It's Two Weeks Until The Election, So Here Come The Conspiracy Theorists!

It's almost like the GOP is expecting to lose.

Hans von Spakovsky, Heritage Foundation weirdo

The election is now two weeks away, yeeks! That means it’s time for more right-wingers to scream VOTER FRAUD, with even more volume and intensity than they have been over the last four years since their loser candidate lost, losingly.

Fraud screamers, come on down! First up is Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow with the supervillain name of Hans Anatol von Spakovsky, who is sure that a high absentee ballot return rate in Wayne County, Michigan — where Detroit is, wink wink — equals FRAUD. He went on the podcast “O'Conner & Company,” where he called Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson “the worst,” and lied that she refused to remove dead voters from the rolls.

“They found over 26,000 people who are dead on the voter rolls and she has refused to take them off. That's the kind of person you have in charge of elections there.”

What actually happened was Cleta Mitchell’s Public Interest Legal Foundation sued Benson and Michigan, claiming that 27,000 voters on Michigan’s rolls were dead. But Benson refused to remove them without first confirming that they were dead, like Michigan’s procedures call for, by using data from the Social Security Administration and so on. PILF lost, because Benson refused to kick off 27,000 people just because Cleta Mitchell stamped her foot and said so.

And does “a lot of people voting there” equals FRAUD? Host Larry O’Connor sure thinks so! 

“Wayne County, which is where Detroit is located, the major urban center in Michigan, has something like a 47 percent return rate — the highest in the state. [...] Does that raise a red flag for you?”

You bet it did! “Any time you see a particular area of a state having a higher rate of use of absentee ballots, and that includes returns, than other areas, that can be a sign or a clue that there is potentially fraud going on,” thinks von Spakovsky.

Actually, as of today, the actual number is even higher, 51 percent of Wayne County requested ballots have been returned! And, but, also, that is the exact same percentage as the whole state, 51 percent. Way to go, Wolverines! You can check their website yourself! The Michigan county with the highest percentage of mail ballots is Ingham, which has returned 54 percent of them, and is not an “urban center,” unless Lansing counts. Why do these guys not think Ingham County is FRAUD? Anything to do with because Ingham County is 68 percent white? We are just asking questions.

In other voter-fraud-screamer news, have you heard that Elon Musk and old space-lasers Marjorie Taylor Greene are talking shit about Dominion voting machines switching votes away from Trump, again? You’d think that after Dominion Voting Systems sued the everloving shit out of Fox News, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Newsmax, Patrick Byrne, etc. etc., and got Fox to settle for $787 million, they and everybody else without a billion dollars lying around would keep the company’s good name out of their filthy mouths. 

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PREVIOUSLY!

Why Did Fox News Settle And Why Didn't They Do It Two Years Ago?

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But no! Madge went on X and InfoWars to claim that a Georgia voter’s ballot had a vote flipped by a Dominion machine, because she saw it on a Facebook post.

🚨🚨🚨 This happened in Whitfield County in my district - GA-14.

We vote on Dominion voting machines then it prints a paper ballot with our selections made on the machines.

This voter’s printed ballot had been changed from their selections made on the machine.

Good thing they checked their paper ballot before turning it in!

After several attempts of trying to change it to reflect their correct choices, they had to void the ballot and use a different machine.

Please double check your printed ballot before you turn it in to make sure it has marked the candidates you voted for!!!

Noted Dominion on their web page of debunkery, “The false claim that voting machines can switch votes has been repeatedly debunked. As both state and local election authorities have confirmed, the issue reported in Whitfield County was due to voter error. The county provided the voter with an opportunity to mark and print a new ballot with their correct choices and the issue was quickly resolved.”

Elon Musk also took to a Philadelphia town hall to say it was “weird” and a “heck of a coincidence” that Dominion machines were used in Philadelphia and Arizona’s Maricopa County but “not in a lot of other places.” Dominion machines are not used in Philadelphia. And are used in lots of other places, because they are fine tabulation machines.

And OANN is still pumping more election-fraud claims, though they have at least learned to not drag Dominion into them. They hosted “Election Crime researcher” Steve Baldwin to rant about “phantom” voters who are dead, or don’t exist, and “NGOs” like “liberal” Catholic Charities that are “corrupting” elections by scandalously helping people register to vote, and something something dark money from China, trying to effect the election for “Camel-uh Harris.”

Republicans are also suing to block military ballots in Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania (and have lost two out of three cases). They’ve tried to disenfranchise 225,000 North Carolina voters, and lost. There are 192 active voting and election cases pending in 39 states, a record! Republicans have been flooding the courtrooms, and the airwaves, the Twitters and the TikToks with their fraud lies.

And yet, they keep losing their cases! And people have been voting anyway. Sending in those ballots. Waiting hours in Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia. Soaring to the polls with marching bands!

Because maybe Election Day isn’t something Republicans can buy at a store. Maybe, perhaps, it means a little bit more?

OPEN THREAD!

[Media Matters/ Democracy Docket]