Month: January 2021

Georgia Secretary of Scum Raffensperger had announced a press conference for yesterday, which most folks — including myself — took to mean that he was having a press conference.

Instead, he had Gabriel Sterling talk. Sterling “addressed” and dismissed all the video, emails, news reports, lies, photographs, sworn affidavits, expert analyses, et cetera that indicated widespread election fraud.

And that’s pretty damned odd. The Secretary of State is the person responsible for maintaining election int… int… election i… the semblance of integrity in state elections. Damn it; I can’t even say those two words together anymore.

It’s the SOS’s job to address irregularities. Sterling is the “voting system implementation manager.” His job only extends to the voting hardware/software. But he spoke, while Raffensperger remained silent.

If we had a functioning court system, I would suspect that Raffensperger was using Sterling so he wouldn’t be on public record as making those outrageous statements. But we don’t; the courts have been enabling election fraud in Georgia since the 2016 elections (at least). Raffensperger knows he has nothing to fear criminally or civilly in the courts. So why did he have Sterling tells the lies? He doesn’t fear official repercussions.

Personally, I think he does fear high-velocity lead ballots cast by rooftop voters, and wants Sterling to be the candidate, not himself.

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Why do I say Sterling lied? Let’s bear it down. Normally I wouldn’t cite the New York Times, but for once they’re useful for something.

Late in the evening, after the water main break had been fixed, election workers prepared to go home for the night and followed standard procedures to store ballots securely: placing them in containers and affixing numbered seals. But when Mr. Raffensperger found out that they were closing up shop, he ordered them to continue counting through the night — so the workers retrieved the containers and resumed counting ballots.

I’ve watched much of the video. You do not see the workers securing the ballots and placing them under that table. And note that the “water main break” is back in the narrative. Several reporters and private citizens did records requests in an attempt to document that break of any other leaking pipe. The only thing they found was an over-flowing toilet/urinal (it’s been reported both ways) that morning.

When a scanning machine encounters a problem, it stops, but a few ballots get through while it’s stopping. When that happens, workers take the ballots and scan them again so they’re counted properly. This is standard procedure, and the ballots aren’t counted twice — and if they were, the hand recount Georgia conducted would have shown it.

No. When that happens, the worker must stop, go to the computer and tell it to discard that batch run, then start over. What we see in the video is two workers running the same ballots through without discarding between runs. If they’ve kept track of how many times they did it, all they have to do is throw out the appropriate number of Trump paper ballots. Then recount numbers match.

Mr. Trump said that thousands of people voted despite not being registered to vote. This is impossible, Mr. Sterling said: “You can’t do it. There cannot be a ballot issued to you, there’s no way to tie it back to you, there’s nowhere for them to have a name to correspond back to unless they’re registered voters. So that number is zero.”

Someone should have told Sterling about provisional ballots. Georgia law specifically allows them, and you’ve got three days past election day to cure them.

Mr. Trump said that thousands of voters died before the election. Mr. Sterling said the secretary of state’s office had found only two who might fit that description.

As I recall, when Trump said thousands, he was speaking of all the swing states. And other people have found more than two in Georgia.

Mr. Trump said that hundreds of people voted using P.O. boxes rather than a residential address. Mr. Sterling said that the secretary of state’s office was still investigating, but that everyone it had examined so far had, in fact, used a proper residential address — just one for a multifamily residence or apartment building.

Outright lie, unless my town’s post office has been converted to an apartment building. There are three people in my town who listed P.O. boxes as “Apt.” #.

TRUMP’S CLAIM: That machines flipped votes, counting Trump ballots as Biden ones.

STERLING’S EXPLANATION: If this had happened, Mr. Sterling said, the hand recount would have shown it, and it did not show anything of the sort.

Funny that he doesn’t mention Coffee County, where they could not get the machine recount to match the original results.

Discussing allegations of hacking, he added that ballot machines and scanners aren’t connected to the internet. “Neither one has modems,” Mr. Sterling said. “It’s very hard to hack things without modems.”

Except that Dominion told Georgia that they do have wifi, and Jovan Pulitzer accessed a polling pad through it. During the ongoing run-off election. Live, during a senate hearing.

TRUMP’S CLAIM: That election officials did not properly verify signatures for mail-in ballots.

STERLING’S EXPLANATION: The secretary of state’s office brought in signature experts, who examined more than 15,000 mail-in ballot envelopes. They found potential problems with only two, and upon investigation, both ballots turned out to be legitimate.

They did not properly verify signatures during the election because Raffensperger signed a consent decree (that’s what a settlement agreement is, dumbshit) agreeing to not follow state law on verification. And how do we know the ballots that were in envelopes were the one counted. Reports say the Fulton County military mail-in envelopes were good, but a poll watcher says the ballots themselves were pristine, unfolded, and 90% Biden.

TRUMP’S CLAIM: That election officials shredded ballots.

STERLING’S EXPLANATION: “There is no shredding of ballots going on,” Mr. Sterling said with clear annoyance. “That’s not real. It’s not happening.”

Oddly enough. Non-state investigators have some of those non-existent ballots that went to the shedder.

Workers did shred secrecy envelopes: the blank envelopes that protect the privacy of a voter’s absentee ballot and go inside an outer envelope. It’s the outer envelope that voters have to sign, and election officials have kept those outer envelopes as required by law. The secrecy envelopes, however, “have no evidentiary value,” Mr. Sterling said, because by definition they have no identifying information on them.

The law still requires them to be maintained. If you can shred anything that doesn’t have “identifying information,” then you can shred ballots.

STERLING’S EXPLANATION: “Pristine” ballots aren’t unusual, Mr. Sterling said. For instance, many military and overseas voters receive electronic ballots that they print out, complete and mail back. But these printed ballots aren’t the right size for scanners, so election workers have a standard process for transferring the votes to scannable ballots. A ballot that gets damaged and can’t be scanned may be transferred in the same way.

Then let’s see the original ballots that were sent in. Let’s compare them to the scanned ballots. Are the orginals 90% Biden?

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