Neil W. McCabe, the national political editor of The Star News Network, interviewed David Bossie, the president and founder of Citizens United, about his new documentary ‘Rigged.’
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Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R), the chair of the state Senate, refused to bring up an election integrity bill for a vote on Monday because Republican Gov. Brian Kemp wanted it scrapped, Senate GOP leadership said, according to state Sen. Brandon Beach.
Senate Bill 89 would have dealt with chain of custody for ballots and prohibited private, “Zuckerbucks”-like donations from going directly to counties by routing them first through the State Election Board for distribution.
However, a vote on the bill was blocked by Duncan on Monday, the last day of the 2022 legislative session.
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After the serious election integrity issues of 2020, Republican leaders and the Republican National Committee have not been idle, but responded on behalf of voters to ensure that free, fair, and transparent elections remain a hallmark of American democracy. Joe Biden and Democrats predictably have done everything under the sun to smear these efforts, even calling those everyday Americans who oppose the efforts racist. But now, over a year later, the results are in, and Democrats have been totally wrong.
Georgia and Texas are perfect examples. Almost a year ago, after the passage of SB 202 – a highly popular Republican-led election integrity law which expanded early voting, poll watching, and voter ID requirements – Democrats pulled out all thestops and started lying. They said the law was “racist,” would “suppress” voter turnout, and even backed a boycott meant to hurt small businesses, many of them black-owned.
Essentially, they shamefully tried to stir up chaos along racial lines. But on Election Day, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution depicted a different scene entirely, writing that voters saw “short lines,” “few problems,” and no “obstacles at the polls.” It is time for all race-baiting Democrat politicians to stop their lies and admit their claims aren’t based in reality.
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Neil W. McCabe, the national political editor of The Star News Network, a constellation of 11 state-focused news sites, which includes The Georgia Star News, interviewed Rep. Jody B. Hice (R.-Ga.) about his race for Georgia secretary of state.
Hice said it was frustrating to watch Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger botch the 2020 election, and be unable to do anything about it, and this frustration motivated him to run against him.
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Election integrity issues from the 2020 presidential election have yet to be resolved, “so we are not ready for 2024,” Phill Kline, Director of the Amistad Project, warned on Monday.
Kline was asked by “Just the News, Not Noise” TV show cohosts John Solomon and Amanda Head if election integrity issues had been solved after the 2020 election. “No, we still have many of the same problems,” he replied, explaining that this is “because the legislatures have not taken the time to understand the problem.”
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The faith, trust, and confidence in our election process has been in steep decline for decades. Concerns over hanging chads and dimpled ballots from 2000’s presidential election may now have been replaced with questions about photo ID and drop boxes – but the overall result is the same: The American people simply don’t trust the outcome of elections.
In fact, recent polls show only 57% of voters believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected in 2020. Similarly, just 61% of Americans believe Trump legitimately won in 2016.
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California Democratic Rep. Pete Aguilar, vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus and member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said localities have the “authority” to allow non-citizens to vote in certain elections.
Aguilar’s comments come as Democrats move to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which includes federal rules that localities and states would have to follow such as not requiring a photo ID or Social Security number to cast a ballot.
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The Minnesota Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in an important case that could change how cities and counties conduct future statewide elections.
The case, Minnesota Voters Alliance (MVA) v. Ramsey and Olmsted Counties, seeks to ensure that counties are following state law vis-à-vis absentee ballot boards and the appointment of election judges.
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Elected officials and like-minded activists across the country are refusing to cooperate with ongoing efforts to thwart voter fraud and promote the integrity of future elections, lambasting such efforts as antidemocratic campaigns to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The apparent resistance of mostly Democratic and some Republican figures to investigating allegations of election fraud and supporting reforms to decrease its likelihood comes at a time when millions of Americans say they don’t have faith in the country’s electoral process.
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Jason Chavez will assume his seat as a member of the Minneapolis City Council in less than two weeks. He said he’ll use his power to pursue voting rights for non-citizens.
Even though the Minnesota Constitution is clear that all voters in state and local elections must have “been a citizen of the United States for three months,” Chavez told Axios that he’s already in the process of exploring a way to allow non-citizens to vote. Minneapolis alone is home to about 30,000 non-citizens, Axios reports.
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A liberal nonprofit that accused President Donald Trump of unleashing a “surge in white supremacy and hate” donated $85,000 last fall to election administrators in Georgia’s largest county as part of a campaign to turn out black votes in the 2020 election. Auditors now want some of that money returned.
The Fulton County Auditor declared this month that county election officials failed to spend all of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s grant for buying absentee ballot drop boxes and did not comply with one of the grant’s primary requirements to publicly disclose how many ballots were collected in the boxes.
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Nearly one-third (32%) of Iowa adults said they are “mostly doubtful or “very doubtful” that, “across the country,” votes in the 2022 general election will be counted as voters intended in a November Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll.
The remainder were very confident (26%), mostly confident (37%) or not sure (6%) votes would be counted properly. Selzer & Co. conducted the poll of 810 randomly selected Iowan adults between Nov. 7 and Nov. 10.
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In a call with reporters this week, the president of the firm selected to conduct a probe of recent elections in Pennsylvania promised a nonpartisan effort to determine what facets of election security in the Keystone State need improvement.
“We have no preconceived notions of what we will or will not find,” said Steven Lahr, president of Dubuque, IA-based Envoy Sage. “The facts, as they are gathered, both digital and physical, will drive our investigative services. We will handle all concerns, data or information presented by the citizens of the Commonwealth through the [investigation] website, or to us by the committee, with fidelity, due diligence and the utmost discretion.”
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Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago and chief of staff for President Barack Obama, famously said in 2008 that you should never let “a serious crisis go to waste” because it is “an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” Liberals in 2020 took Emanuel’s political tenet to heart and used the COVID-19 pandemic to try to implement through litigation and executive actions by state government officials the reckless changes in voting and election procedures that they had been wanting for years.
That effort involved voiding basic security protocols on election procedures, including absentee ballots, and pushing for the equivalent of all-mail elections, which would give their activists a free hand in pressuring, coercing, and influencing voters in their homes in ways they are unable to do in polling places. To force these changes, they ended up filing more election-related lawsuits than had ever been filed in an election year in U.S. history. The prior record was almost 200 lawsuits before and after the 2000 election when George W. Bush beat Al Gore; by late October 2020, more than 400 election-related lawsuits had been filed across the nation, the overwhelming majority by the Left.
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A lawsuit alleging multiple violations of federal and state election laws as well as Pennsylvania’s “Right to Know” statute was filed in Pennsylvania Wednesday night, according to sources familiar with the litigation.
In early 2021, a whistleblower working for the Delaware County Bureau of Elections began inquiring why it was apparent to her that multiple documents pertaining to the Nov. 3, 2020 elections were being destroyed in the southeastern Pennsylvania county, the sources said. The name of the whistleblower has not yet been made public.
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Amidst public concerns of electoral irregularities in Pennsylvania, a recount will decide the outcome of the Commonwealth Court contest between Republican Drew Crompton and Democrat Lori A. Dumas.
Based on unofficial returns published by the Pennsylvania Department of State, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Dumas now leads Superior Court Judge Crompton by 16,804 votes out of more than 2.5 million votes cast for either of the two. That’s a margin of about a third of one percent, within the 0.5 percent difference that prompts a recount under Pennsylvania’s Act 97 of 2004.
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State Rep. Regina Young (D-PA-Philadelphia) voted with all Republican House State Government Committee members this week in favor of a bill to require post-election audits.
The legislation to verify the accuracy of election outcomes will thus go before the full Pennsylvania House with at least a modicum of bipartisanship, making it more difficult for Democrats to call the bill merely “a reactionary thing being done because of the last election,” as Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D-Philadelphia) did at the committee meeting.
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The Department of Justice filed a complaint against Texas on Thursday, alleging certain provisions in the state’s new election law violated federal voting legislation.
The complaint alleged that certain provisions in Texas’ new election law, known as SB 1, violate Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act by denying voters, especially those with disabilities, “meaningful assistance” in the poll booth. The complaint also alleged that Texas’ law requiring the rejecting of ballots with certain errors that the DOJ claims are inconsequential violates the Civil Rights Act.
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Fulton County, Ga. Registration and Elections Director Richard Barron is stepping down on Dec. 31, according to County Board of Commissioners Chair Robb Pitts.
The Fulton County Election Board had voted in February to fire Barron following scathing criticism of his handling of the 2020 elections, Fox 5 Atlanta reported. However, the county’s commissioners overruled the electoral board’s decision, according to Georgia Public Broadcasting.
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A Pennsylvania legislator is in the process of introducing a package of election-reform bills, one of which would let voters adjust their signatures on their mail-in ballots when election officials identify problems with those signatures.
State Rep. Regina G. Young (D-Philadelphia) reasoned that it is common for an individual’s signature to vary over the years. County boards of elections nonetheless presently have the prerogative to void a mail-in ballot if the signature on that ballot fails to match the signature the county has on file for the voter.
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Pennsylvania state Rep. Torren Ecker (R-Abbottstown) believes the guarantee of free and fair elections with secret balloting belongs not only in contests for public office but in votes over labor representation.
This week, he announced plans to introduce an amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution intended to cement that guarantee in the Keystone State in anticipation of federal legislation aiming to strengthen labor unions.
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Pennsylvania lawmakers plan to introduce a measure banning private organizations from funding election administration in the Keystone State.
The bill’s sponsors, state Sens. Lisa Baker (R-Dallas) and Kristin Phillips-Hill (R-Jacobus) have cited the role that the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) played in election operations in Philadelphia and other Democratic-leaning counties in 2020. CTCL has been funded significantly by Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.
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A Pennsylvania court this week issued an opinion allowing litigation attempting to block the use of electronic voting devices in Philadelphia, Northampton and Cumberland counties to proceed.
Commonwealth Court Judge Kevin P. Brobson (R), currently a candidate for Pennsylvania Supreme Court, ruled that two advocacy groups and several state residents have standing to challenge the use of ExpressVote XL systems.
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A new book by The Federalist editor and Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway details how 2020 Pennsylvania-election litigation by former President Donald Trump lost its focus on equal protection and got dismissed.
In Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, Hemingway credits Philadelphia attorney Linda Kerns with attempting to keep Trump’s lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania’s election results focused on Fourteenth-Amendment concerns. The author significantly blames Rudy Giuliani for causing the case to unravel by making superfluous arguments.
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Bipartisan enthusiasm for election-reform legislation appeared solid at a Pennsylvania Senate State Government Committee hearing on Thursday, save for one part: video live-streaming of mail-in-ballot counting.
Elements of the bill, sponsored by Sen. David Argall (R-PA-Pottsville) and Sen. Sharif Street (D-PA-Philadelphia), have arisen largely from recommendations in a June 2021 report by the Senate Special Committee on Election Integrity and Reform. Argall and Street’s proposal excludes some of the ad hoc panel’s more contentious ideas, particularly enhanced voter-identification rules, which Rep. Seth Grove (R-PA-York) is spearheading in separate legislation. (While Gov. Tom Wolf [D] vetoed Grove’s bill in June, the representative has reintroduced it in light of the governor’s subsequent remarks in favor of a strengthened voter-ID requirement.)
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Former President Donald Trump sent a letter on Friday to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking the top election official to investigate potential threats to the state’s election integrity.
In the letter to Raffensperger, Trump cited a report from The Georgia Star News, which detailed that 43,000 absentee ballot votes counted in DeKalb County, Georgia 2020 election potentially violated chain of custody rule.
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At Wednesday’s meeting concerning the Pennsylvania’s Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee’s election investigation, which saw Republicans winning a vote to subpoena voter records, Democrats fumed.
One angrily compared GOP colleagues to Joe McCarthy, the notoriously zealous anti-communist U.S. senator from Wisconsin who served from 1947 to 1957.
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A grassroots canvass of Maricopa County voters in the 2020 election found that over 34 percent of those canvassed said they voted even though the county didn’t have a record of their vote.
Liz Harris, the Arizona resident who organized the independent canvass talked to Steve Bannon about her Voter Integrity Project findings on the Wednesday morning edition of the “War Room.”
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In a special interview, Thursday on First Principles with Phill Kline – host Kline talked with Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO, and editor-in-chief of The Star News Network who uncovered partisan non-profit popups in swing states and the importance of election integrity as the deciding fate of America’s constitutional Republic.…
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Thursday morning on First Principles, host Phill Kline welcomed The Star News Network’s CEO, Michael Patrick Leahy to the phone lines to discuss the influence of Zuckerberg’s money on the 2020 election and altered state election laws.
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Facebook is considering creating a commission to advise the tech giant on election-related issues including misinformation, The New York Times reported.
The tech company reportedly contacted several academics and policy experts to draft plans for a commission that will advise Facebook on electoral matters and potentially decide policies related to political misinformation and advertising, several people familiar with the plans told The New York Times. Facebook plans to announce the commission in the next few months to be prepared for the 2022 midterms, the Times reported.
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The rule of law must be respected for liberty to be protected. Changing the rules to achieve a desired outcome undermines both, and when this is done in the administration of elections, democracy itself is imperiled.
Unfortunately, the left shows no compunction about wielding power for partisan advantage, especially when it comes to election administration. They’ve even gone so far as to create new rules to suit their purposes, regardless of whether they possess the authority to do so.
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A day after the November election, as Donald Trump and other Republican candidates clung to evaporating leads in Georgia, vote counters in Atlanta were confronted by a paper ballot known only by its anonymizing number 5150-232-18.
A Dominion Voting machine had rejected the ballot on election night because the voter had filled in boxes for both Trump and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, an error known as an “overvote.” The machine determined neither candidate should get a tally, and the ballot was referred for human review.
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As part of a review of hundreds of pages of election documents from Georgia’s Fulton County, Just the News reviewed dozens of disputed ballots in which election workers known as “adjudicators” determined that a voter intended to vote for Democratic candidate Joe Biden instead of Republican incumbent Donald Trump.
Just the News’s review of the Fulton documents revealed a system rife with subjective judgment of thousands of ballots on the part of a small number of election workers, all of it governed by a confusing patchwork of state laws that simultaneously seemed to sanction and proscribe the practice of ballot adjudication.
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The Hill reports that a Colorado federal magistrate judge, N. Reid Neureiter, “sanctioned lawyers who challenged the 2020 presidential election results, calling their election claims ‘fantastical.’” “Plaintiffs’ counsel shall jointly and severally pay the moving Defendants’ reasonable attorneys [fees]”—which is very likely to be many thousands of dollars. This ruling comes while a federal district judge in Michigan, Linda Parker, considers imposing sanctions on attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, both of whom raised questions about the propriety of the 2020 presidential election.
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The U.S. Department of Justice’s recent guidance on the process of state election audits indicates that the federal agency is apparently deeply unsettled by the string of election audits and election reform efforts carried out by state Republicans since last November’s presidential election.
The guidance, distributed last week and directed in part toward state legislatures, instructs investigators on “how states must comply with federal law” when conducting election audits. It also addresses efforts by some state legislatures to repeal emergency COVID-19 voting rules that other states have in some cases sought to make permanent.
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Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said Friday he plans to hire more investigators and anticipates allowing more time for a probe into the 2020 presidential contest for Wisconsin’s 10 Electoral-College votes, the Associated Press has reported.
The official vote count in Wisconsin last November put Joe Biden ahead of Donald Trump by 20,682 votes. The margin was just over 0.6 percent of the nearly 3.3 million votes cast statewide.
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Twitter permanently suspended several accounts dedicated to documenting the Arizona audit. The social media giant also permanently suspended other similar or affiliated accounts covering the audit or calls for an audit in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
The suspended accounts were: @arizonaaudit, @AuditWarRoom, @AuditMichigan, @AuditWisconsin, @AuditNevada, @AuditGeorgia, @Audit_Arizona and @Audit_PA. The latter 7 accounts are associated with an Instagram account, @auditwarroom, that hasn’t been suspended from the Facebook-owned platform. That account notified the public that it joined GETTR, a social media platform created by former President Donald Trump’s aide Jason Miller.
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PHOENIX, Arizona – The Star News Network Wire Service – The energy of the thousands of attendees of former President Donald Trump’s rally on Saturday, hosted by Turning Point Action at the Phoenix Federal Theater, carried over to the constant stream of Republican politicians who appeared over the more than three hours of the event prior to the the former president taking the stage.
Trump took advantage of the “Protect Our Elections” theme to detail many of the November 2020 election irregularities in Arizona and other states, as well as to thank the “brave and unyielding warriors in the Arizona State Senate,” who initiated the forensic audit in Maricopa County.
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The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee has prompted extensive commentary about the implications for future challenges to election laws under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Litigants arguing that some laws, such as Georgia’s newly enacted SB 202, disproportionately affect racial minorities may have a greater challenge meeting the standard set forth by the court than the standard that some lower courts had been using in recent years.
But while the justices split on a 6-3 vote on whether a pair of Arizona statutes ran afoul of the Act, it voted 6-0 (with three justices not addressing the question) in concluding that Arizona did not act with discriminatory intent. This holding sets the stage for the Justice Department’s recent lawsuit against Georgia, and it offers hints at how district courts and reviewing courts should behave. In short, the Justice Department has an uphill battle.
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The ubiquitous term “paradigm” and the concept of “paradigm shifts,” were popularized by the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. He used them to characterize, roughly, a scientific theory’s fundamental elements and the changes in fundamental elements that occur with scientific revolutions and changes in theory.
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The number of coronavirus infections among Democratic lawmakers who fled to Texas to stall a voting reform bill increased over the weekend.
At least five members of the Democratic delegation have tested positive for the virus, a person familiar told the Associated Press. The Texas House Democratic Caucus announced three of the lawmakers had tested positive as of Friday, but said the entire group had been fully vaccinated.
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Sixty-seven Texas House Democrats fled Austin Monday for Washington, D.C. on private planes in a political maneuver that Gov. Greg Abbott said only hurts Texans.
Shortly after 2 p.m., House Democrats confirmed in a statement they were not returning to the state Capitol to complete an ongoing special session, which began July 8 and lasts for 30 days.
By leaving Texas, House Democrats avoided being arrested by a “Call of the House,” which Speaker of the House Dade Phelan could have initiated had the members left Tuesday, when the chamber is scheduled to be back in session. Because the legislature was out of session on Monday, Democrats had time to leave after having met over the weekend.
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Katie Hobbs, the Arizona Secretary of State who recently launched a bid for governor, sent a letter to Attorney General Mark Brnovich and requested that he open an investigation into former President Donald Trump and his allies over allegations of “election interference.”
“I urge you to take action not only to seek justice in this instance, but to prevent future attempts to interfere with the integrity of our elections. If your ethical duties prevent you from investigating this matter, I ask that you refer it to another enforcement agency,” Hobbs said in her letter to Brnovich.
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An order handed down by a Georgia judge today named several individual members of a county elections board as respondents in an election-related lawsuit, clearing the way for an intensive audit of 2020 absentee ballots in Georgia’s largest county.
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“They were doing things eagerly but incorrectly.”
That was a judgment rendered in a Georgia election monitor’s report last year detailing what the investigator said were a series of problems brought on by improperly trained temporary staffers handling the absentee ballot scanning operation in Fulton County.
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Regardless of one’s political affiliation, it’s not difficult to find voters in Georgia who were discouraged by the messiness of the 2020 election process.
It’s one thing to be disappointed by the outcome. It’s entirely another to feel disenfranchised and frustrated by questions and uncertainties surrounding absentee ballot handling, unsecured drop boxes, and questionable third-party funding of local elections.
In evaluating federal, state, and local voting safeguards, these and other serious complications — glitches, missing votes, even water pipe breakages at polling locations or ballot drop boxes — raised legitimate concerns and weakened voter confidence in Georgia’s election integrity.
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Documents that Georgia’s largest county submitted to state officials as part of a post-election audit highlight significant irregularities in the Atlanta area during last November’s voting, ranging from identical vote tallies repeated multiple times to large batches of absentee ballots that appear to be missing from the official ballot-scanning records.
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An apparent break-in occurred at the ballot-holding warehouse where the ballots for the pending Fulton County, Georgia audit were housed. According to reports, security guards hired by Fulton County left the facility. About 20 minutes later, the facility’s alarm was set off. A security detail hired by the plaintiffs’ attorney, Bob Cheeley, relayed to reporters that the facility door was wide open.
The audit concerns over 145,000 ballots from the presidential election. President Joe Biden won Georgia with just over 12,600 votes.
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In 1999, Tim Meisburger helped Indonesia run its first open election in almost half a century.
“The people were very distrustful of the process because in the past the party in power rigged elections to get the outcome they wanted,” Meisburger, former Director of Democracy and Governance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, explained. The United States helped fund more than 500,000 election observers across the country to prevent voter fraud and ballot tampering.
“Because of that scrutiny, the elections were fair and honest,” Meisburger added.
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