Here's the blaring headline at the top of the Washington Post this morning:
In a hyper-technical sense this is true. The new Georgia rule doesn't require a hand count of how people voted, but it does require a hand count of the number of ballots to make sure it matches the machine total. The Post doesn't tell us that until the ninth paragraph.
It's still probably a dumb idea, and maybe even illegal too—according to Georgia's Republican attorney general, anyway. There's no reason to doubt machine tallies, and the whole thing is most likely designed to generate discrepancies in case Trump loses and needs something to yell about.
Still, the headline is wildly misleading. Readers deserve better.
Georgia will try to delay the count till past the deadline for the electoral callege so the decision of who will be president will go to the states. Where of course Republicans have an advantage. That's if the race is close enough. The fact that it will disenfranchise millions of voters is irrelevant.
Luckily, as they've proven, the Vice President has ultimate authority over the election. Dems forever!
That's why they are cheating before it even gets to the V.P. to certify.
I like Kevin, but he doesn’t realize how fully committed the Republican Party is to flooding the zone with shit to maintain power.
You give Republicans and Trump the benefit of the doubt at your own peril. I've stopped doing that even before Trump.
I don't know what the Georgia election board is thinking, or if they're thinking, but it's highly likely that there will be discrepancies between a hand count and the machine count, and it will be nearly certain that the machine count is correct. Have they ever tried to hand count thousands of pieces of paper?
They're thinking if you complicate the process enough you will get some sort of error or errors. Enough of an error(s) to delay the certification. This is their goal.
+1
That's not even taking into consideration intentional fraud in the count.
Even banks long ago gave up hand-counting paper money and switched to machines. Money is banks' very reason for being-- if they trust machines over humans even with money, that tells you all you need to know.
I think Kevin is missing the forest for the trees on this take. It is the impact of the rule that matters, and this is 100% to generate a reason not to certify the results.
From the actual language of the rule: "this rule... requires the poll manager and two sworn poll officers to unseal ballot boxes, remove and record the ballots, and
have three poll officers independently count them. Once all three counts match, they sign a control document. If discrepancies arise between the hand count and recorded totals, the poll manager must resolve and document the inconsistency.
Getting three hand counts to match on any large number of items and also the recorded totals is an exercise in futility at any larger precinct.
So all they need is for one partisan hack to falsify their count and delay certification. Add another and they will never get it certified in time. Which is probably their goal.
And it does not seem any better over at Kevin's old blogging grounds:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/09/repbulican-georgia-election-board-hand-count-rules-election-chaos/
"voting rights activists worry that the new hand counting mandate, combined with rules adopted last month requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and access “all election-related documentation,”
The key phrase here is "reasonable inquiry". What does that mean exactly? I can guess it means taking your sweet time conducting a pointless and unnecessary inquiry to delay certification. They are purposely throwing monkey wrenches into the system knowing it will cause chaos.
Like... Don't we already do this?
Like, we have someone check the machines and tally when people submit their ballot.
We also tally when people are handed ballots. We also write down who was given ballots.
What the heck are they asking to do?
Like, yes, we already do this. And like, yes, they frequently don't match. It's, like, due to human error. Or, like, someone takes a ballot and leaves without turning it in. It's typically, like, off by one or two. It's been the case in every election for, like, years.
Trump has turned issues of irregularities into issues of massive fraud. Making a Mt everest out of a mole hill.
He's turned people's lack of knowledge about even long-standing normal processes into points of "possible fraud" at every step. How much do John and Jane Q Public really know about normal ballot processing, or the kinds of checks and safeguards built into handling mail and in-person ballots? He and his lickspittles can exploit this ignorance by constructing malign conspiracies out of anything and everything about this stuff. There's no limit to it, no actual irregularities needed, really.
Yes, yes! They made a big deal in 2020 about the dissociation of the signed envelope, after verification, and the mail-in ballot, an essential step for preserving the secrecy of the vote. IIRC, they argued that the signature verifications were faulty, and since it was no longer possible to identify the ‘unverified’ ballots, the whole election had to be re-run.
So why would we have them count it again?
So as to create a controversy over normal, insignificant irregularities.
And, more and more, it seems like understands that his best and perhaps only path to victory is cheating. Today’s weirdness was threatening Jews with antisemitism if he loses and promising to bring back flavored vapes. Who knows what weird threats and promises tomorrow will bring?
It'll only get worse. Far worse.
We actually just had a statewide hand count for a very tight primary race. The machine count was exceedingly accurate—not more than a vote or two difference in each county. And we are an all-mail (*gasp*) state.
I dunno, Keven. I think the headline is accurate.
The headline doesn't say the law requires a hand count of votes. It clearly states that it will require a count of ballots. It's not "hypertechnical" at all.
Should the reporter explanation come higher in the story? I can accept that. The he;dline, though, is correct.
Agreed. The headline appears to be pretty clear and its accurate.
Why would anyone think that 'count ballots' meant 'count the number of votes' instead of 'count the number of ballots.'
The headline says exacly what Kevin says it should say.
That's what concerns you, not the series of election rule changes the board scheduled for votes just 6 weeks before the election, 17 days before early voting starts, and days after overseas ballots were being sent out? And without citing exigent circumstances?
Oh, they think since the pandemic was used as exigent circumstances, that any 'security' issue they're facing is of the same value.
So in their minds, they're just doing the same.
Yeah, I was suspecting that's what they're thinking, evidence-free, naturally.
Readers deserve better, and Americans deserve better too.
Thanks to the bundle of insanity that is the Electoral College, we have to care about individual state counts, the presidential race is wildly warped towards "battleground states", and certain sections of the populations have disproportionate influence in how the President is chosen.
On top of this, certain states can no longer even be counted on to certify the result of their own election, making them their own ticking time bombs. The need for the Dem candidate to win by a large margin (not just to win, but to win decisively and not let the race go down to a single state) grows greater and greater.
It's gonna get worse, too. There are too many people and too much invested in this narrative.
I blame the British Crown for the Electoral College, for allowing different size/population colonies to be created...
Thanks for the new information, Kevin. Based on that information, I agree that the Post headline is wildly misleading. Still, the news is not good. I hope that Democrats aren't counting on Georgia.
The Post is a "necessary" evil, and their editorial silence on Trump's lies and the way he is corrupting the election process is inexcusable. Still, they employ some good political writers, even if I think that those writers might often need to self-censor to get their stuff into print. Therefore, I will continue to subscribe as long as they offer me my current rate of a dollar per month.
Oh, come on, the Post is not evil just because it does not run constant exposes of Trump's habitual lies and corruptions. It covers it quite enough. And on most issues, the Post is rather to the left, sometimes embarrassingly so --- I swear, if there was a zombie apocalypse, the headline would be "Apocalypse Likely to Disproportionately Harm Poor Communities and Persons of Color."
And frankly, at this point, it really does not matter how much you cover it; people have seen Trump for a long time now and have been exposed to the fact he lies constantly and have made their judgements about him. The 68 millionth data point is not going to change their opinion when the 67,999,999 earlier data points did not...
Well, the Post has a half-dozen conservative commentators that have a very tenuous relationship with the truth.
As far as Trump, do you think it is advisable that after someone lies 30,000 times, you just start treating it as the truth?
I think it is the responsibility of the press to treat Trump as they would any other candidate.
If Harris claimed that Trump voters were eating cats and dogs, how many inches tall would the headline be?
Why exactly should they be any smaller for Trump?
And do you acknowledge that a significant portion of the population pays zero attention until October of an election year? The news should have the urgency of assuming that each story is the only one a voter will see.
Reuters calling it votes in their headline…
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/georgia-election-board-may-order-hand-count-votes-us-presidential-contest-2024-09-20/
Tried to archive dot org …
As an election judge, this makes me cringe. (Caveat: I’m not an election judge in Georgia, so different processes would apply) There are two ways I see this happening: either at the polling place, or at the central drop off where the ballots are delivered. If you do it at the polling place, you just added several hours to an already long day for the folks there as they count the ballots, several times, and probably recount them a couple times when the counts don’t match (due to ballots sticking together, etc). If you do it in a central spot, you just added a ton of work for heavily populated areas, which means those places won’t report results for several days after the smaller more rural areas report their results. And you know exactly how that will play: “we were winning until all these late counting cities dumped their vote totals… and why did they take so long? Were they figuring out how many votes they needed?”
... and all of this done under continuous harassment, sabotage, threats and actual violence against the people doing it.