Georgia Elections Board Votes To Make Three People Hand-Count Each Ballot While Singing National Anthem Backward
Just kidding not literally, but the ratfuckery continues!
Down in Georgia, where Hazzard County doesn’t exist and 159 other counties do, the state elections board is an administrative body, like it is everyplace else. The board’s job is to administer the rules, not make up new ones. And legislating is the legislature’s job, like it says right there in the name.
But after Donald Trump’s humiliating loss there in 2020, three MAGAs on the five-member elections board decided it shouldn’t work like that. Instead, they should have the right to decide what county’s election results they want to certify, and which ones they won’t. And then Friday, just 48 days before the election, the MAGA three passed another new rule to require a hand-count of what’s predicted to be about five to seven million ballots on election night. It’s a rule so fucktacular that even the Republican attorney general thinks it’s just a little bit more than the law will allow.
The hand-count rule “requires the poll manager and two sworn poll officers to unseal ballot boxes, remove and record the ballots, and have three poll officers independently count them.” Not the votes themselves, mind you, just the number of ballots. Georgia went through two recounts in 2020 that showed the voting machines working just fine, they were not accidentally shredding ballots instead of counting them, or making new ballots out of magic. There’s no justification for this, other than slowing things down and creating chaos.
And there’s more! After the ballots are scanned electronically, says the elections board, an elaborate Byzantine dance shall commence:
The poll manager and two witnesses who have been sworn as poll officers … shall unseal and open each scanner ballot box, remove the paper ballots from each ballot box, record the date and time that the ballot box was emptied and present to three sworn precinct poll officers to independently count the total number of ballots removed from the scanner, sorting into stacks of 50 ballots, continuing until all of the ballots have been counted separately by each of the three poll officers. When all three poll officers arrive at the same total ballot count independently, they shall each sign a control document containing the polling place, ballot scanner serial number, election name, printed name with signature and date and time of the ballot hand count. If the numbers recorded on the precinct poll pads, ballot marking devices [BMDs] and scanner recap forms do not reconcile with the hand count ballot totals, the poll manager shall immediately determine the reason for the inconsistency; correct the inconsistency, if possible; and fully document the inconsistency or problem along with any corrective measures taken. A separate container shall be used for the hand counted paper ballots from each ballot box and the container shall be labelled with the polling place, ballot scanner serial number, the number assigned to the ballot scanner for that election, the scanner counts of the ballots from the tabulation tape, and the hand count ballot total as certified by the three poll officials. The container shall be sealed and signed by the poll manager and two of the three hand count poll officers such that it cannot be opened without breaking the seal. The poll manager and two witnesses shall sign a label affixed to the container indicating that it contains all the hand counted ballots from the indicated scanner box and no additional ballots.
Whew, sounds like a bunch of busywork, with so many screwup opportunities! Boss Hogg wishes he could’ve thought of it. And there’s even more!
If a county can’t make the deadline to finish the counting (which this year is 5 p.m. on November 11) or if there’s any discrepancies (which there will be, with such an elaborate procedure that there is no time to train anyone on how to do), the elections board also changed a rule back on August 6 that lets themselves take over from the local elections board, and certify the election for them. Or not!
Hand-counting humans have been found to make about 16 times more mistakes than machines do. The bigger the county, the more mistakes one can expect. And big counties, like Fulton and Gwinnett, Cobb, Chatham and DeKalb, just happen to be where most of the state’s Democrats live too, what a non-coincidence!
Georgia has been working really hard at the vote suppression thing, if you haven’t heard.
Who is behind this ode to ratfuckulence? Trump called the three election board members who voted for it, Dr. Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King, “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory,” though they’re more like the pit bulls trying to steal the bacon off of the counter, hoping you’ll be too distracted by your phone to swat at them with a rolled-up newspaper.
And who is behind them? Aha, what’s this tidbit from ProPublica?
A former Fulton County election official who submitted an initial draft of the rule told ProPublica that she had done so at the behest of a regional leader of a right-wing organization involved in challenging the legitimacy of American election systems. That organization, the Election Integrity Network, is led by Cleta Mitchell.
Well, well, well, if it isn’t old Cleta Mitchell! She is, as Evan once said, “one of those old assface white conservative lawyers who turns up like a slug languishing underneath a railroad tie pretty much anytime Republicans are caught doing fascism. Pick up the railroad tie, oh there she is!”
A-Hole Trump Coup Lawyer Sick Of Gross Youngs Voting, What If We Just Made That Totally Impossible?
Accurate! Mitchell was on that perfect phone call with Trump when he begged the Georgia secretary of state to find his loser ass 11,780 votes. Back in 2022 a grand jury in Georgia recommended she be indicted on seven counts, including soliciting election fraud, witness interference and making false statements. But for whatever reason, DA Fani Willis decided not to include her in that big fat RICO indictment, and she slimed away, unsalted. Lucky break! Now she’s back, with some funding from Ziklag, a nonprofit network of rich Christian weirdos who want to take over America, because Jesus told them that they should be in charge of telling everybody what to do. Guess they’ll worry about humility and getting their camel butts through the eye of a needle some other time.
Mitchell seems to be the hub of a gaggle of election-denying county officials across Georgia, who have been chatting and coordinating with each other, and moaning together about how Democrats are being mean, horrible and “Orwellian to demand that election officials certify an election even if they have unanswered questions about the vote.” YES, BECAUSE THAT IS YOUR JOB! TO ADMINISTRATE! If you think somebody is breaking the law, take the evidence to law enforcement, quick, before Hugo Chavez’s ghost and his space lasers get away!
Spoiler alert, they know there’s no fraud. Like Texas AG Ken Paxton raiding grandmas to find “illegals” voting in Texas, or Tina Peters in Colorado tampering with voting machines to find tampering with voting machines, the “investigation” is the evidence. There must be evidence, because look at all that investigating they’re doing!
So will the elections board get sued and will this latest ridiculousness be stopped in time? We shall see! Until then, here’s 46 minutes of jumps from the General Lee! Whoo!
>>So will the elections board get sued and will this latest ridiculousness be stopped in time?<<
*Magic 8 Ball*
Signs point to FUCK YES THEY WILL GET SUED.
/*Magic 8 Ball*
Well, this is how you keep unreconstructed states unreconstructed; you go right back to the Jim Crow toolbox and if there's too many Black people voting, you make it much tougher. Since a lot of the counties where Black people live are populous (especially Fulton County) this will be intended to make sure there's a casus belli to throw out their votes.
All I can say to this is, if you have someone like Brian Kemp running after you've already given victory to three other Democrats in statewide election (Biden, Warnock and Ossoff), then finish the job and elect the Democrat for governor (Stacey Abrams).
Democrats, fight hard and vote. No matter what, get the votes out there; there'll be a way. It will be ugly in Georgia with rules like this. But always keep trying. You've been through this before.