Trump lost the recounts in these states. But I can still recall sitting before the TV on election night watching with a grin as Trump's leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania evaporated once votes from the counties around Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia came in. Places that ordinarily see votes (8-2 Blacks, as the networks reported) disappeared. Had it not been "the most secure, fairest election ever," as Trump might have said had he won, many thousands of votes -- mail-in and provisional -- would not have been counted, as usual, and Trump would have won re-election. This "usual" scenario is what helps explain why Trump was so upset with the results of some of these states. He thought that he had Georgia in the bag, which partially explains his call to the secretary of state after the election to have the state disqualify enough mail-in votes (11.7 thousand) to give him the edge.
Who knows, but maybe Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove put him up to it (he was with the Trump re-election campaign) and, according to Palast, back in 2012, Rove, a Fox analyst on election night, had been so indignant that Obama was about to win Ohio that he put in a call to the secretary of state's office to throw votes. As Palast puts it in How Trump Stole 2020,
About 70% of Black voters in Ohio had cast their ballots on early voting days...Rove knew that these hundreds of thousands of Black early voters were not given regular ballots. Instead, they were all given ballots that could be disqualified. (p.158)
Mail-in ballots were handed to them, right there at the polling station in front of the voting machines (hooded). They were dumbfounded, but had to go on with it, absent any other choice.
Palast heard about this ploy at the last moment and ran to a law professor he knew who immediately went to court to stop the disqualification of votes:
Turdblossom Rove knew...that if [Ohio secretary of state] Rusted disqualified about 20% of the early-voting "absentee" Black ballots on technical grounds, Rove would realize his last, best hope of defeating Obama ...([professor] Fritakis went to court, I went on air, and the mass disqualification of Ohio votes--which worked the trick in 2004--failed in 2012. (p. 164)
That's right, 2004. Palast proved that John Kerry was robbed -- of Ohio and the presidency -- this same way in 2004. All Donald was doing in Georgia was asking for more of the same ol' same thing, like before, back when the MSM couldn't say it was "the most secure, fairest election ever."
Given how close the Georgia count was in the 2020 presidential election, and the speed with which Trump's request to find winning votes was leaked to the MSM, you might have thought the state would finally get its act together and legislate an end to the last minute manipulation of votes by Republican Machiavellian operatives. After all, Georgia was a liberal laughing stock after governor Brian Kemp changed the rules for vote counting while he was still the secretary of state during the gubernatorial race. Kemp's half-million voter purge not only benefited him, but also helped get Trump elected president in 2016. The pure chutzpah of Kemp's purges was well-received:
And spread it did. Swing states that would decide the 2020 election--Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin--had done a "Kemp job" on their voter rolls. (p.23)
Hundreds of thousands of voters were purged from the rolls.
Recently, Georgia passed legislation (Senate Bill 202) that tightens, rather than loosens, restrictions on voting that, once again, affect Black voters far more than others. New ID laws will make it more difficult for voters to register. Voting buses that helped alleviate the pressure of long lines will be reduced to emergency use only. The so-called "souls to the polls" early voting scheme is reduced, leaving fewer hours of voting open. All of the changes disproportionately affect poor, rural and minority voters. This is a form of doubling down on disenfranchisement. In addition, Bill 202 eliminates the secretary of state as overseer of the Election Board, a "move seen as revenge for Georgia Republicans against the current secretary of state, Mr. Raffensperger, who would not capitulate to Mr. Trump's demands to overturn the results under a false banner of fraud." And losing two Republican Senate seats to Democrats in run-offs in Georgia meant the loss of that chamber's control in Congress.
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