The Night the Votes Went Out in Georgia

I’ve often written about how Republican abuse of power is so pervasive and so rampant, they don’t even care what the public or the media think, they just do it because they can. (And their rich donors tell them to.) Nowhere is that disregard for public opinion more obvious than in Georgia, where the GOP is rigging the gubernatorial election right under everyone’s noses, and acknowledging none of it.

Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp, whose job it is to run state elections, is running for governor against a popular African-American woman, Democrat Stacey Adams. He is a white male, running in a state with a huge black population.

So what to do? Does he formulate a platform to appeal to black voters? Try to show them the benefit of his party’s platform? Win them over to his side with logic, common sense and compassion?

Nope. He tries to keep likely Democrats from voting. He and his cronies/benefactors know the best way to prevail against an outnumbering opponent is to suppress their ability to get their vote counted.

Right off the bat, we have a huge conflict of interest. In fact, Jimmy Carter, who knows a thing or two about monitoring elections,  just sent Kemp a letter asking him to resign his state post. You can’t have an election participant running the election! But they pretend that there would NEVER be any kind of conflict; he’s just too honorable!

Right. Then they also point out that a previous secretary of state also ran for governor and no one objected to that. Of course, I’m sure that Secretary of State didn’t personally hold back 47,000 voter registrations for nefarious reasons.

That’s right, because of voter ID laws, put into place by Republicans, they are holding up registrations for any mismatch between the registration form and whatever they had on record in the state database.

For example, Writing “Drive” on your address instead of “Dr.” A missing hyphen. A signature they say doesn’t match.

All of it is bullshit. Nobody knows with any certainty how they filled out their initial data. Street and their abbreviations should be interchangeable. And signatures? There is a zero percent chance that I could match something I signed yesterday, let alone years ago. And who’s deciding what constitutes a match? (I bet the zip code factors heavily into authentication.)

It’s all a cover to keep people from voting, every last detail is 100% voter suppression.

They claim it’s because they want to combat voter fraud, and that “The Democrats want to hand ballots to immigrants here illegally.” Which is patently ridiculous. Monitoring dotted I’s and crossed T’s are not keeping a single illegal immigrant from registering.

In addition to this chicanery, they’ve also purged over 2.25 million names from voter rolls since 2008. That’s right after Obama was elected, but I’m sure that’s just a big coincidence.

And they’ve closed over 214 precincts since 2012. That ought to make voting harder to do, won’t it? You think they closed precincts in the upscale neighborhoods? Nope. They closed the ones in the poorest areas, under the guise of consolidation, to save money. I’m sure it’s just another big coincidence that these areas skew Democrat.

Why spend money on people who are just going to vote against you, right? Make sure the lines are long and the time spent is vast.

And if they do get through to vote, let's also make the voting machines change the votes from Democratic to Republican. That’s what the NAACP is charging. They’ve fielded numerous reports of votes being recorded that were not what the voters cast.

By the way, Georgia is one of five states whose voting process does not have a paper trail. I’m sure that’s just a big coincidence too.

In April, a cyber-security expert wrote a program on a memory card, and in a demonstration to journalists, inserted the memory card into a voting machine, casting two votes for George Washington and two for Benedict Arnold. When the machine tallied the votes, it recorded three votes for Benedict and one for George.

This was on one of the exact same voting machines that Georgia uses, the same model that generated the complaints from the NAACP.

Also, we should note that Brian Kemp was the only chief election official in the country who turned down election security assistance from the Dept. of Homeland Security. Now we know why… he’s counting on election interference to swing the election his way.

The ways that the Georgia elections have been corrupted are vast. They’re rigging the elections right under our noses and daring anyone to say something about it. Across the country, Republicans (Trump in particular) have charged all along that Democrats are rigging elections, while they’re a damned efficient job of it themselves.

And let me remind you that for all the bluster, there has been no credible evidence of voter fraud, anywhere. Both institutional and governmental studies have found diddley-squat. Yet Republicans are willing to drop millions from voter rolls and erect barriers to voting to combat this invisible “menace.” Even simple ID requirements aren’t so simple, especially if you’re poor, old, or don’t drive. And to make sure it’s especially hard to meet these new “requirements,” they close the DMV offices and voting precincts that their opponents use.

I’ve found that Republicans are especially good at coming up with hoops for other people to jump through.

It is our national imperative that these barriers be overcome. We need to storm the voting booths like ants on a fallen donut because the only way to bring some sanity back to the process is to vote it away from the partisan robber barons and kingdom builders.

Elections should be about the triumph of ideas; not about who can set up the best obstacle course for his opponent.

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