Yesterday, the Georgia State Election Board that has spent weeks approving unnecessary and legally dubious ways of gumming up the works took the step of requiring a hand count of ballots on Election Day, a process that will significantly draw out election results. At the same time, national GOP figures up to and including Donald Trump have been pressuring the Nebraska legislature to change that state’s system of delegating electoral votes by congressional district and go to the usual winner-take-all approach. Both of these shifts would be occurring just six weeks before the Nov. 5 presidential election, as mail ballots have been sent out and poll workers are already being trained and the groundwork laid for a smooth election, ignoring the intuitive directive to leave things well enough alone in the run-up. Early voting has begun in several states. It is too late for states to change the voting rules at this point in the game. The election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is upon us. Whatever the rationalization for this kind of switch in late September is a pretext meant to cover the true purpose of slapping a hand down on the scale in favor of one particular candidate. That is not, by the way, a partisan analysis. In Georgia, GOP officials themselves have all but said as much, including Republican Attorney General Chris Carr — whose office has called into question the legality of the board’s new policies policies — and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a man who has plenty of personal experience with Trump’s anti-democratic antics. He fielded the now-infamous call from the former president demanding that he jettison his oath of office and deliver an electoral victory. The board’s own GOP chair, John Fervier, opposed the changes, saying the “board is an administrative body, it’s not a legislative body,” and pointing out that the vote ran counter to the advice of their counsel. None of it matters to the members who are captured by Trump’s movement, and who will go to any length necessary to ensure that Trump has an edge in a tight election this year. Nebraska’s somewhat quirky system has been in place for more than three decades now, plenty of time for lawmakers to have changed the rules back. The reason they’re scrambling to do it six weeks before this election is because the lone Nebraska vote that President Biden won in 2020 could conceivably come into play in the foreseeable scenario of an otherwise 269-269 electoral vote tie. The timing is strategic in multiple directions; lawmakers in Maine, the only other state to use the split vote system, have pledged to effectively counteract a possible Nebraska change by doing the same thing themselves, taking away an expected GOP vote there if Nebraska takes away a Democratic one. However, the deadline for such changes to take effect in Maine prior to the Electoral College’s convening has passed, since that state does have some safeguards against mucking about with imminent elections. For all their talk about safeguarding the vote, Republicans in several states are putting on a masterclass on how to counteract the will of the voters. For shame.