"If you believe the lie that there was massive voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential election, then you have absolutely no idea how elections are conducted. If you ever worked in an election, you'd know exactly why that claim is false."
That's a quote from a 56 year old grandmother of 4 who is a friend of mine. She asked to remain anonymous when she said that. She's a Republican and voted for Trump both times. She's been an election volunteer for 25 years in one of those six battleground states that got lots of attention this election. She's also been an employee of the Secretary of State where the votes and registration records are kept.
You might have noticed, if you are honest and had really paid attention, that not a single election commission volunteer or employee in any of those six states ever said anything except that the election was accurate and the count was legitimate. That's a fact that you can check on your own without the assistance of either the extremist right wing propagandists or the mainstream media.
You will also discover that those "witnesses" Giuliani and Powell paraded around on television never signed in as an observer or volunteer anywhere. They are also not found on any of the witness lists in any of the 60-some odd court cases filed by the Trump campaign to testify about alleged fraud. That's right. They were not put in front of the court. The attorneys representing Trump know the rules about putting knowingly false witnesses in front of a judge. You get disbarred. They know the MAGA crowd believes anything, so they're using these people to raise money. But they didn't put them in front of the court.
If there had been "massive voter fraud" wouldn't the official observers and volunteers that were Republicans and Trump voters have seen it?
The technology of an election precludes the old idea of someone sneaking in during the dark of night and stuffing ballot boxes. Accountability is too high and the criminal penalties are stiff. Aside from that, too many people are watching. If there had been "massive voter fraud" it would have required multiple observers and auditors who were Trump supporters to be in on the conspiracy to undermine their own candidate.
There are always "irregularities." But unless an election is abnormally close, inside a couple hundred votes difference, irregularities do not make a difference in the vote total. The actual number of reported irregularities in this election was well below where it was in 2016. States have learned from their own mistakes and those of others, like Florida, 2000. Technology has made voting far more accurate. The idea of virtually any kind of fraud is precluded by the security procedures followed in every state and by the fact that it would take a massive conspiracy involving hard core partisans who are appointed to be observers to help their candidate lose in order to commit "massive fraud." The accusations and list of "evidence" presented by Giuliani and the Trump legal team don't hold water. The conclusion can only be that there was no massive voter fraud and that this election was not stolen!
Mail-in ballots, contrary to the perception fostered by Trump, are the most secure way to cast a ballot. When you request a mail-in ballot, your voter registration is marked as if you already voted. You cannot show up at a polling place on election day and vote unless you bring your ballot, which has a bar code to identify it as the one you got. When you mark your ballot, you put it in an inner envelope, which you sign on the outside. Then you put it in the envelope with the address where it gets returned. In some states, it is stored until election day, in others, it is opened and counted when it arrives. The signature on the envelope must match your signature on your voter registration record. Otherwise, the ballot is set aside until your identity can be established. The bar code and the signature identify your ballot as unique. It would be impossible to forge.
Touch-screen ballots no longer send your vote directly into the data base. There were too many complaints about that, so a touch screen ballot simply creates a printed ballot that you put in the ballot box. This prevents marking errors. It also allows the voter to check the ballot and make sure it is accurate. Since each ballot has a bar code unique to the polling location and the voter registration, they cannot be forged or reproduced. When they run through the counting machine, the bar code is recorded and the ballot cannot be run through and counted again. And there are always observers and volunteers, an equal number from both parties, watching the process.
Audits make sure the machines that count ballots are doing it accurately. Conspiracy theories about the "programming" of ballot-counting machines to count the votes of one party twice and only count every other ballot of the other just don't hold water. The machines cannot be programmed to do that. Machines are audited prior to the count, certified and then audited after the count and certified. Observers are told not to sign off unless the audit is accurate.
Every ballot box is identified when it arrives and is not opened until state law specifies when and how it can be. All boxes are accompanied by observers. With the addition of "drop boxes" for mail-in ballots in most states, extra time was needed to pick those boxes up because poll workers had to deliver the election-day ballot boxes first, so many of the drop boxes didn't get picked up and delivered until the early morning hours. Those must also be accompanied by observers and cannot be opened until they arrive at the counting location. There is no record of an unaccompanied drop box or of a box not being delivered in any state.
"But all we want it just an investigation to make sure all legal ballots were counted accurately and no illegal ballots were counted"
Translated, "We want to put pressure on election officials to throw out enough Biden ballots so that Trump wins."
How many audits, investigations and recounts are necessary to establish the accuracy of the election? Why would "just one more" be the one that satisfies you?
The Justice Department, under then Attorney General Barr, an obvious Trump loyalist who used the position to shield Trump from the results of two investigations, conducted a full investigation of the election in all 50 states. He sent out agents who examined touch-screens, other voting devices, the counting machines and they went through literally millions of ballots. They ordered recounts in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan based on a handful of "irregularities" they found. In Arizona, they determined that the election was as accurate as an election could be. Their examination of ballots and counting machines found that there were no inaccuracies and no illegal ballots cast. The largest number of votes that changed in any recount was in Wisconsin, which was off by 68 votes.
In Nevada, the accusation was made that "dead people voted." A list of alleged "dead" voters was given to the investigator by the Trump attorney. One individual who voted was found to have voted a couple of weeks before the election but died before November 3. Under Nevada law, his vote counts. Every other person on the list was contacted and as requested, showed up after being summoned to the county courthouse.
In Pennsylvania, the accusation was made that state officers--the governor, secretary of state and attorney general, had illegally allowed an expansion of mail-in voting, basically dropping the requirement that a voter who wants a mail-in ballot must verify that they have a valid reason to vote absentee which was a violation of state law, and asked that all mail-in ballots, something like 3.5 million of them, almost 70% of the Democratic vote in the state, be invalidated. The court noted that the state legislature, with Republican majorities in each house, had passed a law in March allowing the expansion of mail-in voting, dropping the requirement to provide a reason and prescribing security provisions for storing ballots until election day.
What wasn't clear was whether or not ballots that were postmarked before election day but received after election day could be counted. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ordered that all ballots postmarked by election day, but received afterward to be set aside and not counted until the court could rule on the law. In every county, these ballots were set aside, a total of more than 10,000 of them, and not included in the total. Biden wound up winning the state by almost 90,000 votes, and even though the court ruled that a postmark was a legal confirmation and the ballots could be counted, Pennsylvania certified its results beforehand.
Another incident which points to the dishonesty of Giuliani and the whole Trump effort to claim voter fraud occurred in Michigan. Playing on the racist perspective that African-American communities can't be trusted with a democratic election, he first tried to point that there was an "overvote" in Detroit and that more people voted than were registered to vote. The problem with that is the city of Detroit is not a political unit that conducts a federal election. Detroit's vote totals are not counted separately or reported separately from those of Wayne County, in which the city of Detroit is located. We're not sure where Giuliani got his numbers from, but there is no separate vote count kept for Detroit. Wayne County, which has 1.7 million people, reported 875,000 of its 1 million registered voters cast ballots in the election.
Then there is Edison County. Trump Attorney Sidney Powell noted in the lawsuit she filed in Michigan, that she had noticed something irregular in the vote totals from "Edison County." I'll bet she did. Edison County, Michigan, was completely missing from the state's report. That's because there is no such place as Edison County, or Edison anything, in the state of Michigan. In fact, other than an Edison Township in New Jersey, there is no Edison County anywhere in the United States. When you're lying in front of a judge, you better hope he is not familiar with the geography of his state. Unfortunately for Powell, this one was. He was also familiar with a lot of other things that she was lying about and she has now been duly charged with perjury and the Michigan Bar Association is in the process of revoking her law license in the state.
In Arizona...
Secretary of State Katie Hobbs anticipated lawsuits and challenges to the vote totals by Trump supporters who gathered in threatening and sometimes violent demonstrations outside the building in Phoenix where the votes were being counted in Maricopa County. The demonstrators, good, non-violent MAGA folks, shouted threats, intimidated the vote counters and poll workers, vandalized their cars in the parking lot and tried to bully their way inside to "watch" and make sure things were being done right, that in spite of the fact that several Trump supporters were already inside watching like hawks.
Hobbs brought in auditors and attorneys to help supervise the vote count. They made sure each ballot was verified and the counting machines were verified as being accurate. They documented everything. When the court challenges came up, they were ready with mountains of evidence. The Trump attorneys had nothing but baseless conspiracy theories. Arizona's vote count was verified by an independently conducted recount that noted a discrepancy of just 11 votes, closer than the verified recount in Wisconsin, off by 68 votes.
Georgia is the Clincher
Georgia's state government is as thoroughly controlled by Trump-supporting Republicans as any of the states challenged in the election. Both the governor and secretary of state openly supported and endorsed Trump. The Republican margins in Georgia have narrowed considerably as large numbers of people from the Northeast have moved here because of the job growth and the climate and voter rights activists have worked to increase registration among African Americans who make up a larger share of the state's population than anywhere else except Mississippi.
The presence of Stacy Abrams and her organization, which literally registered hundreds of thousands of mostly Democratic voters was the tipping point. They got their people to the polls. The counties of the Atlanta metro area, where more than half the state's population now lives and which are heavily Democratic, and the predominantly African American counties that stretch across the southern part of the state produced enough votes to give Biden an 11,000 vote edge. With Trump MAGA Republicans in charge of this election, it is hard to claim fraud.
Two things underline the fact that voter fraud is a big lie. One, Trump put incredible, withering pressure on the Secretary of State and Governor to overturn the results of the election regardless of the outcome. He didn't hide the fact that he didn't care about the vote count, he just wanted them to use their authority to pick the electors themselves. When that didn't work, he pressured them to "find" enough votes for him to win. If you have a brain and you're a thinking person, you should notice the irony immediately in shrieking and hollering and whining and crying about "massive voter fraud" costing you the election and asking a secretary of state to commit massive voter fraud on your behalf to overturn the legitimate results of an election.
The confirmation of the accuracy of the election results nationwide happened in Georgia on January 5. In the runoff election for both of Georgia's senate seats, caused when no candidate got more than 50% of the vote in the general election, both Democrats won by margins that exceeded Biden's victory in the state. The vote totals for Raphael Warnock were the highest achieved in a Georgia statewide election and no one was claiming "massive voter fraud" in this one. Aside from the historic flip of a once deep red Southern state to two Democrats in the Senate, the runoff confirmed the accuracy of the Democratic party vote totals and underlined Trump's lies and attempt at corruption.
More Irony
Republican members of the House of Representatives who were recently sworn in are in Congress because they won election or re-election on the same ballots that Biden won the White House. That's right, the same ballots. How many of them do you hear saying their election wasn't legitimate because of "massive voter fraud"? If Biden's election is based on massive voter fraud, then so is theirs, along with every Senator elected in 2020 and every governor and state representative across the country. Illegal ballots are illegal ballots, right? So if this is an illegitimate election, a lot of Republicans are illegitimately occupying their office. Either that, or they know the claims of massive voter fraud are a lie and they are just afraid to challenge the dishonesty because some MAGA party members won't vote for them if they do.
Trump's been whining about voter fraud since 2016. Even though he won, he hasn't been able to endure the fact that Hillary Clinton bested him in the popular vote. That inability is more than just a personality flaw, it's a psychotic obsession. The result of that was the expenditure of millions of taxpayer dollars on a commission to find and eliminate "election fraud." The commission looked everywhere and found nothing. In fact, their work did more to undermine Trump's claim of fraud than all of the evidence that doesn't exist to prove it in this election. Basically, and of course quietly and without much attention, they found plenty of evidence which proves that American elections are the most secure, accurate and fair in the world.
But I'd bet that you won't find Trump taking credit for that as an accomplishment of his presidency, which has almost nothing else to claim.
This is not for Trump supporters who are unable to handle truth and exist in the real world. It is for people who actually respect and appreciate the truth. This is an editorial. Like any editorial, its readers should have a means by where they can verify the factual nature of its claims.
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