Trump Probably Won’t Be Telling You About This…

Georgia has more counties than any other state except Texas. (Source: Georgia DOT)

Even though he wouldn’t stop Tweeting about it for weeks.

But since he didn’t get the results he wanted, or in fact promised, we almost felt obligated to catch you up on a couple of things. Because they should not be allowed to fall through the cracks:

Remember how Trump demanded recounts in Georgia because he’d “win easily” there if that happened because massive fraud of many types would inevitably be revealed if only the state’s Republican leadership had the “courage” to do it? And they did. In fact, their audit of election night votes involved recounting every single vote by hand. And guess what? Biden still won. And then Trump, as he was entitled to do, requested another recount, this time by machine. And Biden still won.

So then Trump started saying that counting and recounting of the votes themselves was meaningless. Primarily because it didn’t accrue to his favor. No, the proof wasn’t in counting and recounting the votes themselves, it would be found in the “signatures and envelopes“.

We don’t need the ballots — we only need the signed envelopes!”, the President asserted.

Because that’s what would count and would prove that “fraud” definitively: signatures on the envelopes submitted by voters who did mail-in votes needed to be inspected to see if those signatures matched those voters’ actual signatures on file with the state or not. Never mind that the state had already done that twice: once when those voters initially applied to do a mail-in vote (with even stricter verification required if they applied online), and again when their vote was received, before it was counted.

Must expose real signatures!” Trump shouted for emphasis.

So again, the state’s Republican leadership did that. They selected Cobb County, which is a rather large county Hillary Clinton won by just a little in 2016, but in 2020, Biden won it by a lot. So if there was any potential “funny business”, given the big swing away from Trump this year, that would be a place to look.

And that audit, led by the highly respected Georgia Bureau of Investigation, found nothing fishy. In fact, according to a release by Georgia’s Secretary of State, the signatures matching the envelopes there—and that’s precisely what Trump wanted and said would prove he’s right—turned out of be “99.99% accurate.” Meaning Trump’s allegations are 99.99% not accurate. And should prove once and for all there was no fraud.

Of course, that’s not stopping Trump from still saying stuff about Georgia, and treating the latest news—unfavorable as it is to his efforts to overturn the election—as a moving target. Now, the President Tweets he actually meant check the signatures of ballots in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, and has an African-American population just shy of 50%.

Meanwhile, as two special Senate elections in Georgia both scheduled for January 5th, draw near, we found something else quite interesting.

An out-of-state organization based in Texas is challenging the validity of thousands of voters in many Georgia counties. Charging those voters don’t actually live in the state. And they want them immediately thrown off voter rolls. 

But a federal judge yesterday blocked those challenges in two counties. And thing is, the bigger of those two counties in question, Muscogee, is very near the huge U.S. military installation of Ft. Benning. Which, incidentally, is named after a Confederate General so should be slated for renaming, should Trump’s veto of this year’s military funding bill be overturned. Renaming that and similar bases is one of the main reasons Trump says he vetoed the bill in the first place.

Also, not incidentally, Biden won that county by a lot. And people in the military get moved around a lot. But usually temporarily. So where they live in particular are easy places to look if you’re an organization hell bent on disenfranchising voters. But those men and women in the military are perfectly within their rights to maintain their residence as Georgia and vote their, even if they are reassigned someplace else and thus aren’t there physically for a time. In fact, this is why absentee voting was invented. And why it’s been used by so many members of the military for years. The only thing that seems to have changed is military votes were traditionally assumed to usually lean pretty heavily Republican. And while there are no doubt still some strong Trump supporters in the military as everywhere else, he really doesn’t seem to have a lock on them, to such an alarming extent apparently, that a group trying to boost Trump-backed Senate candidates is going out of its way to try to disenfranchise large numbers of voters from the armed forces.