Georgia. Plus: Who are the REAL vote-riggers?

I support the recount in Georgia. How can I do otherwise? I'm on record as saying that every important race, whether tight or lopsided, should be double-checked as a matter of routine electoral hygiene. I also believe in hand recounts of paper ballots. Apparently, that's what will happen in Georgia. 

 

Republicans are calling for the resignation of Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He's a Republican too, but the Trumpers have nevertheless decided to make him the target of one of their Orwellian hate campaigns. His sin, they say, is not "delivering" the state to Trump. 

 

This accusation can only be read as an admission that other Secretaries of State have, in fact, "delivered" the vote. We have further verification of a claim I've made for the past sixteen years: Computerized election rigging is real. 

 

The Trumpers hate Raffensperger because he didn't abet a crime. 

 

Although I support the upcoming recount, I'm also angry about the double standard. How can there be a statewide recount in Georgia even though we did not get one in Florida in 2000?

 

On that occasion, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered just such a recount. That decision bothered the lawyers for Dubya so much that they took the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, which nullified the state court's decision. Had the entire state been counted, Gore probably would have won. (Also see here.) 

 

Imagine it: No W, no Iraq war -- and perhaps no 9/11. And no Dick Cheney.

The Republicans are such hypocrites! 

 

Vote fraud is real. A growing amount of evidence suggests that digital vote-rigging did occur in this election -- and that the riggers were the Republicans. 

 

This theory explains the dichotomy between the polls and the results. I don't believe those who claim that polling has magically become much worse than it used to be.

 

The theory of vote-rigging also explains why the polls were "wronger" in the down-ballot races than in the presidential race. A presidential contest commands a massive amount of attention, which limits the degree of plausible cheating. 

 

To keep things credible, the Republicans must always keep up the fiction that the "undecideds" broke late for their presidential candidate. Since there were so few undecideds going into this election, the GOP's riggers could pad Trump's score only so far. Two percent would have been safe. In fact, the padding seems to have been particularly bold in this election, as I predicted would happen. Before election day, an average of the polls suggested that there would be an eight point spread in the popular vote, yet Biden won by only 3.4 points. 

 

Other people look at those numbers and think: "Wow. Polling keeps getting worse and worse. I wonder why?" I look at the same numbers and think: "The riggers were particularly cheeky this time."

 

My scenario explains how Trump could lose the election even though behind-the-scenes manipulators gave him a push. They can't push too far without revealing their presence. 

 

Fortunately, rigging was limited by the fact that most Dems used mail-in ballots, which offer a paper trail.

To explain the difference between the official vote number and the polls, some apologists speak of "shy Trump voters" who lie to the pollsters. There is no real evidence for such a phenomenon. The shy ones are simply presumed to exist because the alternative theory -- rigged voting machines -- is considered unthinkable. 

 

Shortly before voting day, Trump -- a compulsive cat-debagger -- told one of his crowds: "My people ain't shy."

 

It is a fact that Republican candidates receive a small but consistent bump, election after election. This bump may not be enough to insure victory, but it sure helps. Election fraud experts refer to this phenomenon as the "red shift" -- the difference between the exit polls and the so-called "actuals." The shift must always be kept subtle, lest the public catch on. 

 

Conventional wisdom blames the shift on faulty exit polling methodology. If that were the case, the shift would be blue as often as it is red. I stand with those who maintain that the problem is not with the exit polls but with the voting devices. (In other countries, a disparity between the exits and the actuals is considered a classic indicator of vote fraud.)

For the most part, Trump's supporters have spread stories about every possible method of cheating other than malware in the voting devices. Trumpers love to talk about fanciful election rigging schemes such as voter impersonation or made-in-China ballots -- but they hate to discuss the method which Republicans use. Injecting bad code into the vote tabulators happens to be the hardest method to detect, and requires the fewest number of participants. Arguably, one should not even use the term "conspiracy theory" to describe this scenario, since the dirty work might be done by a single malefactor.

Why are we having a national discussion about this nonsense? That's not how vote fraud is actually done. If the Republicans truly cared about election integrity, why won't they join us in our demand for hand-counted paper ballots? Why do they consistently deep-six our efforts to prevent voting on hackable devices? Their refusal to do the right thing proves that they profit from the wrong thing.

I'm not the only one who believes that the 2020 election results were nudged toward the red. Election fraud specialist Jennifer Cohn has been looking into this idea on her Twitter stream. I'll be summarizing her findings in a future post.

Until that time, this thread is a must-read, and I hope she won't mind my giving you a piece of it here. (I've slightly edited her tweets to make them resemble conventional prose.)

Rs blocked efforts 2 assess the legitimacy of their own “wins” (2000, 2002, 2004, 2016), many of which defied polls or involved glitches. They killed the #SAFEAct, which would have required robust manual audits this year. Rs have unclean hands on the issue of election integrity. 

That Rs feel entitled to howl over a corrected machine error—after the many more errors that they gleefully ignored in the past—in an election that Biden was expected to win (unlike so many of the GOP’s supposed “wins”)—& after killing the #SAFEAct—is enuf to make me see red. 

And Trump surrogates opposed recounts in 2016.

 

As a result, most large WI counties conducted their recount only by machine (which can't detect hacking), the MI recount was stopped after 3 days (& excluded machines w/ broken safety seals & precincts where the # of votes & # of voters didn't match), & the PA recount never got off the ground. I wrote about the GOP's successful derailment of the 2016 recount here.

I must add this: Trump's lawyers prevented a forensic examination of the voting tabulators and voting machines. The exam was to be paid for by privately-raised funds, so money wasn't the issue. There is no innocent explanation for avoiding this investigation.

The GOP then killed all efforts to secure the 2020 election, including the #SAFEAct, which would have required robust manual election audits to confirm electronic outcomes in all federal races.

How many presidential elections and thus Supreme Court seats have Republicans stolen? We will never know because Rs insisted on electoral opacity. We must not allow them now to weaponize that opacity to steal the 2020 election or the narrative surrounding it.

How could I not mention the wiped election server in the aftermath of Karen Handel’s supposed defeat of @ossoff (D) in the #GA06 race of 2017, which included a “rare memory card error” in Georgia’s largest county? I wrote about all of that here.

Or the 127,000 votes that vanished from ES&S voting systems in predominantly African American precincts in Georgia in 2018? Did the GOP care then? Nope. They blocked the lawsuit that sought to investigate it.

What about the black votes that vanished from ES&S voting systems in Memphis, as discovered by @benniejsmith? Are Republicans in arms over that? Hell no. They have been trying to force thru another voting system contract with the same damn vendor.

 

We cannot allow the GOP to now weaponize the lack of electoral transparency that they themselves have created & that may even have enabled them to stack SCOTUS w/ illegitimate justices.