How to respond to President Trump’s phone call with the Secretary of State of Georgia?

The voters of Georgia will speak on Tuesday.  The Republican members of Congress will speak the next day.

I am cautiously optimistic about the former, given the turnout numbers.  I have scant hope for the dozen Senators and 140+ House members, given their complicity over the last four years.

This thought also occurs to me: If President Trump is counting to 270, the number of votes needed in the Electoral College, did he make similar calls to officials in other states?

Is there anything I can do as a state legislator?

I’ve asked for legal advice: If an individual had such a conversation with an election official in Maryland, would it violate existing law?  If it would not, how could the law be strengthened, consistent with the First Amendment?

I have already introduced the Voters’ Rights Protection Act of 2021.

This bill would require public notice about a decision to open or close a polling location; if a signature is missing from an absentee ballot or an application for an absentee ballot, give a voter an opportunity to sign the document no later than the last day of canvass; and  provide that a ballot shall be considered to be returned timely, if it is postmarked the day after the election.

http://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2021RS/bills/hb/hb0057F.pdf

Yesterday, before news broke about President Trump’s telephone call, I read about how two Alabamans exercised their right to vote in the first election after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As a 6-year-old in Mobile, Ala., in 1976, [Georgia grassroots organizer Latosha] Brown went with her grandmother to vote at a library. Her grandmother, born in 1910 and prevented from voting much of her life, dressed in her Sunday best and carried her “good pocketbook,” because the occasion demanded respect. “It was the way she would hold my hand,” Brown said. “I knew it was special, but I was too young to know why. When she walked in that booth and closed the curtain, it was like it was her moment. She had complete agency.” Brown’s grandfather carried an old poll-tax receipt in his wallet — a reminder that such agency had not come easily and was not guaranteed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/magazine/georgia-senate-runoff-election.html

Hopefully, the new Congress will enact the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.  We can do our part in Maryland by enacting the Voters’ Rights Protection Act of 2021.