Georgia Audit Finds Whopping 20 Noncitizens Registered To Vote In Whole Damn State
Crisis averted.
Good news for democracy fans in Georgia today! Not only have more than 1.8 million people in Georgia already voted ahead of Election Day, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger today announced that an audit of the state’s voter rolls found just 20 noncitizens who were registered to vote, out of 8.2 million registered voters.
You know, it’s like those rightwing lies about rampant illegal voting by scary undocumented immigrants are in fact lies, a basic truth that has been confirmed by every single investigation of “voter fraud” for decades, as well as in numerous court cases.
Raffensperger’s good news about how clean the voter rolls are is anticipated to have absolutely no effect on MAGA voters, rightwing media outlets, or rightwing politicians who fire up their voters by fearmongering. That’s because the other basic truth about this issue is that despite all the investigations, court decisions, and rigorous academic studies, the myth of noncitizens voting, like the myth of widespread voter fraud, is one jillion percent impervious to facts and evidence, because didn’t they see it on the TV?
But at least you can print the Georgia story out, either from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution if you have a subscription, or from ABC News or other fine outlets.
The Georgia audit found that of the 20 registered voters, nine had actually cast ballots, most of them before 2010 when the state started doing that REAL ID thing that requires proof of citizenship for permanent driver’s licenses. The other 11 had registered but never voted. All 20 registrations were canceled, and the cases were referred to county district attorneys to see if prosecution is warranted, because even if somebody with a green card voted by mistake 20 years ago, they need to go to prison forever.
Raffensperger, instead of reassuring Georgians that fears of massive voter fraud are unfounded, instead framed the audit results as a victory for his vigilance against a threat that the audit suggests was never real to begin with.
“This is the most comprehensive citizenship check ever conducted in the history of Georgia, if not the most comprehensive check ever conducted in the United States,” said Raffensperger, a Republican. “Georgia is a model when it comes to preventing noncitizen voting.”
You might also just as well say that Georgia is a model for the prevention of zombie outbreaks, since “The Walking Dead” and its spinoffs — filmed in Georgia — are even more fictional than noncitizen voting, but keep us vigilant.
The audit also turned up another 156 voters whose citizenship status couldn’t be determined; the secretary of state’s office will investigate them further.
Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office — and the guy who became a national figure when he warned that Trump’s 2020 Big Lie was going to get people hurt — explained that
“One of the reason the secretary ordered this non-citizenship audit is to prove to people that, while there are ways that someone can get on [the voter rolls], it is ceasingly rare,” Sterling said. “There is no proof that there is an overwhelming number of noncitizens on the rolls.”
Clearly, the audit didn’t calm fears of rampant noncitizen voting at all, because Kelly Loeffler, the five-minute Senator and insurrection supporter who lost to Raphael Warnock in 2020 and now leads something called Greater Georgia, a “conservative voter registration organization,” demanded the REAL TRUTH from Raffensperger.
“The revelation that 20 noncitizens — and potentially 156 more — have registered to vote in Georgia is long-awaited information that Georgians deserve to know,” said Loeffler, a Republican and former U.S. senator. “Voters just want the truth, and if state officials continue to withhold or misrepresent it, they will soon erode the trust that has been rebuilt in our system thanks to strong laws and advocacy.
That’s some sophisticated bullshit, pretending that a thorough debunking of the noncitizen voting myth is actually scandalous in itself, to say nothing of the assumption that all 156 indeterminate cases will turn out to be sneaky foreigns, and that even after the audit, Raffensperger still must be hiding something, so he’d better knock it off.
This is where we remind you that MAGA chuds in Georgia have also challenged 63,000 registrations, although ultimately only 800 names were removed, mostly from people who had moved and weren’t going to vote anyway.
But in the meantime, sane Georgians can keep voting early through November 1, and maybe even hope to elect fewer paranoids to high office.
[Atlanta Journal-Constitution / WXIA-TV / Brennan Center / ABC News]
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"Look at the flowers, voters"
I'm kind of wondering how much of this fear mongering is successful because a lot of people are confounded by simple mathematics and numerical illiteracy. Do people not get that 20 voters or even 176 voters, even if they all voted the exact same way, wouldn't be enough to even be a blip in the overall count for all but the most local of elections, and even then, that locality would have to be pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty tiny. And all of them would have need to have lived there. But anyway, details, details.