#georgia audit

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Pushing more easily-debunked lies about the election, Tucker Carlson threatens another insurrection

Eric Kleefeld at MMFA: 

Fox News prime time host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night elevated a melange of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that have circulated online among the right-wing fringe, seeking to discredit President Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia and promote more efforts to recount ballots again.

In so doing, Carlson has placed his show — and with his leading position at Fox News, the entire network — back at the forefront of efforts to delegitimize the 2020 election and push the lies that led to the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Carlson is still going after ballot-scanning machines — even after Georgia’s hand recount

Since last week, Carlson had been teasing a segment on election “misconduct” in Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta. On Wednesday night, much of his monologue focused on alleged “fraud” involving the double-scanning of a few batches of ballots in the initial count from election night.

Just as with prior conspiracy theories about the election in Georgia, this scrutiny on ballot scans in the initial count is conveniently ignoring a simple fact: There was already a manual hand recount of the 5 million paper ballots in the state, which corrected a few mistakes in local areas but did not significantly alter Biden’s victory in the state. As a result, the double-scanning of some small number of ballots in the initial count would no longer have an impact even in a very close race.

In this sense, this claim is similar to other lurid allegations about the election based on a small mistake genuinely did occur but was then blown up beyond any plausibility — even long after the error was already fixed.

Indeed, Trump gained more votes in Fulton County during the recount than Biden did, thus demonstrating that these small mistakes were found and corrected without bias in the process. Furthermore, other significant errors were found in a pair of pro-Trump counties, which when corrected in the recount served to eat into (but not reverse) Biden’s overall statewide lead — and yet those errors in pro-Trump Georgia counties have not received the same attention or level of accusations as the election administration in a heavily Black, pro-Biden county.

The main claim at hand has been hyped online by discredited right-wing columnist John Solomon, former New York City police commissioner and Trump-pardoned felon Bernard Kerik, the QAnon-linked former U.S. Senate candidate Lauren Witzke, and former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon. Other claims in Carlson’s monologue were also pushed by The Gateway Pundit, which also promoted Carlson’s upcoming segment. Following Carlson’s monologue, far-right outlets and figures including The Gateway Pundit, The Post Millennial, and Newsmax chief White House correspondent Emerald Robinson lauded his report.

Tucker Carlson pushed debunked conspiracies about Georgia's 2020 election outcome on his show last night, this time directed at heavily Democratic Fulton County's ballot counting process.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Republicans Push To Export Absurd Arizona-Style Election Audits To Other States

GOP lawmakers from Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia want to conduct unnecessary, conspiratorial audits of the 2020 election in their home states.

Travis Waldron at HuffPost: 

Arizona state Senate Republicans’ “audit” of 2020 election results in Maricopa County is so unprofessional and illegitimate that many election officials won’t even refer to it as an audit.

But the GOP’s audit fever is spreading nevertheless: Driven by the same lies about election fraud that underpin the Arizona audit, Republican lawmakers and conservative activists in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are clamoring for their states to launch their own sham reviews. Another so-called forensic audit ― a term veteran election officials have not used before ― could soon begin in Georgia’s largest county. Embattled Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (R) visited Arizona last week with dreams of convincing his state ― which, unlike the others, former President Donald Trump won ― and others to replicate the process. Other GOP lawmakers, including several with plans to seek higher office next year, have flocked to Phoenix too.

Not all Republicans are on board with the push to continue conducting conspiratorial reviews of the election. But those behind the Arizona audit, and the conservatives seeking to bring them to other states, are preying on a general misunderstanding of how election audits and reviews typically work to promote their own cynical political goals, undermining democracy and American elections in the process.

“The fact of the matter is that in most states, there is already some sort of process in place post-election to ensure the accuracy and fairness of the results before those results are certified,” Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) told HuffPost this week. “People screaming for this kind of audit don’t understand how those things work, and the systems that are already in place to ensure that there are checks and balances.”

“We cannot continue to have people questioning these processes just because they don’t like the result,” she said.

Independent observers and election officials from both parties and across multiple states have repeatedly said that the 2020 election was safer, more secure, and more audited than any contest in American history, thanks in part to increased reliance on mail-in ballots because of the COVID-19 pandemic. There have been numerous audits that follow typical standards and best practices in states and counties. None have turned up evidence of the sort of widespread fraud that Trump and his Republican supporters have insisted took place; neither did the New Hampshire audit to which Trump had pinned his hopes of surfacing evidence of the sort of malfeasance he claimed occurred.

The Arizona audit, meanwhile, is being conducted by a firm that has no experience reviewing an election and has faced allegations that it has violated even the most basic standards and practices of typical audits. Observers have alleged that reviewers have improperly handled ballots; broken the chain of custody for how ballots should be reviewed, stored and transported; and potentially compromised voting machines and election integrity by having active Wi-Fi connections in the location of the audit. It is unclear who is paying for the process, a clear violation of normal standards of transparency for election reviews. And it has possibly compromised Maricopa County’s electronic voting machines, potentially costing local taxpayers the millions of dollars it will take to replace them.

Republicans are seeking to push the partisan sham "audits" that is happening in Arizona to other states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia to fulfill the delusions that Trump won the election.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

It's Not Just Arizona: Trump Backers' Push To Review 2020 Ballots Spreads

The efforts have been inspired by an audit of the votes in Arizona’s Maricopa County, an elaborate exercise engineered by the GOP-led state Senate.

Kate Brumback and Nicholas Riccardi at AP, via HuffPost: 

ATLANTA (AP) — Six months after Donald Trump’s loss, conspiracy theorists and Trump backers are continuing their push for repeated examinations of ballots and finding limited successes.

A Georgia judge last week awarded a group the chance to review mail ballots in a large Georgia county that includes Atlanta. Officials in a rural Michigan county have expressed interest in a review of their voting machines. A similar debate has caused sharp divisions in a New Hampshire town. In some cases, the efforts have been inspired by an audit of the votes in Arizona’s Maricopa County, an elaborate exercise engineered by the GOP-led state Senate.

The efforts are unlikely to yield any new revelations about President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. The votes have been counted — and often recounted — and certified by local officials. Still, the lingering debate and legal wrangling have propelled suspicions and advanced debunked theories. And their sometimes misleading conclusions have been amplified by Trump, whose false allegations of election fraud sparked the push.

The profusion of audits alarms election experts, who note that the Arizona audit has set a troubling new precedent of third-party, partisan review of the ballots, long after elections are over.

“This is bad enough to see it happen once,” said Eddie Perez, an expert on voting systems at the OSET Institute, said of Arizona, but seeing it elsewhere in the country is “dangerous for democracy.’”

The audits are serving a clear political purpose in firing up the Republican Party’s base. At a rally outside Phoenix last week featuring GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, references to the Arizona audit drew much more enthusiastic applause than even immigration, normally the top hot-button issue on the right in the border state.

In a statement Monday night, Trump criticized Republican Party leaders for not doing more about “what went on” in November. He cited the ballot reviews underway and promised “more to follow.”

The Arizona audit has been cited as a template for the others, although each is distinct. In Arizona, the Republican-controlled state Senate subpoenaed more than 2 million ballots and voting machines from Arizona’s most populous county, which includes Phoenix, and gave control of the review to a small cybersecurity firm whose founder, Doug Logan, had tweeted pro-Trump election conspiracies.

[...]

But the biggest new entry into the audit field is in Georgia’s Fulton County, where a judge on Friday ruled that plaintiffs could inspect 147,000 mail ballots as part of their lawsuit alleging fraud in the most populous county in the state.

The lawsuit was spearheaded by Garland Favorito, a longtime skeptic of Georgia’s voting systems who has embraced conspiracy theories about 9/11, Clinton-era scandal and Supreme Court justices. Favorito says he voted for Don Blankenship, the U.S. Constitution Party candidate, last year.

Far-right Trumpists are still hell-bent on continuing efforts to overturn Joe Biden's valid win by pushing biased Arizona-style "audits" to other states like Georgia.