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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.