull out the ballot that is the 300th in the stack. And in County B, in two precincts, pull others out," explained Walter Jones, who heads voter education efforts for GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. "We'll instruct the counties to do that. I don't know if it will be some kind of Zoom call or conference call or if we'll just send an email and they just send us the results and we'll total it up."
The California nonprofit VotingWorks is advising Georgia on the audit.
Indeed, an RLA based on Georgia's statewide presidential results would not be expeditious, as it would evolve into almost a full recount, which is a different legal process that is only supposed to occur after the results are certified.
That's because a statewide audit based on the presidential votes where the margins are so close would turn into a "full hand count" of almost all ballots, according to the audit tool created by RLA's creator, mathematician Philip Stark of the University of California, Berkeley. The number of ballots to get checked grows exponentially as the winning margin shrinks.
While top Georgia officials expressed confidence in their new system and underscore they have seen no evidence of voter fraud, whether the RLA will be accepted by voters in the state — and across the United States — remains an open question.
Whether an accuracy estimate based on a down-ballot race would be accepted or attacked by Trump's campaign is more easily answered, especially if the votes cast in his election are not examined in a process intended to judge the accuracy of the state's overall vote-counting technology.
Under any scenario, Georgia's RLA will be the highest-profile test to date.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.