Rural Georgia voters are now demanding answers in Trump election indictment: report

Georgia was once considered a textbook example of a deep red southern state, but these days, it is a complex, nuanced swing state that reelected a conservative non-MAGA Republican governor (Brian Kemp) and a liberal Democratic U.S. senator (Raphael Warnock) in the 2022 midterms. Former President Donald Trump won Georgia in 2016 but lost it to now-President Joe Biden in 2020, and Democratic strategists consider Georgia a must-win for Biden in 2024.

Fulton County, Georgia is where Trump and 18 of his allies are facing criminal charges over their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. And Coffee County — a rural county about 200 miles away — plays an important role in the case. Former Coffee County GOP Chair Cathy Latham and ex-Coffee County Elections Director Misty Hampton are both included in the indictment.

The Guardian's Timothy Pratt notes that Coffee County is where Trump "allegedly sent associates" to "copy software and other digital information from the state's elections system in early 2021."

On Tuesday, September 12, the Coffee County Board of Elections held a meeting, where, Pratt reports that "local residents said…. that many questions remain unanswered about how Trump's associates were able to do what they did, and who knew what, when."

"Their concern is not just what happened in 2021, but that the digital information obtained is now in an unknown number of hands, meaning that future elections could be affected in Georgia and in other states that use Dominion Voting Systems and equipment made by partner companies," Pratt explains. "County residents wanted to know why board chairman Wendell Stone didn't tell the board and the public about the breach when he learned about it from an e-mail in 2022. Stone told the Guardian he wasn't sure if he ever saw the e-mail."

Jim Hudson, an 80-year-old retired attorney and Coffee County resident who attended the meeting, argued that the indictment has major national implications.

Hudson told Coffee County Board of Elections members, "I'm not a rabble rouser, but this deserves your attention. This thing reaches coast to coast, from California all the way to the East Coast."