Early voting in this year’s election is underway. In Georgia, at least 2,368,814 people have already voted–almost 33% of that state’s registered voters. Unfortunately, with this process comes a rise in misinformation and lies about voting machines “switching Trump votes to Harris” and poll workers tearing up uncounted ballots.
These claims quickly followed the start of voting, and many are being amplified by Trump Surrogates. Last week, Congressperson Marjory Taylor Greene was one of the first to get things kicked off:
Greene, a staunch Trump loyalist, said during an interview with Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Friday that “someone” saw their Trump vote change after casting a ballot on a Dominion machine this year in Georgia, where over 1 million people have voted so far.
“They marked Donald Trump and they marked who they were voting for the rest of the way down their ballot on the machine,” Greene said. “When this voter printed their ballot and they looked, it had changed. It was not Donald Trump, it was not me and it was not the other ones they had voted for. It had switched.
“So they had to start over, and they went through it several times and it kept on making the same error,” she continued. “It kept on switching the votes…. It sounds similar to what we heard in 2020.”
Billionaire (and based on his Tweet/Xeet record one of the markiest of marks for right-wing conspiracy theories) Elon Musk also got in on the action while stumping for Trump in Pennsylvania:
While speaking at a town hall in the swing state of Pennsylvania Thursday, tech CEO Elon Musk repeated false conspiracy theories claiming that voting machines rig elections — an assertion that has been repeatedly debunked since it was pushed in the wake of the 2020 election by those seeking to overturn former President Donald Trump’s loss.
“I’m a technologist, I know a lot about computers,” Musk told the crowd during the event. “And I’m like, the last thing I would do is trust a computer program, because it’s just too easy to hack.” …
In his comments, Musk named Dominion while linking voting machines to losses for Republicans in Philadelphia and Arizona, saying, “There’s always a sort of question of like, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that the, you know, I think they’re used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County, but not in a lot of other places.”
“Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?” Musk said, while calling for states around the country to “only do paper ballots, hand-counted.”
Aside: Anyone who supports an idea as foolish as “hand-counted” paper ballots while simultaneously stating that all States should have their election results done within hours of polls closing is a fundamentally willfully ignorant person–doubly so if they also complain about the government being too big.
Officials at the state and county levels are already trying to get out in front of these claims–often using Twitter and other platforms to fight these attempts to sew doubt on our election process. The Republican-led Georgia Secretary of State’s office issued this statement in response to Greene’s “just asking questions”:
We are seeing similar posts from other election and county officials–often Republicans–in other states as well:
Occum’s razor suggests that these isolated “switched votes” issues are more likely due to fat finger error than plots to steal the election, but most true believers deny the existence of that test (or Harlon’s razor for that matter).
In addition to “rigged voting machines,” we are also seeing rumors of election workers destroying uncounted ballots. For example, this was posted to Twitter/Xitter about Buck County, Pennsylvannia which borders Philadelphia:
I’m not posting the original video because I don’t want to give this misinformation with a heavily racist subtext (in 2020 most election-stealing lies were directed at counties with a large Black population and directly defaming Black election workers… so, of course, the creators of this propaganda video are using a Black actor) any additional views. In this case, it was the Buck County Republican Party that debunked this claim:
Unfortunately, there has been at least one direct attempt to destroy uncounted ballots–though surprisingly, it happened in Maricopa County, Arizona. Maricopa was also a major focus in the stolen election lies as it voted for Biden over Trump in 2020 and played a crucial role in delivering that state (and ultimately the White House):
Arizona law enforcement officials are conducting an arson investigation after election ballots were damaged when a USPS mail collection box was burned in Maricopa County, a Democratic stronghold.
ABC 15 reported that crews responded to the USPS Osborn Station around 1:30 a.m. on Thursday and found a mail collection box on fire.
“Approximately 20 electoral ballots were damaged, along with additional miscellaneous mail,” Phoenix Fire Department officials revealed, according to ABC 15.
Thankfully, due to improvements in ballot tracking based on useful and pro-democratic local election reforms people who used that collection box will be able to see if their ballot was among the damaged:
“We are waiting for details from law enforcement,” Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer explained. “We encourage all voters who used that mail box in the last 36 hours to check the status of their ballots at https://BeBallotReady.Vote.”
“Successful delivery is usually reflected on that website within 72 hours,” he added. “Voters should be aware that tomorrow, October 25 is the last day to request a replacement ballot. If a voter believes they were impacted by this incident they can learn more about how to make that request at https://Request.Maricopa.Vote.”
Based on 2020, what we are currently seeing is just the start of these types of incidents: both real and manufactured. If that wasn’t enough to sow doubt, we have state laws around absentee voting (or even worse county laws about hand-counting ballots) guaranteeing that, unless the election is an unexpected blowout in key states, we won’t know the results for days.
All of this sets up the conditions for an incredibly ugly post-election fight. Providing everything is as close as current polling suggests, the Trump camp could (and I predict will) declare victory before the polls even close and then do everything they can to disrupt the counting of mail-in ballots. Perhaps it’s my cynical side taking over, but I suspect that what we are about to go through will make 2020 seem like a cakewalk in comparison.
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Author: Matt Bernius
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