9/20/21: At this point, you have to wonder if Donald John Trump has gone completely and clinically insane.
Last Friday, we learned that the orange loser sent a letter to Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger, insisting that it was time for Mr. Raffensperger to throw out the Georgia vote – from last November! – and gift Trump with the state’s 16 electoral votes.
This was almost beyond bizarre – considering that Trump has already made it clear that he hates the Georgia Sec. of State – and because Georgia has already counted its votes three times.
Fourth time is a charm?
Now, in a desperate grab for the last straw, where there is in fact no last straw to grab, Rejected-President Trump claims, “Large scale Voter Fraud continues to be reported in Georgia.”
If straw is lacking, Trump can still send
Raffensperger wads of corn tassel. And he does, claiming, “Enclosed is a report
of 43,000 Absentee Ballot Votes Counted in DeKalb County that violated the
Chain of Custody rules, making them invalid.” (This is different than the time
Trump called Mr. Raffensperger on the phone last January, and asked him to
“find” just enough votes to give him the win.) In any case, the poor,
mentally-ill man suggests that the Secretary of State can “start the process of
decertifying the Election, or whatever the correct legal remedy is.”
*
DOWN IN ARIZONA, the really, really big recount of votes, done by Cyber Ninjas, a company run by a man who says Trump was cheated out of that state’s electoral votes, is…uh…still not done. The Cyber Ninjas originally promised to finish their own, totally fair recount of one county, Maricopa (which went heavily for Biden) in a month. Now, it’s been five.
Once again: We should note that the Maricopa County Board of Elections was, at the time of the November election, controlled by Republicans, and is, at the present time controlled by other Republicans.
Both these sets of election board officials
have basically said, “The Cyber Ninja recount is a ludicrous waste of time and
money. Ninja CEO Doug Logan – who said the election was fixed even before he
started the recount – which included looking for bamboo in the paper
ballots – which would prove they were sneaked into Arizona from China – is not
exactly the unbiased sort you might hire to do a forensic study of election
results. In fact, his company had never done a recount before.
The stupid claims of fraud are all over the place in Arizona and ex-President Trump falls for them all. Matt Braynard, a former Trump campaign staffer, said he helped lead a phone survey – and found Republican voters who said they voted, but whose records said they didn’t! Yes! A straw at last.
Except we know people often say they voted, but didn’t, because they feel like ill-informed losers when they’re contacted by pollsters, if they admit they don’t care. In a Pew Research poll in 2016, 16% of all those who were contacted said, “Yes, I voted.” Public records proved they did not.
When Braynard showed up for a public hearing in Georgia – to claim he could prove the vote in that state had been rigged – he thought he had a handful of straw. But a Democratic lawmaker pulled out a lighter and set fire to his mess. To cite just one or two examples, Mr. Braynard claimed that 1,043 individuals in Georgia had voted, using a postal box “disguised as a home address.” That’s a crime in the Peach State. Rep. Bee Nguyen began dismantling this and many of his other claims. Nguyen noted that an apartment complex around the corner from where she lived had a FedEx office on the first floor – but the complex was not a FedEx building as Braynard had claimed. The complex did use a postal-box-like numbering system for residents. But all the residents – Nguyen had a list of who they were – were also on Braynard’s list of illegal voters.
They were indubitably not.
In other cases, Braynard had listed people who
voted in two states, Georgia, and, say, Maryland. Nguyen explained why this was
not a crime. John O’Neal, born on April 5, 1956, who voted in Georgia, would
not be the same as John O’Neal, born on August 11, in 1956, who voted in
Maryland. Braynard had multiple errors of this kind – when the votes of both
John in Georgia and John in Maryland were legit. (Braynard was essentially
accusing all the people on his various lists of having committed felonies, and
you’d think he’d want to be more careful with research.)
The lopsided battle between Braynard and logic played out last December. A more recent example of imaginary straw in the hand involves Liz Harrington, in Arizona. According to Ms. Harrington, she has proof that 168,000 ballots in Maricopa County were printed on paper that was too thin! She found “evidence” of 75,000 ballots that were supposed to be mailed out, but weren’t! Then you had 18,000 voters who voted in November, but who were later purged. Finally, she insisted that 3,981 voters cast ballots, even though they registered after the deadline. So those votes should be thrown out.
First, it turned out that Harrington hadn’t done much work on her own. She was merely quoting an estimate of how many fraudulent ballots there were – and that estimate came from something Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan kind of said. USA Today decided to do a bit of checking. It turned out Harrington and her kind were confused. If a person voted in person, but early, which was legal, it might look like 75,000 people voted by mail, who never asked for vote-by-mail forms, because the state lumped all early votes into one category.
The “thin paper” claim was even thinner when it came to proof. Ballots printed at voting centers slightly offset lists of candidates, front and back, which, CEO Logan said might have thrown the voters and the voting machines off. There was no proof that this did occur. Logan simply believed that it might.
(Growing up, this blogger used to believe
the Cleveland Indians would win a World Series every year. That doesn’t mean
they did.)
What about those 18,000 voters “purged” from the polls, between November 3 and January 2? Maricopa County election officials tried to explain the situation. It was like talking to children about why they needed to eat their cooked carrots before dessert. The county has 2.6 million registered voters – and it is not unusual for there to be “tens of thousands of changes to voter rolls each month.”
People die and get removed.
More often, they move and get removed.
Finally, what about that specific number: 3,981 people who registered after the deadline, but whose votes were counted in November?
Those would have been among the 6,200 individuals who cast provisional ballots. They registered on time, but wanted to vote early, and had to cast provisional votes until clerks could catch up on all the forms.
FUN WITH PROPAGANDA: Fox News has 24 hours to fill daily, and since they want to fill at least 23 with anti-Biden, anti-Democratic, anti-liberal propaganda, sometimes they have to dig deep.
On Monday, they decided to attack President
Biden for riding a bike. Guesting on Harris
Faulkner’s show, Rachel Campos-Duffey blasted the president for being a puss. “Being the leader of the free world has to be the
most demanding job in the whole world and he simply does not have the mental or
physical stamina to do this job,” Campos-Duffy claimed – having seen nothing
more than a video of Biden riding his bike.
“I mean, just compare it to President Donald Trump, who worked these long, long hours and had impromptu hourlong pressers with the media,” she said.
Yeah. Long hours, and more than 400 days, as president, spent at Mar-a-Lago and other resorts he owned.
Not to mention all those rounds
of golf he played, and the tens of thousands of tweets he sent out.
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