An ocean of old-fashioned paper must be deployed across Georgia to assure the lines keep moving at polling places in one of this year's most important battlegrounds, a federal judge says.
A traditional copy of the local poll book, or roster of registered and eligible voters, must be printed and delivered to each precinct in case the brand new but often balky electronic versions malfunction, Judge Amy Totenberg of Atlanta ruled Monday.
It's a narrow, but important and rare, courthouse win this year for voting rights advocates in a state that epitomizes their long battle against government officials willing to hold down turnout in the name of election security. And GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger vowed to appeal.
His office and county election officials, he said, "are preparing Georgia for the biggest election turnout in history, and it will do so successfully despite the constant distraction of litigation filed by activists determined to undermine the credibility of our elections."
Raffenseberger also announced he'd referred at least 24 allegations of voter fraud to the state attorney general — a follow-up for his announcement this month he suspected at least 1,000 people had cast both mail-in and in-person votes in the primary.
The judge's ruling was a partial win in a lawsuit arguing the state's entire suite of election hardware, being used this year for the first time, proved so inadequate during the primary that it should be ditched entirely in November. Acquired after widespread claims that voter suppression in the 2018 governor's race, its glitches and complexities caused such long backups that thousands walked away without voting in June, especially in and near Atlanta.
Though as many as half of the Georgia electorate plans to vote by mail this fall, shattering past records, that would still mean at least 2 million votes cast in person.
The judge declined to block the use of the new ballot-marking machines in favor of hand-marked paper ballots, which would have been both an expensive and logistically complex assignment with just five weeks until Election Day.
Instead, she told Raffensperger to provide election superintendents in all 159 counties paper lists of people, generated after the end of early in-person balloting, still eligible to vote Nov. 3 at each polling station. The backups are to be used to determine eligibility and precinct assignment if the computers go down, she said, and poll workers must be trained to use both systems — and also to have a sufficient stock of emergency paper ballots on hand, rectifying another widespread problem in the primary.
Those are "reasonable concrete measures," her 67-page opinion said, "to mitigate the real potential harms that would otherwise likely transpire at precinct polling locations grappling with the boiling brew created by the combination of new voting equipment issues and old voter data system deficiencies."
Polling shows a tossup race for Georgia's 16 electoral votes, which President Trump took last time to extend the Republican winning streak in the state to six elections. Both of the state's Senate seats are also being contested, and David Perdue has become one of the year's most endangered GOP incumbents.
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.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.