BY MATT MARGOLIS | P J MEDIA

AP Photo/Mike Stewart

A contractor hired by Georgia Secretary of State to monitor election counting in Fulton County wrote a 29-page memo back in November “outlining the ‘massive’ election integrity failures and mismanagement that he witnessed in the Atlanta-area’s election centers,” reports Just The News.

The bombshell report, constructed like a minute-by-minute diary, cited a litany of high-risk problems such as the double-counting of votes, insecure storage of ballots, possible violations of voter privacy, the mysterious removal of election materials at a vote collection warehouse, and the suspicious movement of “too many” ballots on Election Day.

“This seems like a massive chain of custody problem,” the contractor, Carter Jones of  Seven Hill Strategies, warned in the memo—which was delivered to Raffensperger’s office shortly after the election. Despite his office being warned about these massive problems, Raffensperger maintained that Georgia “had safe, secure, honest elections.”

Jones claims he observed absentee ballots arriving at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena “in rolling bins 2k at a time,” and none of them were in sealed and numbered boxes. Jones believed this to be highly suspicious, said there were “too many ballots coming in for secure black ballot boxes.”

Another red flag raised by Jones was about temporary workers hired to scan and count ballots after an election worker witnessed a conversation during which one of the temps revealed his intention to “f**k s**t up.”

Jones wrote that he needed to keep an eye on them. “Perhaps this was a bad joke, but it was very poorly timed in the presence of a poll watcher.”

Those two workers had been assigned to a “team confirming and boxing ballots that have already been scanned to prepare them for later audit” because “this is the place where they could do least to achieve their declared objective.”

Jones wasn’t simply concerned about those two workers but was also concerned about the vetting process of the agency that hired them, called Happy Faces.

“What is Happy Faces doing to vet the people who they are sending to make sure that they are not sending in people who do actually want to ‘f*ck sh*t up?'” Jones asked.

Happy Faces did not respond to Just The News’ request for comment before their report was published.

You can read the entire 29-page memo here.

John Solomon of Just The News spoke about this report on Just The Truth with Jenna Ellis.

As Jenna Ellis pointed out, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office most certainly knew of these issues even when Raffensperger and other Georgia officials were saying unequivocally that the 2020 election in Georgia was above board. Raffensperger told Just The News he still trusts the outcome of the election. However, considering there are thousands of ballots potentially impacted by these irregularities, and Joe Biden’s state-certified victory in the state was by fewer than 12,000 votes, it is certainly plausible that there was results-changing fraud in Georgia.

Lawyer Bob Cheeley, who’s leading the Fulton County audit, previously told Just the News that the evidence he’s seen so far points to “election tabulation malpractice,” though experts and state election officials disagree on whether the evidence is proof of fraud or gross incompetence. They are, however, mostly united in the opinion that top election supervisors in Fulton County should be removed. Raffensperger told Just The News that he also supports the ouster of Fulton County’s top election officials.

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Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama, and The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/06/18/bombshell-memo-documents-massive-election-integrity-problems-in-atlanta-n1455516?utm_source=pjmedia&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=&bcid=227841a8b1ca836b99e21ea36efa6859&recip=28551147

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HUGE: Significant Election Irregularities Exposed in Fulton County, Georgia

BY MATT MARGOLIS  | P J MEDIA

AP Photo/Ben Gray

Documents from Fulton County, Georgia, that were submitted to state officials for the election audit “highlight significant irregularities in the Atlanta area during last November’s voting, ranging from identical vote tallies repeated multiple times to large batches of absentee ballots that appear to be missing from the official ballot-scanning records,” reports Just The News.

Thousands of ballots are potentially impacted by these irregularities, suggesting they could be results-changing, as Joe Biden’s state-certified victory in the state was by fewer than 12,000 votes.

Just The News reviewed memos that included “handwritten tally sheets for all absentee ballots counted by the county as well as a private report from a contractor hired by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to monitor the Atlanta-area election process.”

The report, which chronicled seven days of problems, recorded troubling behavior like the mysterious removal of a suitcase of sensitive election data known as polls pads, used to authenticate voters.

“Learn that Rick reprogramming poll pads earlier was setting up a new precinct for SC11 because someone took the wrong suitcase but only took one,” the contractor Seven Hills Strategy wrote late on Nov. 2, the night before Election Day. “Seems to be a mystery who this person was –> Should have chain of custody paperwork!! That means that a stranger just walked out with sensitive election materials?”

The contractor also observed that sensitive election materials were left on a dock at a warehouse without supervision. “Several cases (including SC11) were just left out on the loading dock outside the warehouse,” he wrote. “Thankfully the seals were intact.”

Last month, Henry County Superior Court Judge Brian Amero unsealed approximately 145,000 Fulton County absentee ballots from the 2020 election, approving them for an audit. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported at the time that the audit “cannot change the election results, which were certified months ago and have already been confirmed by multiple recounts. But the plaintiffs say an examination of ballots would get to the bottom of what they see as suspicious activity by election officials at State Farm Arena in November.”

Lawyer Bob Cheeley, who’s leading the audit, told Just the News that the evidence he’s seen so far points to “election tabulation malpractice,” though experts and state election officials disagree on whether the evidence is proof of fraud or gross incompetence. They are, however, mostly united in the opinion that top election supervisors in Fulton County should be removed.

Just The News reviewed the Fulton County documents.

Among the problems those memos exposed:

• More than 100 batches of absentee ballots — each containing approximately 100 or more ballots — were assigned tracking numbers before being sent to one of the five absentee vote-counting machines in Fulton County but are not subsequently recorded in the handwritten logs showing which batches were scanned and counted, raising concerns the ballots may be missing.

• More than two dozen batches of absentee ballots were identified as having been double-scanned on the tally sheets.

• Five sequential batches of absentee votes each appeared with the exact same vote count of 392 for Biden, 96 for President Donald Trump, and 3 for Libertarian Jo Jorgensen, a count that state officials admitted was a statistical impossibility.

• Many control sheets for absentee ballot batches counted during the state’s audit did not check a box indicating the ballot came from a secure container, raising the possibility that ballots were stored insecurely or that multiple batches of ballots were sealed in a single container.

Fulton County’s paperwork is also so “shoddy” that one state official said it left open the possibility that fraud or misconduct occurred. “An audit is only as good as the data that’s input, and in this case Fulton County’s records are so problematic I’m not sure a reasonable person can trust them,” the official said. “When you add in the reports of ballots magically appearing under tables or being moved out of the counting center, there are legitimate outstanding questions.”

Hypothetically speaking, if the Maricopa County, Ariz., audit and the Fulton County, Ga., audit both found enough fraud to change the results in those states, Joe Biden’s lead in the Electoral College would shrink to 279, and Trump’s Electoral College vote count would be 259—which would still not be enough to alter the results of the election. Another audit may be coming to Pennsylvania. If an audit finds results-changing fraud in Pennsylvania, which the Trump campaign alleges happened, that would mean that Trump’s true Electoral College vote total in 2020 would have been 279, to Joe Biden’s 259. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that the 2020 election would be invalidated and Trump would assume the presidency again.

“The election was lawless, six states allowed their delegates to vote by false certifications, but the [Electoral College] process happened,” explained Jenna Ellis, Trump’s former legal adviser. “The Constitution has only one process for removal of a sitting president: impeachment and conviction.”

“The best thing we can do as constitutionalists moving forward is to ensure this utter disregard for states’ election laws never happens again,” Ellis continued. “That’s why election integrity is the number one issue facing America today.”

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Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama, and The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/06/17/huge-significant-election-irregularities-exposed-in-fulton-county-georgia-n1455273?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=onsite&utm_campaign=582

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Easy to Vote, Hard to Cheat

By Glenn Harlan Reynolds | Real Clear Politics

(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

America’s voting system is in trouble. To do its job, it needs to produce clear and trustworthy outcomes. It’s not enough to produce a winner and loser. The losers have to believe that they lost fair and square, and the public has to have enough confidence in the system to be skeptical when sore losers claim fraud.

We don’t have that right now. To get there, we need paper ballots, voter ID, and open counting – plus a bit of self-restraint among our political class. Across much of America, voting is now done by computerized devices. Computers have many advantages: They’re fast, they’re easy to program (compared with changing printed ballots), and they produce rapid results that can be quickly reported.

But they also have problems. One is that to trust a computer, you have to trust the people who wrote its software, and everyone else who may have had an opportunity to change that software. Devices that connect to the Internet also raise the risk that people on the other side of the world might change the software or the results.

Since 2020, such worries have often been dismissed as right-wing propaganda, but just before the election USA Today published a roundup of concerns about electronic voting that cited numerous computer scientists. Conclusion: “All election systems are for the most part black boxes: proprietary software and hardware jealously guarded by the handful of companies selling them. But state reviews and court cases opening up DRE [direct-recording electronic] systems of all makes and models for examination have for years flagged problems.”

“The whole community of computer scientists is mystified why election officials will not listen to experts about technology but will listen to the vendors” selling and maintaining it, said computer scientist Duncan Buell of the University of South Carolina.

Prior to the 2020 election, several prominent Democrats, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Ron Wyden, sent a letter citing reports of vote-switching by machines manufactured by Dominion Systems. They wrote: “These problems threaten the integrity of our elections and demonstrate the importance of election systems that are strong, durable, and not vulnerable to attack.”

They were right. Whether or not voting machines were actually compromised, if people can’t trust them, they’re no good. So, we need something more trustworthy. How do we do that?

Paper ballots, voter ID, and open counting, for a start. Paper ballots aren’t fraud-proof, but they have several advantages over electronic voting machines. First, they can’t be hacked by someone in Minsk or Guangdong. To change a paper ballot, you need physical access.

What’s more, while you can change a vote tally in a computer by flipping some bits – and bits are interchangeable – paper ballots capture more information than simply votes for or against a candidate. Erasing original votes is likely to leave some residue.

Creating large numbers of fake ballots is also harder. Computer votes have no identifying characteristics. Details of handwriting, ink color, and so on make each paper ballot unique. If you mass-produced completed ballots, it would be much harder to make them look genuine; a Xerox machine wouldn’t do the job.

Of course, votes need to be genuine. Voter fraud is itself a species of voter suppression. If a fraudulent voter casts a ballot, that ballot neutralizes the vote of a legitimate voter who chose a different candidate.

Many states (including mine, Tennessee) require a photo ID to vote, as is the custom around the world. Voting by mail is frowned upon. In Europe, 63% of countries ban mail-in ballots except for citizens living abroad; another 22% ban mail-in ballots even for overseas citizens. Most countries that allow mail-in ballots require people to show an ID to obtain one. Some countries – including those where the U.S. has tried to boost democracy, such as Afghanistan and Iraq – have gone further, marking voters (remember the famous “purple finger” photos?) to prevent repeat voting.

The goal is simple: one person, one vote – with both person and vote authenticated.

I’m not the only one to endorse paper ballots. After the Democrats’ Iowa caucuses debacle last year, where a smartphone voting app failed miserably, the New York Times ran a piece headlined “The only safe election is a low-tech election.”

And as Sen. (now Vice President) Kamala Harris noted, “Russia can’t hack a piece of paper.”

Of course, to be trusted, votes must also be counted fairly. I recommend an open count at each polling place. Counting votes on the spot would eliminate problems with ballots being “lost” on the way to a central counting facility or being “discovered” in the trunk of a car during the count. Everything should be done out in the open.

There should also be accountability for voting officials. Votes lost or found? You lose your job. The responsibility is vital, and there should be serious consequences for failure or dereliction.

Finally, we need a better political culture. Politicians were once unwilling to challenge elections for fear of looking like sore losers. That has changed. From the “hanging chad” recounts in 2000 to the Diebold conspiracy theories of 2004 to claims of a “hacked election” in 2016 to the ongoing hysteria about the 2020 election, charges of fraud, made by major political figures, have become normal.

This may help fire up the base and generate media clicks, but it’s destructive – and it undercuts the credibility of any genuine charges of fraud that may emerge. True, reforming our political culture, which I regard as deeply dysfunctional, may be asking too much. All the more reason to support paper ballots, voter ID, and open counting on-site. Adopting these methods would do much to promote political trust, and political legitimacy, in a nation sorely in need of both.

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Glenn Harlan Reynolds is Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee, and founder of the Instapundit political blog.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/17/easy_to_vote_hard_to_cheat_145941.html

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The Supreme Court’s Day of Reckoning is Coming

By John Green | American Thinker

Image: Pixabay

The election of 2020 is going to lay bare the dereliction of the Supreme Court for all to see.  The COVD-19 pandemic gave numerous state election officials an excuse to implement far-reaching changes to our election processes.  Those changes obviously made our systems vulnerable to fraud.  States implemented massive mail-in balloting at the same time they relaxed ballot security and voter identification.  They even extended the voting periods -- to give the criminals more time to commit their fraud.

All these changes were unconstitutional.  The Constitution clearly gives the various state legislatures the authority to define how their elections will be conducted -- not state election officials.  Election officials are only empowered to conduct elections within the rules set forth by their respective legislatures -- except, apparently, during a pandemic.  There must be a pandemic emanation hidden in a penumbra of the Constitution we didn’t know about.  Alarmed that the changes would invite fraud, various organizations filed lawsuits to stop the changes. 

The Supreme Court declined to get involved.  It ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing because nobody had been harmed -- yet.  Since the election hadn’t happened, nobody was damaged, and there was no case to be heard.  They were thinking like a civil court, not the defenders of the Constitution they are sworn to be.  It was a cowardly way to stay out of the political controversy.  Unfortunately, it also missed an opportunity to defend the Constitution, which was clearly under attack.

After all the ad-hoc changes had been allowed to stand, the election of 2020 saw an unprecedented number of irregularities -- too many to ignore.  Election observers were banned from observing the election.  Counting stopped in the middle of the night and then restarted after boxes of ballots were mysteriously found.  There are reports of ballots being driven across state lines -- by the truckload.  There were even precincts that counted more ballots than there were registered voters!  A number of states filed lawsuits against the states in which these irregularities occurred.

Even though the Supreme Court is supposed to be the arbiter of cases between states, it again refused to get involved.  They ruled that Texas couldn’t sue Pennsylvania because Texans had their votes accurately counted and therefore were not harmed by Pennsylvania.  Apparently having the wrong president crammed down the throats of Texans is not considered “harm.”  Given the flood of illegal aliens President Asterisk has invited -- and the crime that has accompanied them -- would the justices consider Texas “harmed” now?

A number of other cases were dropped because the court considered them “moot.”  The election had been certified and nothing was going to change that -- hence no need to look at the evidence.  In the immortal words of Hillary Rodham Clinton, “At this point what difference does it make?”

The court seems to have three distinct voting blocs:

1.   The oath keepers -- These are the justices that are willing to stand up and defend the Constitution even if it means they’ll have to endure attacks.  Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch make up this bloc.

2.   The jellyfish -- These are the justices that lack the spine to face controversy.  They’re more concerned about defending the court than the Constitution.  Justices Roberts, Barrett, and Kavanaugh make up this bloc.

3.   The subversives -- These are the justices that have been using penumbras and emanations to rewrite the constitution in pursuit of social engineering.  Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer make up this bloc.

It’s rumored that only three justices wanted to hear the 2020 election lawsuits.  Does anyone doubt that it was those who comprise the “oath keepers” bloc?

Now, Chief Justice Roberts has placed his court in a trick-box.  By choosing to stay out of the election controversy, John Roberts has bet the court’s reputation that the mysteries of the election would remain mysteries.  As wagers go, it was not a particularly smart one.  The election involved millions of ballots, tens of thousands of election workers, and thousands of counties.  If there was fraud, there is too much evidence, in too many hands, to stay hidden.

Tellingly, the Democrats are scrambling to keep the truth hidden, but it’s slowly coming out.  State-sponsored forensic audits, as well as private investigations, are turning over the stones.  We’ll likely know the truth by the end of this year.  If it turns out that the election was stolen, the Supreme Court will be exposed as derelict, weak, and useless.  It will all be because the jellyfish bloc doesn’t understand the psychology of bullies.

The Supreme Court avoided involvement in the election because they wanted to stay out of the controversy -- they didn’t want to be bullied by the Democrats or the media.  There are other possible motives, but they’re even more disturbing.  Cowing to bullies will not avoid conflict.  Bullies prey on weakness.  One has to either stand up to them eventually or accept servitude.  Every kid on the playground has learned that lesson by the 8th grade.  Apparently, John Roberts hasn’t.  Each time Chief Justice Roberts has acceded to the bullies, he’s made the court’s future challenge greater.

Ruling that last-minute ad-hoc election changes were unconstitutional would have been relatively straightforward -- but the court didn’t.  Hearing the election fraud evidence and adjudicating the result would have created a political crap-storm -- but it would have been the right thing to do.  What will become of the court’s reputation if it becomes obvious that the election was stolen and rather than stand up, it sat down?

An April poll by Rasmussen Reports found that 51% of the population believes that fraud affected the election outcome.  Does Roberts grasp the significance of that number?  It’s the percentage of the population who believe the Supreme Court was derelict in defending the Constitution.  If John Roberts wanted to defend the court, perhaps he should have considered the pursuit of the truth rather than avoidance of controversy.

A recent Ipsos poll found that 63% of the public thinks it’s time to impose term limits on Supreme Court Justices.  The public isn’t stupid.   It recognizes that the Supreme Court needs to be taken to the woodshed.  The next few months will say a lot about the Supreme Court.  Will it correct course, or will it embrace servitude to the mob?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/the_supreme_courts_day_of_reckoning_is_coming.html