A Georgia Republican Party official named Cathy Latham, one of the "alternate" electors for Donald Trump, has testified that she had nothing to do with a bunch of tech experts hired by Big Lie lawyers who copied data from voting machines in Coffee County. Surveillance footage suggests otherwise, and new surveillance footage suggests really, really otherwise:
A Post examination found that elements of the account Latham gave in her deposition on the events of Jan. 6 and 7, 2021, appear to diverge from the footage and other evidence, including depositions and text messages.
In other words, she lied. Right?
In response to questions from The Post, Latham’s lawyers said, “Failing to accurately remember the details of events from almost two years ago is not lying.” They have said she did not take part in the copying or in anything improper or illegal.
Latham says she was in the foyer of the Coffee County elections office for a few minutes and chatted with a couple of people. Surveillance footage shows that she visited twice, spent about four hours total, visited every part of the office, and finally took a selfie with one of the forensics experts.
That's quite a memory lapse, no? You can make up your own mind, but if I were a juror in her inevitable perjury case, I'm pretty sure I'd go with "lie."
You say her perjury case is inevitable.
I say I'll believe it when it's over and she's locked up.
Republicans lie under oath even when they don't need to. When do they ever suffer consequences?
"It’s always Republicans."
Careful with the term always....
Adding a qualifier of “it’s overwhelming” or something like that would do the trick, it is something like 99 Republicans out of every 100 incidents.
Fuck off troll.
Wish that those calling Kevin Drum names - even "Republican" - would likewise be 200% accurate.
But we know how very close his statement was to the mark.
“ Careful with the term always....”
Oh, you always say that!
Chuck Todd's Brother by another Mother has checked in.
It's the blind self-conceit of utter bores and halfwits that makes the baboon colony so offensive, and why they should always be given the harshest possible sentences, because nothing else is going to disaffect their minds, and removing them from society, where their presence is already harm enough, is the only realistic protection against what will inevitably be their further attempts at revenge against anyone they can think they will get away with injuring.
Nah, these are just "alternate memories".
Lol!
We are all Jungians now.
It's always projection with Republicans. Always.
Maybe the Democrats need to say that they'll only accept the election of a Republican if the Republican can prove that there was no election fraud. Otherwise, take them to court and use their own charges of fraud against them. Don't issue a concession speech. Issue a challenge to protect the integrity of our elections. If they want to win elections fair and square, let them demonstrate that they won fair and square. Otherwise, assume the worst and if they were claiming fraud, use that to challenge, challenge, challenge.
Like +5. This is a very tempting strategy.
No. I understand the inclination to beat them at their own game, but the Rs real goal here is to undermine democracy itself. They can read the demographic trends as well as anyone else, and they know they are within a few years of being unable to win at the national level. Hence their efforts to sow doubt in the public mind about elections.
Let's not help them with that.
Clear thinking. Thank you.
I am betting Ms. Latham is wishing she had herself her very own Rose Mary Woods, though 4 hours might have taxed even her.
Don't people get charged with perjury all the time for failures of memory?
Bill Clinton argued that whether or not he committed perjury depended on what the definition of the word "was" was. Bill Gates took a different tack, arguing that whether or not he committed perjury depended on what the definiton of the word "is" is.
I thought it was Clinton that argued the definition of “is”.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1998/09/bill-clinton-and-the-meaning-of-is.html
IANAL, but every time there is a case in the news, the legal experts on the talking-heads teevee opine on how difficult it is to get a conviction when the accused ‘doesn’t recall’. Unless there’s a written record or recording of that person actually recalling, how do you prove they did recall?
Perjury charges are actually quite rare.
Yeah, well, she has to try to wriggle out of this, doesn't she?
We're going to be seeing a lot more of this in the midterms. Lots of people are absolutely convinced that they are empowered to personally intervene to fix perceived wrongs. They're pushed to this belief by Trump's own words and actions and a sense of righteousness.
And the will be small peanuts compared to what will happen in 2024. Trump's strategy is create havoc in the election.
"It's always Republicans." It is generally unsound to say "always" and "never," because those terms are so rarely valid. My unscientific view is that there is fraud on both sides and we'll never get a reliable scorecard. And look, regardless of who commits election fraud, can't we all agree that all steps to minimize election fraud should be taken, to include producing a photo ID, a document that everyone needs to function in modern society. And shouldn't we prohibit unsupervised ballot drop boxes?
No, everyone doesn't need a photo ID to function in modern society. And no, we shouldn't prohibit unsupervised drop boxes--there's no evidence that drop boxes, supervised or unsupervised, contribute to voter fraud.
Personal banking is essential; you cannot get a bank account without ID. For many millions, driving is essential; you can't drive without, er ... a driver's license. You can't fly without ID. Try getting non-emergency healthcare without an ID. Want to take the SAT; better have ID. Get even an entry-level job without ID? No way. It is true that you can live off the grid in a cabin in the Alaskan outback without an ID, but that doesn't sound like modernity to me.
And as for unsupervised drop boxes, to my mind, the burden to prove they're fraud-proof should be on anyone who wants to introduce such a method. We went for more than 200 years without them after all.
I don’t think you understand. Drop boxes are provided as an alternative method for voters to return absentee or vote-by-mail ballots, instead of putting them in the mail. Given the deterioration of the USPS under TFG, the drop box is a surer way to get your ballot delivered to election officials by the deadline. Mailboxes aren’t supervised either.
Also mailbox tampering has become a regular thing in many parts of the country to the extent that it is unwise to mail checks via US Mail.
It's not the intentionally off-grid-living that are the problem, it's the marginalized poor. Often elderly. Often non-banking cookie-jar or under-mattress stuffers. Non-driving. (You think that's rare?) Flying? Non-emergency healthcare? SAT-prepping? Don't make me laugh! There is a significant number of such "marginalized" potential voters who can prove who they are, but don't possess the kinds of id's suppressors demand.
Personal banking not essential. Millions of Americans are unbanked. For those who don't drive, a drivers license isn't essential, regardless of how many do drive. Even more people don't fly than don't drive. Try getting non-emergency care if you're uninsured, like millions of Americans. Millions of undocumented workers don't have an ID and they work. Welcome to modern America. Check your privilege, sparky.
We've been using unsupervised drop boxes for years. "Fraud-proof" is a straw man. We've had plenty of tests and there still is no evidence for significant voter fraud with or without unsupervised drop boxes.
We went for more than 200 years without cars or TV, too. Your point?
Smarter trolls, please.
Joel --
Let's be civil please. You're obviously smart and I'm no dummy either; it would be great to have a discussion based on mutual respect.
Here's my take. The argument that there's no evidence of widespread fraud may or may not be true. But even small amounts of fraud can be hugely important in a close election. 700 or so votes was the difference between President Gore and President Bush. I doubt the Democrats would have passed on evidence that 1,000 votes (out of the many millions cast in Florida) were fraudulent, simply because the fraud was not widespread.
Considering the importance of election integrity, the least we ALL can do as citizens is to cooperate in reasonable measures to minimize the risk of fraud. This means that everyone who wants to vote should do whatever it takes to get an ID. If a state makes that inordinately difficult, we should take steps to make it easier--I'd even support a get-out-the-ID campaign to reach out to anyone who needs an ID and offer to help--money well spent. And for anyone with so little mental capacity that, even with assistance, cannot obtain an ID? First, the numbers should be vanishingly small; and second, how would such a person's vote benefit our selection of office holders?
And I also think in-person voting should be the standard, with exceptions that track with absentee voting practices that have served well for many decades. It's no too much to ask voters to come to the polls, and I've warmed up to the notion of a reasonable voting period over a matter of days to add a little bit of convenience.
"The argument that there's no evidence of widespread fraud may or may not be true."
Since no one has produced any evidence of widespread fraud in decades, I think you are going to have to provide some before your suggestions become "reasonable". The burden of proof is on people like you who want to make more difficult for (poor) people to vote.
I said much more than that. Do you have a reaction to the rest? In particular, I'd be interested on your view regarding the need to combat even low occurrences of fraud in close elections, and my policy suggestions.
My reaction is that I haven't seen an atom of evidence that drop boxes are linked to any election fraud. The burden of proof is on those who claim it is, whether or not elections are close.
Hope that helps.
As for voter IDs, if you require them, make them easily available by mail. As for in-person voting, what's so magical about that? Mail voting seems to work fine. In the third decade of the 21st century, we should have secure online voting. Requiring in-person voting is a quaint anachronism.
Here's the deal requiring a photo ID penalizes poor and older women who do not drive. Poor don't use banks so they don't need an ID for that, often they don't drive either.
Older women have often married so they've changed their name so when their regular driver's license is surrendered because they can no longer drive, it's a royal PITA to get all the required documents to get a state id. Even women who've married and divorced run into huge issues proving name changes.
But then again I'd guess you don't want those folks to vote because you wouldn't like how they'd vote.
The answer to all of these concerns is to make it easier to get an ID. States and localities would do well to reach out to shut-ins and the poor. Money well spent to help folks to get IDs.
Making it easier to get ID would almost certainly mean making it easier to get someone else's ID. That just moves the fraud problem.
Why do you assume that I have a bad motive for my policy views and suggestions? I want every citizen who wants to vote to be able to do so.
Recent events have shown that the main reason to "supervise" ballot drop boxes is to prevent Republican trolls from dropping dog turds, acid and fire bombs into them.
As for "a valid photo ID", you must live in some pretty privileged surroundings to think "everybody has one." Maybe "everybody you want to vote" has one!
No, we shouldn’t take ‘all steps’ to eliminate ‘election fraud’, which is not actually a thing. That is, in every election, there are likely to be a few people who cast illegal votes, but there is no evidence that this has happened on a scale that would change the outcome of an election, in the postwar era. We should rather continue with measures that prevent large-scale fraud, balancing those against the need to make voting as accessible and convenient as we safely can.
There is a reliable scorecard on who gets caught committing election fraud, and it's almost all Republicans. You may hypothesize that Democrats commit just as much election fraud but they're smarter and sneakier and so don't get caught nearly as often, but I would want to see evidence for that.
People like RoQueef would never deign to admit members of the Democrat Party are smarter than the median voter, let aline smarter than a GQP vote fraudster.
Any election fraud should be severely punished and I do not care who commits it. All governments should be vigilant and proactive to minimize the risk and prosecute offenders of any political stripe.
If it's true that Republicans commit most voter fraud, they should pay the price; and I would love to see the data to which you refer.
People have been putting ballots into USPS mail blue letter boxes for ages and ages. All of those are unsupervised. There really isn't anything that a person could do, anyway. I handed my ballot into a drop box at the county elections office, where they had a retiree sitting there "supervising." But all she could do was smile and remind people that the envelope needed to be signed. What fraud was she going to stop? Anyone who wanted to drop off dozens of fraudulent ballots would just do it at an actual post office while wearing a hat and sunglasses.
There just isn't much fraud that can be stopped with voter ID laws. If people were impersonating others regularly, we'd have cases of voters going to the polls at 5 pm, only to learn that they supposedly already voted hours earlier. That just doesn't happen except for a few very isolated cases where someone pretends to be a family member that they can be very sure won't be voting. Worrying about those cases is like worrying about the voters who mail in their ballots on the day before the election and then keel over dead 10 minutes later. Plus, all the news cases like this I've seen are Republicans.
The real source of voter fraud is probably impossible to stop, and that is family members voting absentee on behalf of their relatives with dementia. Ma may have been a lifelong Democrat, but now that she has alzheimers and can't see the ballot, the only thing to do is vote GOP down the line for her! There is no way to really stop this, except to have multiple elections officials visit every oldster and have them take care of filling out the ballot. But absolutely no one ever talks about this. Partly because it probably isn't that common, and partly because the people obsessed with fraud know those fraudulent votes likely skew Republican anyway.
Hell, GQP sons & daughters have cast absentee ballots for dead parents, & GQP husbands & wives for dead spouses.
So, you favor a national electoral identification card, easily obtained?
QR code tattoo .. and an ID chip like we put in dogs. But just for republicans.
Yes, but the cards must have a serial number and each serial number should contain the number 666.
Me. Drum said that for a reason. So far, it’s all republicans, especially for larger scale cases. (My fave is the man who had his dead wife vote for Trump …. after he killed her)
Photo ID? No. If you want, maybe keep each voter’s headshot online to match at polls, but rejecting someone who doesnt carry card 24 7 365? No.
Put cameras at drop off boxes. Cameras that are safely stored to foil Republican vandals.
But whatever we do, we shouldn’t make it more difficult to vote until we have significant fraud. And we don’t, except for Republican officials who violate their oaths to protect our votes and other info so that enemies of democracy can … what … discover ways for Putin to help Trump next time ?
At the moment, in the short term, it seems the best way to have free and fair elections is to have as few Republicans as possible involved.
He used to love her
But he had to kill her
He used to love her
But he had to kill
He knew he'd miss her
So he had to keep her
& keep her legacy
With a vote for Trump
“ It is generally unsound to say "always" and "never," because those terms are so rarely valid”
Everyone knows that!
Actual LOL.
We should definitely do things based on your unscientific and completely evidence-free beliefs.
" . . . but if I were a juror in her inevitable perjury case, I'm pretty sure I'd go with "lie.""
How about "lie on stilts?"
If you want to be a juror in that case, you'd better have a picture ID ...
I was called up for federal jury duty last year. Nobody asked for a picture ID.
Okay then, thanks, that was very surprising.
Slithering lawyers for lying clients. Now I understand why lawyers are the bottom feeders. No wonder repulsives like them.....
Q: Why don't sharks eat lawyers?
A: Professional courtesy.
Hey! 98% of lawyers give the rest of us a bad name!
I also conveniently forget all my criming.