I saw a remarkable story in an online magazine DCReports. I haven’t seen this discussed here at dkos so I thought I would link to the article and describe the highlights. I am interested in knowing what others in the dkos community think of the story.
Why the Numbers Behind Mitch McConnell’s Re-Election Win Don’t Add Up (How does an 18% approval rating result in a 58% win?) (article here: www.dcreport.org/...)
The highlights:
- this reporter Alison Greene used the county-level vote totals published by Kentucky to identify anomalies in McConnell’s 2020 re-election win.
- Ms. Greene links these vote tally anomalies to the use of Election System & Software (ESS) voting machines.
- similar vote tally anomalies have also been identified in other states using ES&S voting machines, including Lindsey Graham re-election in SC and Susan Collins re-election win in Maine.
In subsequent investigation, Ms. Greene looks at county-level vote totals in S. Carolina, and notes similar irregularities in Lindsey Graham’s re-election there. Again, the ES&S voting machines seem to be at the heart of it. This Twitter thread describes Ms. Greene’s findings — here:
In this thread Ms. Greene notes that Georgia had years of questionable election results until the 2018 Governor’s race resulted in many lawsuits. A judge ordered the state to replace its voting machines. Georgia chose the Dominion voting machines. The 2020 election in Georgia was the first time a Republican did not win every Georgia race since 2002 when the state began using ES&S voting machines.
Ms. Greene goes on to say that in the wake of Trump’s “big lie” and the Georgia senate races, Republican state legislators across the country are canceling orders for Dominion voting machines and ordering ES&S voting machines instead. Apparently, the new AZ 2020 election recount only involves counties employing Dominion voting machines; Republicans are not re-counting the votes from counties that use ES&S voting machines.
I urge interested readers to go thru the DCReports article and Ms. Greene’s Twitter thread to see the numbers and the details for themselves.
In this age of fake news, I maintain a level of skepticism of Ms. Greene’s reporting. It should be noted that Ms Greene is using publicly available election data, so her findings should be verifiable by anyone (I myself have not tried to verify Ms. Greene’s numbers). We know the conservatives use a myriad of methods to game and cheat elections; this story is consistent with Republican party behavior, and the Republican habit of projecting their bad actions onto others. Yet, while it may look fugazy, there are only anomalous results and speculation. Then again: what does “smoking gun evidence” of election fraud look like?
I am surprised that we are not seeing more reporting on this, especially given Republican prolific complaints about election fraud. I remember reading George Palast’s reporting on Republicans using “voter purges” to gain an advantage in the 2000 Florida presidential race. The reporting was almost entirely ignored by the US press. Twenty years later on, and “voter purges” are an accepted fact of every red state election.
It is clear to me that Donald Trump, his “big lie”, and Republicans have monopolized the national debate about voting machines and election fraud. It might be time for the citizens in Kentucky to file their own lawsuit. If the numbers reported by Ms. Greene bear out, we would have actual damning evidence to show a judge.
This is you democracy, America: cherish it.