Today on The BradCast: Rachel Maddow is an excellent broadcaster. But, boy, did she fall — along with a bunch of other mainstream corporate media outlets on Friday — for a wildly misleading spin on a new rule adopted last week by the Georgia State Board of Elections in advance of this November’s elections. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
Before we get to an expert to help set the record straight on this matter today, to explain how virtually everyone from WaPo to New York Times to Atlanta Journal Constitution to, yes, Maddow got it wrong…a few quick news items of note…
- It’s possible, with Hurricane John about to slam into the West Coast of Mexico in the Pacific, and a different storm to be named Helene quickly spinning up in the Atlantic, that by week’s end — if John crosses the Mexican peninsula and enters the Gulf — we could have two major hurricanes, both threatening landfall in the Gulf of Mexico at the same time. Climate change is wacky fun, in’t?
- Nearly 500 are confirmed killed and more than 1,000 injured near Lebanon‘s border with Israel on Monday, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the deadliest barrage on Hezbollah since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. All of which is meant to extend the Israeli PM’s time in office and out of jail on corruption charges filed well before his war on Gaza — and even war crimes charges that are likely to come his way if and when he is ever finally removed from office. Hezbollah reportedly fired thousands of rockets in return at Israel.
- Congressional leaders have reportedly reached a deal to keep the Government open after the end of this month, as the new fiscal year begins on October 1. The deal would continuing funding the Government until at least December 20. The agreement to prevent a government shutdown just weeks before the Presidential election — when every member of the U.S. House and one-third of the U.S. Senate will be on the ballot — comes as House Speaker Mike Johnson gave up on a measure Donald Trump was insisting on to make it a crime for non-citizens to vote (which is already unlawful under federal law). We’ll see if the agreement is finalized by both chambers, and whether Republicans will then send us over yet another fiscal cliff this Christmas.
- Newly released FBI data find violent crime in America, including murder, dropped precipitously from 2022 to 2023.
- The U.S. economy continues to outpace the rest of the developed world and the stock market remains at all-time record levels under the Biden-Harris Administration, even as Donald Trump‘s failing media company, which trades on the NASDAQ as DJT, plummeted another 10% on Monday to a new all-time low since going public, as the race is on to meet my prediction that his loser of a company could become a penny stock by Election Day!
- And, speaking of Trump grifts, it looks like Melania Trump, who has barely appeared on the campaign trail this season, was paid nearly $240,000 to speak at a political fundraiser at her own home in Mar-a-Lago last April. Who wrote the check to her remains unknown at this time.
And then, it’s on to the story which has apparently freaked out Democrats and voting rights advocates since it was first misreported by pretty much everybody on Friday. That was the day that three Trump-supporting MAGA election denialists on the Georgia State Elections Board adopted a new rule requiring hand-counting at each precinct at the end of election night.
But the new rule requires only the hand-counting of the number of ballots cast at the precinct — not the actual results on those ballots, as many have misreported — before they are sealed up and sent to county headquarters.
Similar reconciliation of the number of ballots cast against the number of voters who signed in to the poll books or to the number of pages reported as scanned by the precinct tabulators, are carried out in many of other states without problem at the end of election night.
According to our guest today, an expert in Georgia’s terrible touchscreen voting and scanning system, the process is likely to take anywhere from 15 minutes to a half an hour after the close of polls. But you wouldn’t know that from the mainstream media coverage, with Democrats and Republican election officials alike in Georgia, screaming bloody murder that this new rule would lead to inaccurate tallies, delays in the count, and potentially add “months” to the time it will take to tally up results in the Peach State this year!
We’re joined again today by the great MARILYN MARKS, longtime voting system expert and Executive Director of the Coalition for Good Governance. Her non-partisan organization is responsible for the federal lawsuit that ultimately banned Georgia’s unverifiable, insecure touchscreen voting systems made by Diebold, only to see them replaced by Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger with similarly unverifiable and insecure touchscreen systems made by Dominion. She is also the woman who discovered and exposed the MAGA breach, copy and distribution of statewide voting system software in Coffee County, GA that resulted in criminal charges against five people, including Sidney Powell, in the state’s racketeering felony indictment against Donald Trump and many others.
As Marks explains today, the mainstream media outlets were misreporting on Friday’s new hand-count of the number of ballots cast rule “out of hysteria for no good reason.” She confirms that “it’s simply a ballot counting rule that most states have,” allowing them to “know how many ballots you have collected” and to confirm that number before ballots are moved anywhere. “That is a common-sense rule. It will take about 20 minutes at most to implement at most of the polling places in Georgia — that’s a rough estimate — and it is a safeguard on a lot of different things.”
“If there are major discrepancies,” between the number of ballots and the number signed into the poll books, she says, “that’s the time to figure it out, not after all the equipment and people get moved.”
Many Democrats — justifiably — fear that, if Trump loses in the state again, some Republican officials on the election boards at both the state and county level are hoping to find ways to create havoc and chaos that could delay certification and ultimately place the actual election results in doubt, leading to challenges in Court or Congress on January 6th next year.
“We seem to be in such a hyper-partisan environment right now,” says Marks, “that if we can throw some mud, true or not, on the other side, it’s a way to build enthusiasm for our team.” But that, she suggests, is short-sighted and unhelpful given the very REAL concerns about the election in Georgia (and elsewhere.)
We also discuss, some of the very good reasons that Democrats should be concerned about the reported results in Georgia this year, particularly given the software breach of statewide voting systems in Coffee County that Sec. Raffensperger has refused to mitigate in any way before the 2024 election, including with software patches distributed by Dominion.
Marks is concerned by the “chaos” that could be caused by someone exploiting the Coffee County caper. “It would be so easy for someone to shut down the system by just writing code that would shut down all the machines at 10am on Election Day,” she offers by way of just one example. “There’s nothing Georgia could do about it. They are not prepared.” In response, I offer an even simpler and arguably more chilling scenario at how a tiny group of people can create utter havoc in the state by simply claiming that the state’s touchscreen systems have misprinted their ballots — whether that’s true or not. There is no way, with the systems, to determine if they are telling the truth.
Tune in for more on those actually real concerns about GA elections, as well as Marks’ tips for voters in both Georgia and other states, including North Carolina, California, and anywhere else that voters may be forced to vote on a 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting systems at the polling place this year…
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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Very good eye Brad on the misrepresented “Hand Counted ballots required” syndrome.
It’s vital to note that Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel since October 8th of last year, and that tens of thousands of Israelis have had to evacuate their homes in the north. Israel’s war on Hezbollah is starting because Israel feels secure pulling forces away from Gaza, since Hamas is being handled by regular raids in Gaza.
Honestly, this is poor coverage on the current fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. I know you’re capable of better, because you typically do better.
I believe Netanyahu will ramp-up his war as much as possible in hopes of entangling the US in a big conflict, and possibly helping Trump in the election with all the chaos and passions that US entry into the war would trigger.
Sure hope I’m wrong.
JMO.
The three scariest people in the world:
Trump/Netanyahu/Putin
The Triumvirate Of Terror.