From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily.

Today, in the weeks after the 2020 election,

Georgia's Republican leaders were seen as defenders of election integrity,

repeatedly rebuffing demands by President Trump to overturn Joe Biden's victory.

Now, after adopting a sweeping election law, they've emerged as a threat to voting rights.

My colleague, Nick Korsaniti, on what happened in between.

It's Tuesday, March 30th.

So, Nick, what is the story of how Georgia came to pass this sweeping new election law?

Well, I think you have to look at these hearings that were held in the Georgia legislature

back in mid to late December, as the president was going around looking for people to support his

claims and falsehoods about the election and was constantly getting rebuffed by statewide

election officials like the Secretary of State. He found a lot of allies in the state legislature.

The state of Georgia is one of the Republican trifecta states where both houses of the state

legislature as well as the governorship is held by Republicans. And so, what they did is they held

these hearings where they invited people like Rudy Giuliani to testify, to kind of prove his

points that there was lots of fraud, lots of issues with the election. And in those hearings,

Giuliani in particular said some pretty inflammatory things, casting about a bunch of conspiracy

theories, falsehoods about the elections, falsehood about the company that provided the elections

machines to Georgia. And it was in those meetings that I think you started to see a legislature,

see an opportunity to seize on this moment and this doubt that had been cast among the Republican

base about the result of the election to possibly do something with the state's election laws.

And why exactly is that? Given just how little fraud was ever documented in Georgia in the 2020

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