Originally published at: Trumpy Georgia Board Passes Another Disastrous Rule Blatantly Designed To Delay Election Results
In a change that the Republican state attorney general believes is unlawful, the MAGA-controlled Georgia state election board voted Friday, in a 3-2 vote, to enact a new rule that requires counties in the state to hand-count ballots — a process that is based on conspiracy theories about voting machines that experts say is both…
Are these new rules being challenged in the courts?
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Those MAGA Three Stooges are just angling for cheap tRump points, as virtually the entire GA State government officials are opposed to their self-serving and wholly impractical “rules” changes. Dems already have launched lawsuits, and this bit of chicanery will be deep-sixed quite shortly.
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I think they’re getting the pieces in place for another “Brooks Brothers” riot. Delay the tabulation in the counties with the most ballots – the Democratic-leaning counties – and then suing to stop the count on some bogus pretext.
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Roughly 5M votes last time in Georgia. That’s, er, gonna take a while to count by hand. Say maybe 12 per minute, 720 per hour, that’s 7,000 people hours for a primary count, so to be done in two days you’ll need at least 500 people.
This is designed to delay and mess up the count, then get the Subprime Court to anoint TCF as the winner.
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What’s next? A poll tax?
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Volunteer or paid human vote counters?Because you are going to need thousands of them. Will the Board provide the money?
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Poll Attacks…
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Trump referred to the three board members — Janelle King, Janice Johnston and Rick Jaffares — as “pitbulls, fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”
Old Blabbermouth, giving the game away again. He’s openly admitting that the MAGA board members are “in it to win it”, acting for partisan advantage.
The only “honest” election according to OldFelon is one that he “wins”.
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All poll attacks is local.
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It appears to be designed to fail, very specifically in the more populous, more urban, more blue counties.
Maybe they finally caught on to what @txlawyer has been saying all along - it’s not very pointful (for them) to screw up and delay the reporting of small rural deep MAGA counties, and the Fulton County election folks ain’t gonna play along, so they need some other way to torpedo the counts there.
Unfortunately for them, the Georgia courts still seem to be mostly functional, and the Governor and SoS aren’t playing TrumpBall either, so I expect this to get challenged fast and hard.
ETA: +1 for “Subprime Court”, but they might also be aiming to throw it into the House of Unrepresentatives this time (1 vote per state).
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I think 12 per minute is far too quick for a hand count. Mulitiple candidates per ballot to tabulate and any other measures being voted on.
Or did the 3 r’s on the election board say only the votes for president need to be 100% hand counted? I wouldn’t put it past them.
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Sworn to what? That they’ll chuck a ton of democrats’ votes?
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Oh goody. Now we have to wait and see if we’ll be saved by the courts.
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It’s certainly too quick, assuming they’re hand-counting everything. I was talking to someone a while ago who said “well, Germany hand-counts (due to a court decision a few years ago) their ballots and it works fine, so why can’t the US?”.
But here’s what a German election ballot (from 2009) looks like:
Everyone casts two votes; one for their local representative, and another for a political party (and the parties then get extra reps in proportion to their 2nd vote tallies).
Pretty quick to tally, even with the (hey, it’s Germany, what can I say?) extra complication of the two-vote system.
Now, here’s a sample ballot from Georgia in 2020:
Lots of other races on there. Plus the option for write-ins. And I won’t even mention what the ballots look like here in California, with a handful (or more) of ballot initiatives to vote for, along with the fed/state/county/local offices.
Definitely not something you’re going to be hand-tabulating in only 5, or even 10 seconds.
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The hand count rule seems intended to give trump an artificial lead, as they will take exponentially longer in urban counties than out in more sparsely-populated trump country. And the impossible timeframe for completing the hand count seems aimed at preventing those urban counties from getting their votes counted at all.
This seems very much like there’s a federal voting rights lawsuit coming. DOJ might even lead the charge.
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Supreme Court (by the time it gets to them)
“Oh, yeah, thats unconstitutional… but… its to close to election day so… I guess its ok”
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Where cynicism and realistic assessment collide.
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Republicans may not understand irony or hypocrisy, but they excell at cynicism…
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I think you’re half right: the new “rules” will likely be challenged in court, and the court will almost certainly not act in time to affect the election - a Pyrrhic victory for democracy.
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