An election worker examines a ballot during vote counting in the 2020 election at State Farm Arena, in Atlanta. Brynn Anderson/AP
Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is no stranger to voter suppression in Georgia and she sees a “nightmare scenario” for how Republicans could nullify a Democratic victory in the state in November.
In August, after Donald Trump praised three Republican appointees to the Georgia State Election Board by name at a rally in Atlanta, the MAGA-aligned majority on the board passed a series of rule changes—requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and review “all election-related documentation” before certifying an election—that Democrats and voting rights groups fear could lead GOP-controlled boards not to sign off on the results if Kamala Harris wins the state. “The discrete and immediate concern,” says Abrams, who ran for Georgia governor in 2018 and 2022 and founded the voting rights group Fair Fight, “is that this will delay the counting of Georgia’s Electoral College votes.”
If there’s a lengthy dispute over the vote count, Georgia could miss the December 11 deadline for certifying its Electoral College results. If no candidate receives the 270 votes necessary to win the Electoral College as a result, the presidential election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where Republicans control a majority of state House delegations, allowing them to swing the election to Trump.
“It is not just a nightmare scenario, it’s a very real possibility,” Abrams told me recently in Austin, Texas (we did a panel together on September 7 for the Texas Tribune Festival). “There’s a timetable, and that timetable presumes that everything is settled by the federal deadlines that are set. A state’s inability to meet that deadline or refusal to meet that deadline, throws the election to the House of Representatives. That is not the electoral body that should be deciding this election. It should be the people of the state.”
What Abrams is outlining is known as a “contingent election” under the 12th Amendment. If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral College votes, the House selects the president and the Senate picks the vice president. That’s only happened once in US history for the country’s highest office—in 1824, Andrew Jackson won the Electoral College and popular vote, but the House installed the runner up, John Quincy Adams, as president.
“It’s not just a nightmare scenario, it’s a very real possibility,” Abrams says.
In a contingent election, a majority of state delegations, not House members overall, decide the winner. Under this scenario, the House essentially functions as the Senate, with each state getting one vote for president regardless of population. That means California, with 39 million people, has the same level of representation as Wyoming, with 584,000 people. This structure significantly favors Republicans, who are overrepresented in sparsely populated rural states, and who also drew redistricting maps in key states like Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—giving them control of the House delegations despite the closely divided nature of those states.
A contingent election would amplify the structural inequities built into the US political system. “In the Electoral College, voters in large states have slightly less relative power than their share of the U.S. population would suggest. In a contingent election, this imbalance becomes extraordinary,” noted a report last year from Protect Democracy. “The twenty-eight smallest states control nearly 28 percent of votes in the Electoral College (148)—yet, they control 56 percent of the votes in a contingent election.” (Washington D.C., which has three Electoral College votes, but is not a state, is also barred from participating.)
That could lead to an extraordinarily undemocratic outcome—a candidate could lose both the popular vote and fail to gain a majority of the Electoral College, but become president thanks to House members who do not even represent a majority of the body, let alone a majority of Americans.
Currently, Republicans control 26 state House delegations, exactly what they need to pick the president in a contingent election, compared to 22 for Democrats, with the rest divided equally. Though a contingent election would take place after the new Congress is seated in early January 2025, Republicans are likely to add another state, North Carolina, where the GOP gerrymandered district lines last year to pick up three or more House seats. “Republicans should have a majority in at least 26 state U.S. House delegations in 2025, even if they do not retain the overall House majority,” writes Kyle Klondike of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. And if Republicans retain the House majority, GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson could use his power to further tilt the rules in Trump’s favor.
Of course, a lot of things must go haywire for Abrams’ nightmare scenario to occur. Georgia law clearly specifies that counties “shall certify” the election returns. Democrats are challenging the state board’s new certification rules in court ahead of the election. And if counties refuse to approve the vote counts after the election, they will almost certainly be forced to certify the results by the courts or other state officials—which occurred when Republicans declined to certify election results in other states in recent elections. And Georgia may not be the tipping point state in the Electoral College anyway.
Jessica Marsden, counsel to the free and fair elections program at Protect Democracy, called a contingent election scenario “extremely unlikely.” She said that while she was alarmed by election deniers taking over state and county election boards in Georgia, she remained confident that top state officials, such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who resisted Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory in 2020, along with state courts, would once again uphold the integrity of the election.
“We’ve looked hard at Georgia law and we think it’s well-established that certification is a ministerial duty,” Marsden explained. “Even with the changes that the state board is trying to make, counties have a deadline and they have to certify by that deadline and state officials, based on our understanding, are ready to hold them to account. I think state officials are going to be all over this problem and will have the tools they need to make sure the election is certified.”
But Abrams’ concerns are not as far-fetched as they might seem given what happened in 2020. Yes, the effort to overturn the election failed. But it did lead to an insurrection at the Capitol. And the election denier movement is much stronger this time around, taking control over key election bodies in states like Georgia. Even if the election results are ultimately certified, any kind of dispute or delay in counting votes could be weaponized by Trump and his allies to disastrous effect.
“The biggest increase in risk post-2020 stems from the concerted, intentional effort to foment distrust in the election system,” Marsden says. “It’s less to me an issue that there are weak points that could be used to overturn election results. My concern is primarily the damage that gets caused along the way by people who have been lied to about the validity of the process.”
Before 2020, Republicans who wanted to subvert fair elections were focused on passing laws that made it harder to vote. But after Trump tried to overturn the election, his allies expanded the voter suppression playbook, shifting from simply limiting access to the ballot to contesting election outcomes, as Georgia clearly indicates.
“Georgia is an incubator for voter suppression and has been for decades now,” Abrams says. “We will not be the only state, and in fact, we’re not the only state, that has seen variations on this certification theme. Those who want to destabilize the system realized that voter suppression has three pieces: Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? Does your ballot get counted? Well, they have done what they can to interfere with the first and the second. The ultimate does your ballot get counted is not allowing the certification of your votes, because that is the final administrative step to a vote actually being counted in an election.”
