As far as I could tell at the time, it's not that Georgia only had problems in heavily blue districts - they had problems everywhere. The mainstream media just only reported the problems which happened in heavily blue districts. Republican voters in red districts saw the same kinds of multi-hour waits as the folks in the district which was supposedly sabotaged via missing power cords (apparently that didn't even really delay voting), some of them even started theorizing that this was some kind of vote rigging attempt, the difference is that was treated as a nutso conspiracy theory whereas the idea that queues in blue districts might be vote rigging was regurgitated by AP and the rest of the press.
Georgia also only had problems in heavily blue districts. They "forgot" power cables, left machines unused in warehouses, and rejected thousands of early votes due to "glitches".
There is nothing odd or mysterious about it. It's the logical conclusion of being a political minority clinging to power and it's been happening for decades both openly and less openly.
So you're saying one county, with ~80,000 delayed votes, ~60% of which were for Biden, completely eliminates Georgia as a counterexample here? I don't have a good spider-sense for this kind of number crunching so I'd have to do some math.
> It's fine if you're not paying attention, but way less fine to build a narrative about voter fraud based on it.
I have not been claiming there is anything to this theory, but it is fun to argue about. And I'm definitely not happy to see this argument get personal, but from my perspective, it is least fine of all to gaslight people with a nonsense fairy-tale that corruption and fraud do not exist.
It's not just that the entire media screwed up that story so badly that they convinced the entire planet that a scheme that would suppress Republican votes would instead suppress Democrat votes, or that they continue to do so. It's that from what I can tell the only reason this turned into a major voter suppression scandal is because of which votes were supposedly being suppressed. Even your own initial reply to me demonstrates how this happens; every right-thinking person who saw the official justification in the context of supposed Republican voter suppression saw it as obvious bullshit, and when presented in the actual context suddenly it's obviously true and a non-scandal.
The North Dakota business is strong evidence of this. The official Democrat state party establishment engaged in a blatant attempt at voter suppression via bogus ads in one of the most tightly-contested and critical Senate races in the entire country, they've stood by it, the state Senator whose at-risk seat they're protecting has stood by it (when asked, she said “it is really important people understand the consequences of voting”[1]) - and this has received infinitely less mainstream press coverage than random online trolls joking about how Democrats should please vote on Wednesday. Random Republican bozos posting things that could never suppress a single vote[2] are treated as proof of widespread malfeasance while actual Democratic establishment misbehaviour is treated like the obscure ravings of some bozo which should be ignored.
And again, North Dakota was a case where the state Democrat establishment literally waved their shady bullshit in the face of everyone whose vote they wanted to suppress with their own name printed on the ad. Anything that would require investigative reporting to discover? Forget about it. We know the mainstream press don't investigate or report on this stuff. We'd never even know it happened. That's my point too.
I doubt the Georgia voter suppression claim is the only one the media got wrong either. It's the only one I've found out about that is wrong in this particular way, but given just how obscure and little-reported this error was, if there were others how would I even know?
[2] Seriously. The old and nasty tactic of targetted flyers with the wrong election date on, sure, but Tweets with a wink and a nod about how only "Democrats" should vote on that day? Not a chance, not with the saturation bombing of the entire Internet with reminders to vote.
Ultimately, it is almost always the fault of Democrats- whether it is fake electoral fraud allegations, gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement. Stacey Abrams and fauci are the true villains here. /s
Btw, electoral fraud via voter disenfranchisement is a well established reality. Voter disenfranchisement has been a Republican tactic for decades that Democrats are finally fighting against. Yes, this is fraud - which is why Republicans are now upset that their fraud is being shut down by Stacey Abrams. Georgia already proved this.
So, maybe I'm not understanding something, but there are numerous reports from what appear to be reputable sources -- a few listed below -- claiming that there were uncovered missing votes during recounts in Georgia. However, there isn't a word said about this on CNN, MSNBC or any other heavily left-leaning media sources. The only sources that I hear talking about this are on YouTube. I don't give a shit if I get downvoted for saying this, but when the damn Atlanta news channel says there are uncounted votes how the hell does the left not take an issue with this? My goodness, this is the beginnings of a banana republic.
Maybe you'll accept the credibility of the Republican lawmakers and election officials in Georgia who also consider those accusations of fraud to be baseless[0].
In PA at least, they could have not kicked out GOP observers, literally cheering as they were thrown out. In other counties, observers had to stand far away for "COVID" reasons, while dozens or counters of DEM observers were crammed together at tables.
In Georgia, observers were told to go home, and then people continued to count behind closed doors, unobserved. There is video and no matter how many news sources yell "debunked" ... there is no reasonable explanation for it. There was no water pipe burst. It was a lie and it LOOKS TERRIBLE.
If you want an honest election, then people have to not make up this shit. But everyone sees every single GOP/Republican as some evil racist Nazi, so some of these things could have been totally on the books, but people threw out observers due to media fueled hate. The trouble is ... it's impossible to tell. The percentage of rejected mail-in ballots due to signatures is far far below what is has been before.
It looks bad. It stinks. Anyone who is in the center and is truly looking at everything is likely going to make the judgement, even if their party won, the election was shady as fuck.
Are you sure you drew the correct lesson from the incident? There were a ton of rumors, witnesses, statistical evidence, and so forth. It sure didn't make it sound like undetected vote fraud could be common.
I believe you that it wasn't easy to tell that it was corruption instead of just incompetence. Here are some facts (not media opinions) to think about:
- Kemp controlled the election and was also a candidate[1]. He refused to recuse himself from his election duties. Why was that?
- Kemp purged more voters than anyone else in history[1]. His office then destroyed the evidence when an investigation was launched[2].
- A judge allowed an external audit of faulty voting systems used in 2018. The Republican Secretary of State objected[4].
1. Can you imagine a lawsuit being fair if the judge is the plaintiff? Or a football game being fair if the quarterback is also a referee? I don't trust any human to have that much honor and impartiality, especially if (in their mind) the lives of many unborn babies and the American way of life are at stake. Wouldn't someone like that think, "The ends justify the means?"
Just because you worked there doesn't mean you know everything that went on. How do you even explain the pipe burst that never happened and the counting that continued. Everything in your area might have been on the up and up, but things happened you may have not seen:
Also keep in mind Georgia never did re-canvasing and when they did a re-count, they recounted the IMAGES of the ballots, not the paper ballots. Georgia has also refused to release the images of the ballots. Give me a data dump of images so we can go through and make sure they all have different serial numbers. If they really didn't run the same ballots through over and over, it would be easy to prove. Why are they not releasing them?
Finally, that "leaked" call between Trump and the GA sectary of state everyone went ape shit over, did you know that was literally illegal. It was a Settlement Call, lawyers on both side were present (and named) and all of that was privileged. The GA Sec of State should be in jail right now. He won't be.
There are no consequences for breaking the law if you're on the right side.
You are attributing to malice what can be easily explained by bad processes and incompetence (we see this all the time in tech with bugs that make it through to production!).
The missing votes weren't much, and changed the nature of the race by less than 500 votes. Trump still lost Georgia by about 13,000.
The banana republic part of this is a man who lost the election by more than 7 million votes trying to steal the election. Trump didn't come close to winning. Trump got straight up thumped, and he is still trying to sue to get millions of votes thrown out. Millions of American votes.
If you are concerned with why voting isn't smoother in this country with less errors, you need to support creating national standards and funding to help make voting easier and more modern. This is an artifact of an incredibly balkanized voting processes. A lot of Americans would support easy, modern, universal voting.
The election is long since past, and Trump lost. The reason you don't see national news orgs covering small-scale election issues in individual counties is that they aren't national news stories. It's really that simple.
The fact that a recount found additional votes -- the point of a recount -- and that the additional votes didn't impact the election is not news. It's just not news.
If every election has some shady things happen then it's not possible for every bit of shadiness to be explained as anything other than shadiness.
So was there shadiness or wasn't there?
A lot of it can be explained away, which is why I said the hanging chad issue was a bigger problem. but ALL of it? I don't think so, even at the time there were a few things that gave me pause.
Those claims were dropped because they were wishful thinking and didn’t stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. The non-expert who made those claims caused the author of the tool he misinterpreted to write an entire blog post about it:
The other key thing to understand is that Georgia had a full hand recount of the paper ballots which those machines tabulated. Even if they were completely hacked, they couldn’t rewrite the paper records and there’s no credible evidence of even a single ballot being changed much less the many thousands of them which would have been needed to make the electronic and hand counts match.
Every time we criticize Georgia, we should remember that the President's party is the one in charge of elections there, and the one in charge of auditing and assuring security of those elections. There is every incentive for the state election commission to cry foul if there was foul to cry; the fact they have not is extremely telling, and one really has to widen the conspiracy net to come up with an explanation that puts the state election commission of Georgia in on a conspiracy to defraud the electoral process.
> there is not institutional effort to investigate the irregularities
I don't know what you would consider "institutional effort," but there are absolutely processes for investigating irregularities and multiple investigations are currently in progress. Georgia just concluded one such audit today. https://www.ajc.com/politics/no-fraud-georgia-audit-confirms... - they don't get reported on in detail because, to be honest, the details are boring and therefore don't make for very good news; they have about as much fun as a tax audit with even fewer exciting variables. and to really get a big picture of what's going on, one has to track the news from multiple states, since every state manages its own balloting system.
A full and exhaustive audit takes time. The President commissioned such an audit at the federal level for the 2016 election, and it resolved in 2018, finding an absolute handful of actionable cases. I would expect the audits that are going on now to continue, as multiple parties are interested in pursuing them. But they take time; the one for 2016 took two years.
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