Don’t look now, but the fix is already in this election to cheat the vote via a Georgia hand count, stall strategies, and other nefarious tactics to send Donald Trump back to the Oval Office.
Politics :
In case you haven’t been paying attention, Trump is shaking in his boots over the realization that ol’ Joe Biden is no longer his competitor — and that the youthful and highly popular Kamala Harris could legitimately beat him in November. So, Trump has been busy revving up some of his greatest hits from 2020, including ‘STOP THE STEAL’ and ‘THE ELECTION WAS RIGGED.’
As reported on OK WASSUP! in August, Donald Trump brazenly got a couple of his MAGA sycophants installed onto the Georgia State Election Board. He even bragged about it at rallies and introduced them to his crowd as “great” patriots. These MAGA sycophants then went to work to successfully instill a Donald Trump dirty trick in their battleground state: a Georgia hand count.
Yes, while the rest of the country will be using machines and modern technology to count the millions upon millions of votes on election night, Trump has convinced his people to stall via a Georgia hand count.
According to USA Today, the Georgia State Election Board passed a controversial measure last week requiring all of the state’s voting precincts to hand-count ballots and compare them against machine count tallies BEFORE they can certify their state’s results. This decision was designed to delay results, create space for election meddlers to spread disinformation, block certifying the actual victor, and allow Trump an excuse to claim early voting and mail-in ballots were “rigged.”
Here we go again!
The newly passed Georgia hand count rule will require 3 separate individuals in each of Georgia’s 2,400 precincts to hand count all ballots and then sort them into stacks of 50. Election workers must then compare those stacks to the figures generated by machine counts. If the numbers don’t match, the state vote can’t be certified.
“Quick reporting of results is a hallmark of Georgia’s election administration and bolsters voter confidence. Delays in results create a vacuum that leads to misinformation and disinformation,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said.
He’s right.
Voting experts have long warned that hand counts are time-consuming, costly, and less reliable than machines. They also said Georgia’s new count rule is contrary to state law and a breeding ground for error.
“What we are talking about in plain terms is asking for thousands of people to handle ballots BEFORE their totals are known and were formally reported without virtually a single safeguard in place, even without considering the risk of any bad actors,” said Marisa Pyle, senior democracy defense manager for All Voting Is Local. “Elections staff are begging you to stop.”
By this concocted stall tactic in Georgia, Trump has laid the groundwork to sow doubt in the integrity of the election process — as well as for MAGA election workers to “accidentally” err during the human hand tally. Of course, then, he can repeat his 2020 strategy to claim voting was rigged and victory was stolen from him.
However, that’s not the only trick up Trump’s sleeve.
According to The Atlantic, Trump recently attempted to change the long-standing rule in Nebraska from its traditional split of the Electoral College allocation to a ‘winner-take-all’ system. Thankfully, his plot failed. However, the fact that he attempted the change only 2 weeks before early voting was set to begin proves just how desperate and conniving he is.
In preparation for Donald Trump to pull a few more ‘gems’ from his dastardly bag of election tricks, states are already fighting back.
On Tuesday, top election officials in several major swing states confirmed they are prepared to take local governments (and Trump cheaters on the local level) to court if they refuse to certify the 2024 presidential election and impede the election process.
During a public event at the University of Michigan last Thursday, officials from Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin assured the public that they are prepared to protect the legitimacy and integrity of the election — and to go to any legal lengths to do so.
“We would immediately take them to court to compel them to certify, and we’re confident −- because of how clear the election law is in Pennsylvania −- that the courts would expeditiously require the counties to certify their election results,” said Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt.
Schmidt, who is a Republican, is remembered for standing against efforts to overturn the 2020 election when he was a local government official in Philadelphia. He already took 3 counties to court during the 2022 primary to force them to certify the election results and will do so again in 2024 if necessary.
Lisa Marra, the Arizona elections director who works for Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, said her state is prepared to take the same approach.
“The state would sue to get them to canvass the election,” Marra said of any county that refuses to certify. “If they refuse to canvass at that point, we’d go back to court and the state could actually move forward without those results.”
Meagan Wolfe, the nonpartisan administrator for the Wisconsin Election Commission, is also gearing up for potential tricks on the local level designed to aid Donald Trump.
“I feel very confident that if we were to have that kind of issue where we had to have a court intervene to mandate somebody to do their mandatory responsibilities [count and certify ballots], we’d be able to resolve that very quickly,” she said.
Division, diversion, and “stall, stall, stall” is the name of the game for Trump in the Georgia hand count battle and other planned election tricks. However, officials seem to be proceeding one step ahead of Trump and his efforts to sow electoral doubt, cheat the election, and claim victory just to keep himself out of jail.
OK WASSUP! discusses Politics:
The Georgia hand count and other Trump electoral tricks.
Slate: Since late July, a partisan majority on the Georgia State Board of Elections has enacted a series of last-minute changes to the state’s election procedures, including changes that could threaten the ability of people of color in Georgia to vote and have their votes counted equally. Our organization has vigorously opposed efforts to alter the election certification process and will continue to do so. While we expect the courts to block the Georgia board’s most egregious attacks on the votes, we must recognize that these attempted changes would have been harder, if not impossible, to implement in the coming election if the Supreme Court had not eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, or if Congress had passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Under the former preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Justice or a federal court undoubtedly would have had to first… Read more »