On Tuesday afternoon, I received a text message from Shannon Cofrin Gaggero, an Atlanta blogger, community organizer, and former high-school classmate of mine. She was in a police van, along with six other people, most of them women. She had wriggled a hand free from handcuffs in order to send the text. “The two white women in the van are the only ones with loose cuffs,” she explained. She then tapped out a message from Nikema Williams, a Georgia state senator who was among those arrested, and who was sitting next to her, still restrained. Williams is black. “In 2018, I’d never thought that I’d be arrested for standing up for my right to vote,” Williams dictated. “I was removed from the state capitol, and I work as a state senator for supporting my people’s right to vote. This is 2018. We were peacefully protesting.”

The seven of them had gathered, along with two or three hundred others, in the rotunda of Georgia’s state capitol for a “Count Every Vote” rally organized by a local affiliate of Black Lives Matter. The goal of the rally, according to attendees, was the nonpartisan and straightforwardly democratic one indicated by its name: to insure that, in a number of close Georgia races—including, most prominently, the race for governor, between the Republican Brian Kemp and the Democrat Stacey Abrams—all the votes were counted before the winners were declared. Within about fifteen minutes of the rally starting, police had arrested fifteen attendees.

Among those arrested was a writer named Ari Willis, who uploaded a video, shot moments before the arrests, to Twitter. “You have thirty seconds to vacate the premises or you’re gonna go to Fulton County Jail,” an officer says on the video. “This is what democracy looks like,” a protester replies. Willis tells the camera that the alleged crime is “disturbing the peace.” Those arrested were taken away from the capitol wearing zip-tie handcuffs, in two police vans. Another video, uploaded to the writer Kate Rope’s Facebook page, shows those arrested, most of them black, speaking as they’re loaded into the vehicles.

“All for democracy!” someone says.

“You’re sending a prophet up the road,” a woman says. “You’ve got our prophets going in cages! There is hope yet!”

“They say we’re disturbing the peace,” a man adds. “None of the legislators came outside and said we were disturbing any peace!”

“This can happen because we are not being heard and we are being bullied by white supremacy,” the first woman says. “This is what it feels like. It does not feel like justice.”

Shortly after Gaggero texted me Williams’s statement, she called me. The group was now waiting to be taken inside Fulton County Jail. “I have you on speaker, on stealth,” she said. Priscilla Smith, an artist who impersonates Donald Trump, said, “They told me I had to leave. And I decided not to leave. It’s a public place. I said, ‘I’m an individual citizen and I’m here because every vote counts.’ ” She added, “I didn’t intend to get arrested. I just wanted to urge our lawmakers to count votes.”

“The capitol police were aggressive from the jump,” Gaggero said. “They were intimidating. Surrounding folks. Had boxes full of zip-ties ready. An older woman got thrown to the ground.” (A spokesman for the police said he was “aware of a woman who claimed to be thrown to the ground, but her story was disputed by eyewitnesses,” and maintained that “officers acted in accordance with Georgia law.”)

“Those of us who are white didn’t get arrested until the very end, after most of the black folks,” Smith added.

When the arrests were taking place, I had been on a conference call with Lauren Groh-Wargo, Stacey Abrams’s campaign manager. Out of nearly four million ballots cast so far in the governor’s contest, Kemp, the former Georgia secretary of state, leads Abrams, the former state house minority speaker, by fewer than sixty thousand votes, a margin that has narrowed as provisional, absentee, and other ballots have come in. In Georgia, a winning candidate must receive more than fifty per cent of the vote; the current count puts Kemp just over that line. On the call, Groh-Wargo noted that Abrams is within 20,585 votes of triggering a runoff election. (Later, on Twitter, she would report that the number was down to 18,617.) On the call, Groh-Wargo said that there were, at that time, nearly thirty thousand outstanding votes, putting the campaign’s targets at least hypothetically within reach.

The Kemp campaign, meanwhile, believes that there are as few as thirteen thousand votes left to count—few enough not to matter. Kemp declared victory last Wednesday and, the next day, resigned as the state’s chief elections official. He is now focussed on transitioning to the governorship, believing that “the math hasn’t changed,” as his press secretary has repeatedly put it to me in e-mails since November 8th. The math does indeed look tough for Abrams, though no major publication has called the race. And, in the last thirty-six hours, two lawsuits have been settled in a manner favorable to Abrams’s hopes. On Monday night, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg enjoined the interim secretary of state, Robyn Crittenden, who was appointed by the current Republican governor, Nathan Deal, from certifying the election before Friday. Totenberg also called for other steps to insure that all the remaining provisional ballots are counted. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May ruled that Gwinnett County must count ballots on which voters omitted their birthdates or mistakenly listed their birth year as 2018. U.S. District Judge Steve Jones has said that that he hopes to rule on other requests made by the Abrams campaign by Wednesday.

Groh-Wargo sent out an e-mail after the conference call, which read, in part, “There are enough uncounted ballots out there to send us to a recount or a runoff election. But that’s not the point.” The e-mail went on, “Brian Kemp used his office as Secretary of State to make it harder, and often impossible, for some Georgians to vote. Now, his office is lying about the number of votes cast and the number of ballots still uncounted.” (Kemp’s press secretary told me that the campaign would put out a release on Wednesday, but did not offer additional comment. On Monday, Kemp’s communications director said that “Stacey Abrams and her radical backers have moved from desperation to delusion.”) Kemp has been widely criticized for his handling of the election; among other things, shortly before Election Day, the secretary of state’s office announced that Georgia’s Democratic Party was being investigated for “possible cyber crimes.” The charge was not substantiated, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that, as of Monday morning, Georgia Democrats had not heard anything from law enforcement about the supposed investigation. In a follow-up e-mail on Tuesday, Groh-Wargo told me, “Our fight isn’t about Stacey Abrams, it is about fairness and the integrity of our Democratic process.”

By five o’clock, the “Count Every Vote” rally had moved to outside the Fulton County Jail, where Gaggero, Willis, Smith, Senator Williams, and the other protesters were being held. After six hours of detention, and a misdemeanor charge of obstruction of justice, Williams was among the first released, on Tuesday night. (Gaggero and others were charged with disrupting the general assembly.) At eight o’clock, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a group that Williams helped mobilize in support of Abrams, issued a statement from the senator. “There are countless Georgians who cast their ballots and still don’t feel like their voices are heard,” it read. “I joined them down on the floor, and I was singled out as a Black female senator standing in the rotunda with constituents.” Her legislative colleague David Dreyer, a lawyer and state representative, who is white, also attended the protest and was not arrested. Outside the jail following Williams’s arrest, Dreyer said, “For some reason, Senator Williams was treated differently than I was treated.”

He went on to criticize the aggressiveness of the Capitol Police’s handling of protesters who were “standing up for people’s right to vote.” He added, “So this is not democracy—this looks a lot more like an authoritarian government. And it seems like that’s happening a lot these days, doesn’t it?”