I Told You So Just Doesn’t Cut It

This post is based on an article posted at The Federalist on December 23. Obviously, I am a bit late to the game, but it is an important article.

The article reports:

Fulton County, Georgia, recently made an admission that should have commanded national attention. During a hearing before the Georgia State Election Board, county officials acknowledged that approximately 315,000 early ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election were unlawfully certified yet were nonetheless included in Georgia’s final, official results, in a race Joe Biden was officially declared to have won by just 11,779 votes.

The admission arose from a challenge filed by David Cross, an election integrity activist, who alleged that Fulton County violated Georgia election law in its handling of early voting. Under state statute, each ballot scanner is required to produce tabulation tapes at the close of voting, and poll workers must sign those tapes to certify the reported totals. These signed tapes are not merely an administrative safeguard. They are central to determining whether the vote count itself is legitimate.

So I guess that phone call from President Trump to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was justified! However, that is not the point.

The article concludes:

Cross, whose persistence brought these revelations to light, has asked the State Election Board to decertify Fulton County’s 2020 advanced voting results for the historical record. His request is not aimed at changing past outcomes. We cannot undo the fact that for four years Joe Biden was president. But an official acknowledgment that Fulton County’s vote certification, and by extension the Georgia outcome, was invalid would place a permanent mark on the deliberate misconduct of those responsible and the institutional failure that enabled it, while reinforcing the principle that election law is not optional.

If the State Election Board declines to act, this episode may quietly fade from memory, leaving nothing to prevent it from happening again. Democracies do not fail when rules are broken. They fail when no one is held accountable.

Let’s put the people in jail who were responsible for this fraud, and let’s have an honest election this year and in 2028!

The Truth Comes Out

On December 23, The Federalist posted an article about the corruption in Georgia during the 2020 election.

The article reports:

Fulton County, Georgia, recently made an admission that should have commanded national attention. During a hearing before the Georgia State Election Board, county officials acknowledged that approximately 315,000 early ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election were unlawfully certified yet were nonetheless included in Georgia’s final, official results, in a race Joe Biden was officially declared to have won by just 11,779 votes.

The admission arose from a challenge filed by David Cross, an election integrity activist, who alleged that Fulton County violated Georgia election law in its handling of early voting. Under state statute, each ballot scanner is required to produce tabulation tapes at the close of voting, and poll workers must sign those tapes to certify the reported totals. These signed tapes are not merely an administrative safeguard. They are central to determining whether the vote count itself is legitimate.

I am not saying that all of the questionable ballots were case for Joe Biden, but isn’t it interesting that it took over 300,000 questionable votes to defeat President Trump.

The article notes:

On Jan. 2, 2021, Trump called Raffensperger (Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger) to discuss the irregularities in Fulton County, mentioning the county no fewer than 14 times during the call and stating flatly that it was “totally corrupt.” Trump cited estimates of “250 to 300,000 ballots” that had been “dropped mysteriously into the rolls,” repeatedly noting that Fulton County had never been “checked.” In light of what has now been formally admitted, those claims read less like hyperbole and more like an uncannily accurate description of what actually occurred.

Rather than taking those concerns seriously as questions of whether the law had actually been followed, Raffensperger dismissed them outright, insisting that “we do have an accurate election.” What he did not disclose was that his chief of staff, Jordan Fuchs, was secretly recording the conversation in violation of the law, as The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway reported last year. Immediately after the call, Fuchs leaked the tape to The Washington Post, where, the very next day, it was selectively framed to create the now-infamous narrative that Trump had pressured Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.”

The article concludes:

If the State Election Board declines to act, this episode may quietly fade from memory, leaving nothing to prevent it from happening again. Democracies do not fail when rules are broken. They fail when no one is held accountable.

The state needs to make restitution to all of the people who were financially destroyed by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) case brought against the people who challenged the integrity of the Georgia election.

Taking One Step Toward An Honest Election

On Monday, Just the News posted an article about a recent rule adopted by the Georgia election board.

The article reports:

The Georgia State Election Board (SEB) on Monday adopted a rule that requires the number of ballots and voters be the same before the certification of election results.

The rule ensures that counties comply with Georgia state code. It comes after Fulton County was found to have likely scanned thousands of ballots twice in a recount of the 2020 election.

“The purpose of the rule is to ensure that county superintendents and boards of elections follow the required procedures and can uniformly, properly, and lawfully fulfill their duties, and reconcile the number of ballots to the number of voters so that certification of election results accurately reflects the will of the voters in every county,” the rule reads.

“The rule is built on basic, kindergarten math,” Election Integrity Network Founder Cleta Mitchell said Monday. “Count the number of voters, confirm that the number of voters match the number of ballots. Those numbers should match and should be the same as the number of votes tabulated. The duty for election officials to certify CORRECT results is required under the statute. The rule just makes sure it happens in every county.”

…Also on Monday, the SEB voted to adopt a rule that will require all polling places have signage that states only U.S. citizens can vote.

Obviously this move will not stop all election fraud, but it might stop some of it. There are people still registered on the voter rolls of many states who were born in 1850 and still vote. There are also counties where more people than the number of registered voters vote. It’s time to fix these problems.

This Is A Problem

Just the News is reporting today that there were major chain of custody violations in the handling of mail-in ballots in DeKalb County, Georgia, in the 2020 election.

The article reports:

More than 70% of the 61,731 absentee ballots put in drop boxes in the November 2020 presidential election in DeKalb County, Georgia, were counted and certified by officials, despite violating chain of custody requirements.

The exact number of ballots was 43,907, according to the Georgia State News. The ballots were counted and certified by county and state officials, the news outlet says.

The chain of custody requirements are set forth in Georgia Emergency Rule 183-1-14-1.8-.14, put into effect by the Georgia State Election Board in July 2020.

The rule states absentee ballots placed in drop boxes “shall be immediately transported to the county registrar” by the two-person collection team. The team is required to sign a ballot-transfer form indicating the number of ballots picked up, the time the ballots were picked up and the location of the drop box.

The rule also states the county registrar or a designee “thereof shall sign the ballot transfer form upon receipt of the ballots from the collection team.”

It is interesting that the greatest concerns about election fraud in the 2020 election are centered in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. These states represent 73 electoral college votes. There are also a number of anomalies in the election–bellwether counties that voted 18 to 1 for President Trump, states that have voted for the same candidate for eighty years suddenly voting differently, and other usually bellwether counties that supported President Trump.

Some states are already adding laws that will help protect election integrity. That’s a good thing. The place fraud is easiest is mail-in ballots. However, the electronic age also opens the door for electronic tampering of election results. Even though the machines that scan the votes are generally not hooked up to the internet, as soon as the election head puts the election results on a thumb drive to report them, those results have entered the cloud. We need to find a way to secure the electronic reporting of our elections. We also need to keep all electronic tallying in the United States. Having overseas servers tabulating American voting is not a good idea.