One week after President Trump urged voters to test the integrity of the election system by trying to cast two ballots this fall, by mail and in person, Georgia has started probing whether 1,000 people committed felonies this summer by succeeding in doing precisely that.
The announcement Tuesday, by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, launches by far the biggest investigation this year into potential voting fraud, which Trump baselessly maintains is rampant and threatens to invalidate the result of a presidential contest reliant on absentee ballots as never before.
Raffensperger said he has found almost no evidence of people out to scam the system, however. And he conceded that, during one of the year's most chaotic primaries, many may have been so skeptical about the fate of their ballot envelope that they headed to a polling place as a failsafe.
"Every double voter will be investigated thoroughly," Raffensperger said at a news conference, noting that proof of nefarious "intentionality" isn't required by state law to convict and imprison someone for as long as a decade for voting twice. "At the end of the day, the voter was responsible and the voters know what they were doing."
He said evidence of double voting, in the June primary and August runoffs, had been uncovered in 100 of the state's 159 counties but the discovery had not changed the outcome of any contests — which would undercut part of Trump's unfounded allegations about how easy it is to steal an election when mailable ballots are in wide circulation.
Last week, at a campaign stop in neighboring and similarly competitive North Carolina, Trump encouraged supporters to return an absentee ballot and then try to vote in person as a way to "test the system."
After aides suggested he was being hyperbolic, he issued more exhortations about double-voting — which in some states is itself an election fraud crime. At a minimum, it added yet another dimension to Trump's long campaign to sow doubt about the coming November result, an unprecedented upending of democracy's norms from an incumbent president. There is minimal evidence of any sort of fraud in recent American elections, using the mail or otherwise
Polling shows a tossup contest for Georgia's 16 electoral votes, which Trump took last time to extend the Republican nominees' winning streak in the state to six elections. Both of Georgia's GOP-held Senate seats are being contested this year.
The progressive Common Cause Georgia accused the state's top election official of meritless amplification of election integrity worries. "People who intentionally vote twice should be subject to the usual criminal penalties," it said. "But we are concerned that voters who were simply trying to vote may get caught up in the dragnet."
Raffensperger said he knew of just one voter "bragging" of voting twice.
Like many states, Georgia has a system to prevent such behavior: Receipt of each absentee ballot is recorded on computer servers, which local election workers can check before giving out ballots at polling places. Despite this safeguard, Raffensperger said, "the human element" allowed 1,000 people to vote both ways in a primary plagued by a shortage of poll workers, long lines and problems with a new generation of voting machines being used statewide for the first time.
Almost 150,000 people who requested absentee ballots showed up at polling places on election day, officials say, most of whom said it was because they never received their forms in the mail.
Voters were urged to vote absentee in the primaries to avoid Covid-19, and more than 1.1 million did so — shattering previous records. (Nearly half of all primary votes were cast remotely, up from 5 percent in most recent elections.) The record seems destined to be broken again in the general election; almost 1 million of the state's 7.4 million voters have already requested an absentee ballot.
Raffensperger and the State Election Board have made some changes to make the fall election smoother than the summer's primary, including a new online system for requesting a no-excuse absentee ballot, the addition of secure drop boxes for those ballots and an earlier start to the processing of absentee ballots.
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.