The cheat goes on

Just how hand-counting ballots helps Trump is never explained

On Friday, the Jeff Bezos Post said, “Pro-Trump Georgia election board votes to require hand counts of ballots.”

The New York Times reported, “The new rule is the latest in a stream of right-wing election policies passed by the State Election Board over the past few months. The board has come under increasing pressure from critics already concerned that it has been rewriting the rules of the game in a key swing state to favor former President Donald J. Trump.”

New York magazine, where reporters sleep with presidential candidates, also got a little huffy over the ethics and morals of counting ballots by hand.

It reported, “Despite widespread warnings of chaos and ideological overreach from the offices of the Republican secretary of State and attorney general, a Trump-loyalist majority on Georgia’s State Election Board ordered the bizarre procedure of hand-counting ballots in every single precinct in that intensely competitive battleground state, beginning on Election Night. As the Washington Post explains, the rule change, if implemented, would most definitely slow down determination of Georgia’s election winners and threaten the whole system with unbearable strains.”

Just how hand-counting the ballots, something done throughout American elections throughout our history, helps Trump was not explained. The Bezos Post and NYT —newspapers that received Pulitzers for spreading the Russian Hoax lie — learned nothing about the reliability of their Democrat sources. Once again, they just accepted and parroted the Democrat Party fabrication that this helps Trump.

How different it was at the turn of the century in 2000 when Democrats sued for a hand count of votes in Florida. You just can’t trust them new-fangled electronic vote machines, they said.

Now they say you cannot trust counting ballots by hand.

The Bezos Post said:

Some critics say that because the hand-counting requirement would almost certainly inject error into the tabulation process, it could give county boards the evidence they need to investigate results and delay certification. Some questioned whether the two rules together amount to intentional sabotage of state elections.

“Requiring poll workers to hand-count ballots after the close of polls will do nothing more than provide exhausted patriots with an opportunity to undermine public confidence through an honest mistake,” said Joseph Kirk, elections chief in Bartow County, northwest of Atlanta.

Excuse me, but that’s how we do it in West Virginia. Once the polls close, the poll workers count the ballots and send them on to the county. It does not take long to do this.

Counting ballots by hand is nothing exotic or unusual.

Theodore de Macedo Soares researched the matter and reported in June, “The United States remains one of the few major democracies in the world that continue to allow computerized vote counting—not observable by the public—to determine the results of its elections. Countries such as Germany, Norway, Netherlands, France, Canada, Denmark, Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, and most other countries protect the integrity and trust of their elections with publicly observable hand-counting of paper ballots.”

Most if not all our NATO allies hand-count ballots.

They also have voter ID.

On June 1, 2021, the Daily Signal reported, “Of 47 nations surveyed in Europe — a place where, on other matters, American progressives often look to with envy — all but one country requires a government-issued photo voter ID to vote. The exception is the U.K., and even there voter IDs are mandatory in Northern Ireland for all elections and in parts of England for local elections.”

The Democrat Party and its media propagandists say voter ID is ray-cist because minority people somehow lack photo IDs.

In most jurisdictions, you need a photo ID to buy a pack of smokes.

The American Lung Association reported, “American Indians and Alaska Natives have the highest smoking rate of any racial or ethnic group. A recent study also found American Indian and Alaska Native men and women have a higher percentage of smoking-related deaths from heart disease and stroke than white men and women.”

The same illogic is at play in hand-counting votes.

The NYT story said:

The Georgia State Election Board, once a bureaucratic backwater in the state election apparatus, has thrust itself into national headlines with a 3-2 right-wing majority that has aligned itself closely with rules rooted in election conspiracy theories.

Last month, the board passed a rule upending decades of settled Georgia law, allowing local election officials to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” investigation before certifying election results, a rule Democrats and election experts said could disrupt the certification process.

So now, nearly a quarter century after Al Gore refused to accept losing to George Walker Bush, challenging election results is a bad thing and we must meet arbitrary deadlines.

When politicians challenged the 1876 presidential election results, Congress and the Supreme Court empaneled a 15-member committee to decide who won.

One of the things I have learned to do in life is to always double-check. I don’t always double-check myself and wind up making myself look like a fool. Maybe I am. But I do not see how counting ballots by hand does any harm. Maybe Democrats believe that hand counts will expose the way they are gaming the electronic voting system. Such exposure would definitely help Trump — and the American people