Ron Carlucci is dismayed.
He and his brother-in-law, Tim Romano, have traveled to Chatham County from Connecticut to serve as poll watchers. As dyed-in-the-wool supporters of Donald Trump who believe the former president was cheated out of reelection in 2020, they had wanted to be deployed to Fulton County, which to many Republicans is the epicenter of vote fraud in Georgia.
Instead, Carlucci is watching a trickle of voters go in and out of the Butler School polling station in a remote precinct on Savannah’s east side and worrying there won’t be a repeat of the scandals of the 2020 election that are now election-denial lore.
Nothing akin to the burst water pipe that election deniers say allowed election workers in Fulton to steal the election from Trump in Georgia in 2020. Nothing like election workers in Detroit illegally delivering thousands of completed ballots for counting long after polls closed on Election Day.
“I wanted to be in the thick of it,” Carlucci says. “This doesn’t look like the place.”
As Carlucci describes he and his brother’s winding path from Connecticut to a polling station in Savannah, it’s clear that they aren’t serving as poll watchers to ensure, strictly speaking, a fair election; they’re serving as poll watchers to ensure Trump doesn’t lose.
A resident of Stamford, Carlucci says Romano arranged their poll-watching assignment with disgraced Atlanta attorney L. Linn Wood. Wood, known for his praise of the Jan. 6, 2021, violence, put them in contact with Tamara Favorito, the wife of Garland Favorito, the head of VoterGA. Favorito then arranged for the pair to work as poll watchers under the aegis of the Georgia Constitution Party.
Each link in this chain involves prominent figures in the election-denial movement.
Garland Favorito and VoterGA have debunked the results of the 2020 election. Wood’s false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election landed him in hot water with the Georgia Bar Association. Rather than risk disbarment, he surrendered his license to practice law in Georgia and retired to what has been described as his “MAGA-Friendly Bed-and-Breakfast” in Yemassee, South Carolina
Romano and Carlucci, a 67-year-old retiree who owned two wine shops and “drive a cement mixer for five years in between,” view Harris’ candidacy as ludicrous and even illegitimate. They describe as “ridiculous” the idea that a presidential candidate who dropped out of the presidential race in 2020 before the Iowa primary is now the Democratic nominee and running neck-and-neck for the presidency. Harris is small and undeserving. Trump, Carlucci says, is “bigger than life.”
Asked what’s at stake in this election, Romano and Carlucci, like Trump, paint a dystopian future.
“It’s the bottom of the ninth,” says Romano, a bricklayer. “If Democrats win the White House and the Congress, there will never be a reason to even think of voting again.”
“They’re going to take another 20 million illegals and give them all voting rights and tell them where to live. There will be one party — a communal World Economic Forum ready to roll. World Health Organization? You’re going to have to take a shot. They’re going to put a chip in your forehead.”
Carlucci’s vision of a Harris presidency is no less stark:
“We’re absolutely fearful of a possible takeover by the Democratic Party that will last a minimum 100 years. We’ve studied this for the past four years and see the writing on the wall with the weaponization of the Justice Department.”
With a little less than six hours left for voting in Chatham County, Carlucci hadn’t lost hope that he would witness a vote-rigging attempt before returning to his hotel in Hilton Head for the night.
Carlucci approached a police car parked near the door of the Butler School voting precinct and asked the officer seated inside a hypothetical involving an after-voting hours delivery of ballots to the school’s back door.
“If you happen to see a vehicle pull up and unload stuff into the school gymnasium, is that something you get involved in or not?”
“Depends on what it is,” the officer said
“I mean, would you ask that, right? Say they had it covered up, you would ask, huh?
“Yes.”
“That’s great to know. Just curious.”
