True The Vote:
Our evidence of voter fraud in Georgia?
Uh. We’ve got nothing.
Sorry about that.
Over half of Republicans cling to the idea that the 2020 election was surely stolen from Trump, including the election in Georgia. True the Vote, a Texas organization, said they had evidence.
Trump and his allies said they believed it. Conservative media repeated it. A rumor became the justification for overturning an election. The allegation did not need to be true, and indeed it could be contradicted by audits and recounts. But someone said they had evidence of fraud. That was enough.
Trump made his "find 11,000 votes" phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and Trump allies arranged for partisans in Georgia to swear they were duly elected electors. Rudolph Giuliani told Steve Bannon's podcast "We got a big project working in Georgia right now." They did. On January 7, 2021, the day after the Capitol incursion, a group of Republicans breached the voting system in Coffee County, Georgia.
What evidence was there of misdeeds? Who saw ballot trafficking, vote switching, and fraud? True the Vote, took credit finding it. They filed formal complaints to the Georgia Election Board. True the Vote made a strategic mistake. It is one thing to lie to Fox News. But like the people who signed up to be fake electors, True the Vote made the error of asserting on government documents that they had evidence, in hand, of fraud. The Georgia Election Board sued to see it.
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| PDF of the filing |
True the Vote responded in court with a series of admissions. As regards their allegation that they had the names of people with information on a coordinated effort to gather ballots from drop boxes, the allegation that served as the basis for the 2000 Mules movie:
TTV does not have in its possession, custody, or control such identity and contact information.
What about the “contracted team of researchers and investigators," the people with "personal knowledge" of ballot trafficking?"
TTV does not have in its possession, custody, or control such identity and contact information.
And so on.
No, they don't have any information on the "117 Georgia hotline complaints" they claimed that they had.
No, they have nothing to show about the "network of non-governmental organizations."
No, they don't have information about the supposed "bartender who came in from South Carolina" to help with a ballot harvesting scheme.
An odd irony of the legal ramifications of the effort to overthrow the 2020 election is that the guilty people may not be brought to justice for the profound assault they made on American democracy -- the big crime. Such justice that happens will be because of little crimes. People swore falsely on certifications of elections. People signed complaints alleging they had documents they did not have. People examined -- and therefore tampered with and made useless -- tabulating machines in Coffee County. Fox News did not pay a fine to the government for airing wildly untrue information on vote switching. Instead, they paid a civil judgement to Dominion. Rudolph Giuliani isn't in trouble for lying about the Georgia election. He loses a defamation lawsuit to the election workers he defamed.
Meanwhile, in New York, Trump is in trouble not for intentional cooperation between his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and the Russian government in the 2016 election. That is a criminal act that undermines our democracy. Instead, Trump is standing trial because of checks he mischaracterized so they could be deducted as expenses in his business records. He called them legal fees instead of hush money to keep Stormy Daniels from selling her story to the tabloids.
It is the little things that trip you up.
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23 comments:
Neither the blatancy of Trump’s lies nor the clear evidence of his criminality makes any difference to his cult followers. As Republicans are quick to remind us after every mass shooting, it’s a mental health issue. That’s true. They are seriously sick in the head.
James Comey, perhaps the dumbest man in Congress since Louie Gohmert left, is blaming the FBI for referring this guy to his "committee". Despite thae fact that the FBI cut their ties toSmirnov in 2020, and informed DOJ in writing, he was an unreliable source.
Who was in Charge in 2020 ?
In the field of computer hacking, there is the concept of an “attack surface.“ For any given system, this “surface” is the sum of all the possible ways that system can be attacked.
For decades, the Democrats have been doing everything they can to make voting as easy as possible for the unmotivated voters who make up a significant part of their base: “motor voter“ registration whenever you interact with the DMV, vote by mail, extended voting periods, etc. These innovations by Democrats have significantly increased the size of the attack surface of voting. The system now has many more vulnerable points of attack than the older, simpler system of voting in person on Election Day.
While no one has produced evidence that significant fraud happened in the 2020 election, the system looks more vulnerable because it is more vulnerable. This makes accusations of election fraud much more credible, even in the absence of specific evidence.
In the current atmosphere of polarization and mistrust, it’s important for the system of collecting and counting votes to appear reliable to the general public. Our current more complicated voting system does not seem to be passing that test for many Americans.
Ed –
It sounds like you may be getting your Republican conspiracy theories confused. It’s easy to do since they all have the same common denominator – a total lack of any evidence.
True the Vote is a group that came up with the election lies that “2000 Mules” and the “stolen election” were based on. Smirnov was a star witness in Comey’s efforts to find some excuse for impeaching Biden.
The allegations of both have proven totally bogus and Smirnov has been charged with lying to the FBI. Cris Hayes called it “the most spectacular embarrassment imaginable” but if Republicans were capable of shame or embarrassment, they wouldn’t be nominating Trump.
I'm aware of the Smirnov arrest, also that Comer has been touting him as their "unassailable" informant against the President for some months now in their wholly fruitless endeavors in finding anything at all illegal the President has done to merit Impeachment. Also that I inadvertently referred to Comer as Comey, my bad.Here is a.link to a trusted source, including WaPo about Comer mow blaming the FBI.
I meant James Comer, the beady eyed confederate Chair of the House Oversight, who keeps stepping on every rake in sight in his attempts to Impeach the President for nonexistent crimes.
To help forestall further conspiracy theory confusion, former FBI Director James Comey may be a bit of a strutting popinjay, and arguably a bit veracity-impaired as well, at least where improper leaks to the press are concerned, but no one on either side of the aisle would call him dumb. The GOP House committee chair from (diagnostically?) Kentucky by way of Tennessee is James Comer.
Right - Comer. Comey is old news, the guy that helped Putin get Trump elected.
Is it really more vulnerable to fraud though? Because even though it *is* more easily accessible (as should be default in any system of government that strives to allow citizens to vote without poll taxes or other Jim Crow such nonsense) there really isn't anymore fraud than before. Which is to say that out of over 100 million votes cast in 2020, less than 500 were actually found and prosecuted to be fraudulent. If you're into percentages that's about 0.00005% which is functionally negligible.
Perhaps Michael the real problem is that right wing "news" sources are pushing a blatantly false narrative that is readily eaten up by an audience that has been primed by literally decades worth of propaganda/outright lies to believe them.
The integrity of the vote is actually and fortunately quite strong and robust, despite what you and the rest of the MAGAs may believe.
What Woke Guy said does not contradict what I said. I said that the system looks more vulnerable because it is more vulnerable. This is true whether or not those vulnerabilities were actually taken advantage of.
If you leave your car unlocked, and no one steals anything from it, that doesn’t mean you weren’t vulnerable; it just means you were lucky.
In reality, the lack of evidence of voting fraud shows how effective the checks and monitoring are. In the White-wing alternate reality, it shows how effective the conspiracy was.
I'll grant you that the specific things you mentioned like DMV registration and vote-by-mail technically do increase the "attack surface" as you put it. However the car door analogy is a good one that you should think through to it's logical conclusion:
If I am worried about someone breaking into my car I lock the doors. I don't buy a car with 1 door rather than 4 because I'm worried that the extra 3 doors are going to increase the "attack surface" of my car. That would be crazy and yet that analogy almost perfectly captures the paranoia that has overtaken the GOP on this issue.
The car doors are locked Michael l, you can rest ready about that.
The lack of evidence of election fraud is consistent with two hypotheses:
* There was no election fraud.
* The election hackers were smarter than the guards, and their successful hack went undetected.
All we know for sure is that there was no large-scale unsuccessful attack.
Michael,
It sounds like you support voter suppression "just in case."
That’s not what I said, nor is it what I meant.
The lack of evidence of voter fraud is consistent with one hypothesis: there's no basis for the allegations.
To the far-White conspiracy theorists, the allegation is all the proof they need. "Evidence? We don't need no stinkin' evidence!"
I don’t usually pull rank like this, but it’s appropriate here:
With a PhD in computer science, and 30 years of experience as a software engineer (meaning that I built things out of logic at a professional level), I would not so humbly assert that I am correct about the logic I presented about the two hypotheses.
I understand that some people have such a high level of revulsion towards Trump that it warps their reasoning.
I am not an advocate for Trump. I do not want Trump to become president this November. But that does not alter the logic; facts don’t care about your feelings.
No doubt there are educated people who subscribe to conspiracy theories, but that doesn't alter the logic. The fact is that every allegation of significant voter fraud was thrown out of court for lack of evidence. True the Vote claimed they had evidence, but they were lying.
The compulsion to be certain about what you don’t actually know is a fundamental error of logic.
Creating a voting system with far more points of attack than having everyone vote on the same day in person vastly increases the probability of successful, and potentially undetected voting hacks.
What’s the basis for asserting that an undetected voting hack didn’t happen? An emphatic assertion that the system is impregnable and perfect?
Many fools have lived to regret such assertions. Remember the Maginot Line?
There's nothing logical about believing allegations without any evidence. Remember the Jewish Space Lasers?
The Democrats have created a voting system with many more potential vulnerabilities than the previous system of everyone voting in person on the same day. Maybe some of those new vulnerabilities were successfully exploited. Maybe they weren’t. No one knows.
What we do know is that those vulnerabilities are there, just waiting for exploitation by suitably competent and motivated bad actors.
Anyone with knowledge of the amazing clever and unanticipated successful attacks performed on computer systems by hackers can only look at this new voting system invented by the Democrats with alarm at the naïve optimism with which they constructed it.
If this new voting system gets hacked, will we even know? Not if the hackers were really good.
Oregon, the state you and I both live in has been doing fully mail-in voting for many years, nearly 30 years now and has a vanishingly small number of instances of fraud. There is nothing inherently less secure about a voting system that happens over a period of time, like mail-in compared to same-day in person voting.
Unless your point of concern is more regarding all your mentions of computer hacking. Well my friend, Fox News had similar concerns and after voicing them repeatedly they came to a nice 787 million dollar agreement with Dominion Voting Systems that their "concerns" weren't valid.
As to your worry that we wouldn't know if there was a hacking, I'd strongly encourage you to actually read more about safety layers built into these systems. Because your vague concerns are mostly already addressed with multiple layers of safeguards. Not to mention the tons of polling, exit polling and other such data. If Biden is winning Alabama 85-15 then we'll know there's something suspicious happening but I'm more than confident that will not be the case.
If you're actually concerned about voter fraud then your real concern with a guy who pressures secretaries of state to "find" him an extra 11,780 votes because THAT actually *IS* fraudulent. And there's only one guy and party who is pulling shit like that.
OK, maybe some of our firestorms were started by Jewish Space Lasers. No one knows. There's no evidence they weren't.
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