A sweeping bill to change Georgia's election practices awaits Republican Gov. Brian Kemp's expected signature.
It offers some hope for those who say the system failed miserably in the nation's eighth most populous state last fall, when a hotly contested and high-turnout election was marred by allegations that voters were wrongly denied access to the polls, absentee ballots were rejected for questionable reasons and vote counts were shady and incomplete. Kemp was secretary of state, in charge of election administration, at the time. He narrowly defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams, who was bidding to become the nation's first African-American woman governor.
Georgians will get a new generation of voting machines, with touchscreens attached to printers that generate paper ballots. This permits voters to review their choices before their ballots are counted and preserves a written record for use in recounts and a new system of audits, which the state election board has been ordered to put in place in time for the 2020 election.
Once the law is enacted, voter registrations won't be canceled for inactivity for eight or nine years, two years longer than under existing law, and voters will be mailed a notification at least a month before such cancelations. (More than 1.4 million voter registrations were canceled in the state over the past eight years.)
The new law will also limit Georgia's "exact match" rule, which stalled more than 50,000 registrations last year because of mismatches between applications and other state records on such things as hyphenations of last names and use of maiden names. From now on, applicants will immediately become active voters when they sign up, with such discrepancies flagged for election judges to review when voters show photo IDs at polling places.
Also, the bill prevents polling place relocations or closures within two months of a primary or general election. County officials have closed 214 precincts across Georgia since 2012, according to an analysis conducted last year by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But at the same time the bill will reduce the number of voting machines in each precinct to one for every 250 voters; now, it's one per 200 voters.
The new statute says absentee ballots may not be rejected because of mismatches between voters' signatures on their ballots and their signatures on file. Instead, a system will be created to allow people with signature problems to provide identification. (The AJC found that nearly 7,000 absentee ballots, or 3 percent of the statewide total, were rejected in November.)
Finally, the legislation lowers the threshold for a losing candidate to request an automatic recount to half a percentage point; the standard is now a full percentage point.
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.