Election denial officials admit hand recounts don't show fraud
Election deniers in a small Georgia county instituted automatic hand recounts — which have resulted only in human error. Plus, election denier madness across the state — and the country.
When the Spalding County elections board met in early April, supervisor Kim Slaughter — herself a Trump-supporting election denier — had bad news for the QAnon-believing MAGA zealot who chairs the board.
Slaughter told the conspiracy-warped chair, Ben Johnson, pictured above from his own Twitter account, that the board-mandated hand recounts of recent elections had found some discrepancies between votes counted by machine and those counted by hand. But, Slaughter told Johnson and the rest of the board, every discrepancy discovered was “human error.”
““There were [...] some discrepancies but we kept going,” Slaughter told Johnson, “and it was always human error and we just weren’t catching it.”
Slaughter then asked Johnson and the board to remove the requirement for automatic hand recounts they had put in place last year.
“So, just to clarify, you’re saying that the human error was in the hand counting process, not in things on the ballot not matching what was tabulated,” Johnson asked Slaughter, who confirmed his understanding.
After hand-counting almost 7,000 votes during the March presidential primary, Slaughter and her team had found that not a single vote was improperly counted by the Dominion voting machines used by Spalding County.
Still, it wasn’t enough for Johnson.
“You know I have the utmost confidence in your office and you, but we implemented (hand recounts) as a mechanism to show to the general public accountability and transparency to the best of our ability in terms of, are we doing everything we can to gain public trust that what somebody voted is what the end result of outside the machines?” Johnson said at the meeting, reiterating his belief that Georgia’s voting machines are beset with acts of election fraud. “For me, every race, my trust in the system goes back down to zero.”
Johnson is a case study of election denialism: faced with hard evidence in his very own county that no fraud had occurred, he still didn’t believe what his own election supervisor was telling him.
In August 2023, the board implemented automatic hand recounts of all elections. The first test of that new system came in November, when Spalding County was one of a handful of Georgia counties to count votes by hand after they were already counted by the Dominion voting machines used there, and in Georgia’s other 158 counties. In March, Spalding County again went with a hand count to double-check votes in that month’s primary. A voting rights advocacy organization, All Voting Local (AVIL), was there to witness the hand count, which took more than two days for the 6,800 votes submitted throughout the county.
“If turnout in 2024 matches 2020, they will have more than four times the ballots this upcoming November, meaning it could take eight or more days for the county to tabulate their results,” AVIL noted.
What do you think will happen if Spalding County and other places require hand recounts before they accept results? They won’t be able to certify results until those lengthy — and error-prone — hand counts are completed, which means states won’t be able to come up with final tallies. That’s a recipe for chaos that will be seized upon by the Trump campaign as evidence of fraud. Then you’ll have angry, election-denying Trump supporters showing up at election offices throughout Georgia and elsewhere. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see how that situation can turn volatile pretty quickly.
By the end of that meeting in April, Spalding County agreed to simply perform hand counts for some upcoming elections. Whether they choose to institute an automatic hand recount of November remains to be seen.
In other election denier news:
Certification of election results by local election officials is shaping up to be the issue in November. The AP has a rundown of efforts to lay the groundwork for mass refusals to certify in Michigan and Arizona, also taking note of the election-denier lawsuit we reported on in Fulton County that seeks to codify the discretion to refuse to certify results. I predicted that certification would be a major plank of the Trump campaign’s attempts to call into question — and, let’s just be honest, overturn — November’s election results back in March after a long investigation. Looks like I was on to something.
In Macon-Bibb County, voters from what looks like both sides of the political aisle packed an election board meeting to protest — you guessed it — certification of election results.
Also in Macon-Bibb, a Trump-supporting election denier introduced a mass voter challenge thanks to EagleAI, a software program developed partly with funding from Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network that seeks to remove ineligible voters from voter rolls.
In Cherokee County, election deniers attempted to convince the county commission to implement an opt-out provision in an obscure law recently introduced by area Republicans that would have remade the election board into majority-Republican from its traditional 50-50 split. And when I say majority Republican, I think we all know that means majority election denier. The decision was delayed but local Democrats are concerned that the Democratic nominee chosen by commissioners isn’t really a Democrat — local Dems aren’t familiar with the new election board member, and he voted as a Republican in the 2020 primary, a source knowledgeable tells me.
An election denier in North Dakota who oversees local elections received what amounts to a possible bribe from a current U.S. congressional candidate — in the form of a rifle. Mark Splonskowski is the Burleigh County auditor, which means he oversees elections there, my old North Dakota pal Rob Port reported. The giveaway was supposed to be for folks who donated to the campaign of Rick Becker, except campaign finance disclosures don’t show any donations from Splonskowski, the new, proud owner of a Diamondback Firearms DB16, worth around $600. Splonskowski is an election denier, as Port reported: “Last year, Splonskowski filed suit against the state of North Dakota with the backing of a national group called the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), arguing that he shouldn't have to count mailed-in ballots postmarked before the election deadline but received afterward, despite state law specifically allowing this.” PILF is chaired by, shocker, Cleta Mitchell.
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P.S. Things seem like they’re heating up on the lawfare front of attempts to question November’s election results. Of course, it’s only going to get hotter in that area of widespread attempts to rig 2024. And that is what’s happening. Never forget that the primary driver of all Donald Trump’s actions is projection — whatever he’s accusing someone of, you can be sure that he’s guilty of it himself. And right now, his people are trying to rig this thing through legal and quasi-legal means of questioning election results and making unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud. That’s the plan, and it’s all happening right out in the open. If all that weren’t bad enough, Trump and his campaign are sprinkling in daily, martial rhetoric to further rile up a base of supporters that, trust me, is already pissed off enough as it is. To support American Doom’s work exposing election deniers, far-right extremists and other threats to democracy, please subscribe for as little as $5 a month.