A County Elections Director Stood Up to Locals Who Believe the Voting System Is Rigged. They Pushed Back Harder

This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1437723
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Some small towns sound like a special kind of Hell.

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I propose a change of terminology. Let’s call them election liars. “Denial” implies some sense of factual error. These people are voicing obvious untruths, aka lies or fabrications.

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I grew up in a “town” of around 450 people. Everyone’s “secrets” were not secret very long. It was John Boehner country. Moderately red. I was accepted as the “village hippy” as my family had farmed there for at least 6 or 7 generations on the same land. That little place could easily have been the hell of your thought. Not all small places are hell however.

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Michella Huff is one heck of a hero, and she needs all the support we can give.

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Not sure calling them liars is a fully complete and accurate characterization. I’d suggest:

Fascist: 1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

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Excellent article from Pro Publica. I’m happy that part of my TPM Prime As F**k goes to help.

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There’s a whole range of election deniers. Some are indeeed outright liars. Some (like Trump) are just nihilists indifferent to the actual truth or falsity of the claim. Some are delusional dipshits who, in earlier years, would have been ranting about being probed by space aliens. Most just go along with it because that’s what their tribe is supposed to believe.

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Maybe some people in Surry County don’t want elections.
Perhaps if those questioning the election were to help out with the ballot counting maybe that would convince a few. I reside in Tucson, AZ. We can watch the ballot handling and counting by video cam on line. It’s obvious to me there is no chicanery going on .Also Mrs darr had a temp gig at our elections dept in 2020 so I got “eyes on” first person stories that there was no “stolen election” here. trump is responsible for this crap he started the whole idea of a stolen election because his mental illness would not allow him to lose. All of this is on him.

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Doesn’t seem like we can trust small towns to hold elections, guess all voting and counting should happen in cities, to prevent fraud of course.

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Let’s face it. We actually have only one political party in this country, the Corrupt Party. The Democrats and the Republicans are simply the left- and right-wings of the Corrupt Party. They disagree on the fringes, but they have two goals–enriching themselves from the public coffers and maintaining control of the government levers of power for themselves.

We constantly hear that our Democracy is in danger, but the US has not been a democracy for years. We are run by plutocrats and autocrats just like Russia. We need a new form of government that will guarantee that the People run the country, and not the moneyed elite currently mismanaging our Republic.

How we get from here to there is an answer I don’t have. I only know that we are watching the downfall of the greatest political experiment ever, and we have to be ready to replace it with something as good!

In a county where Trump won 70% of the vote, this is about more than winning. They want political extinction of the other party. “Other” in the sense meaning alien.

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This kind of operation feels like it has Steve Bannon’s grubby little fingers all over it because it drains the system of resources while simultaneously cutting resources from the other end. They will probably challenge every voter to make the lines longer in Democratic districts.

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Sorry, but there is no corrupt equivalent on the left. 1 does not equal 100. Pouty whataboutism serves to make the problem worse by letting the clearly corrupt off the hook.

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Do not feed…

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The Problem is that there is a large population of people like the ones mentioned in this article who could not run a Church Social, much less a country as diverse as the US. They have joined a bandwagon started by a mentally ill man who cannot accept that he is NOT king of the world, and reinforced 24/7 by charlatans on rightwing media. By comparison, the Democratic Party is the ONLY entity who recognizes the danger to our democracy that the Republican party poses. There may be some corruption, but it is negligible compared to the Trump Party. Bothsiderism is denying the problem.
There is no way “the people” can run this country until and unless the rightwing determination to destroy democracy is finally exposed as the insanity that it is.

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Every time I read that both parties are I want to remind that person that only the GQP wants to deny the validity of any election.

I almost would invite such individuals to go to a very warm place.

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There’s a palpable Lord of the Flies feeling to the GOP/Trump election denying crowd.

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People who can’t tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, which gave us GW Bush, who lied us into the Iraq war, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and destabilized the Middle East for decades, so far.

People who can’t tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans thought it would be fun to vote for Trump because he would shake things up. That has resulted in an all out, Fascist assault on our democracy.

People who can’t tell the difference are part of the problem, not the solution.

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The election was definitely rigged in favor of The Rump, in every possible way. This is why the prick thinks he won! He knows exactly how far he went and how hard he worked, to steal it. Every swing state he lost, had an equally loyal Republican in the election office. He’s mad because They were loyal to the votes and not to him.

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