Hawkeye wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 2:16 pm
Do you also deny that Trump lied about the election being stolen from him? That is even more irrational!
Do you deny that Stacey Abrams has been lying about the Georgia gubernatorial election being stolen from her? You probably don't even know about this because you only listen to one side of the story.
As a matter of fact, I do deny that Stacey Abrams was lying when she claimed the election was stolen from her, or, at least, that she had no legitimate justification to suspect as much. She was running against Brian Kemp, after all!
The Wizard of Voter Suppression: Brian Kemp’s Long History of Making Black Votes Disappear
I didn't listen only to one side of the story! Her side of the story is by far the more credible! She has more integrity and credibility in her right earlobe than Trump and Kemp have in both their bodies combined!
On Nov. 6, Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams could turn the nation’s political map inside out and become the first black female governor in U.S. history. The mathematics say its entirely possible. The voter enthusiasm is on her side.
There’s only one problem: She’s running against one of the greatest suppressors of the black vote in history.
Between 2008 until 2012, the state of Georgia struck 750,000 voters from its rolls, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, an unusually high rate of purging, but still within reason. However, after Kemp got his hands on the state’s voting apparatus, he has purged twice as many voters. Kemp has nixed nearly 1.4 million voters from Georgia’s books for inane reasons such as missing hyphens, rumors that voters have moved and even misspelled street names. And since he became the Republican nominee for governor, he has doubled down.
One of his biggest weapons is his “exact match” policy. If a voter’s registration doesn’t match their DMV records (which often has flawed data), Kemp has mandated that the registration be invalidated. There are reports of voters with hyphenated names being removed from rolls because their registration didn’t have the hyphen. Others have been deleted because their addresses were misspelled.
To be fair, when voters sued the state of Georgia about this policy in 2013, noting that it was arbitrary and not a legal standard, Kemp did stop doing it. Then he simply had the Republican-led state legislature pass a law codifying the exact match system, and continued his purge.
Kemp also uses other methods to get rid of voters. He tosses out the names of people suspected of not being citizens. He purges inactive voters. He kicks out people who didn’t serve on jury duty. He uses every imaginable method, and somehow the voters left out are always black.
But purges aren’t Kemp’s only strategy to suppress the black vote. Georgia officials have closed 214 polling places in 53 counties since 2012, according to the Journal-Constitution. And most of the counties (39 of the 53) where those closures occurred are in counties with significant black populations (more than 25 percent).
Earlier this year Randolph County passed a plan to close two-thirds of its polling locations. Not only is Randolph County mostly black, but the elections were run by Michael Malone, who was a Kemp donor and was curiously on the list of people who Kemp was considering using as a consultant for his campaign, the Washington Post reports.
Aside from being an ardent Trump supporter, Kemp is also vehemently opposed to anyone inspecting his handiwork. After intelligence officials noticed that Russian hackers had breached election software in Georgia, Kemp was the only state election official to rebuff help from federal experts.
Georgia is one of the few states that don’t use paper ballots and there is no way to audit the results of an election in the state. Not only are two-thirds of the state’s voting machines more than 10 years old, but when Marilyn Marks and the Coalition for Good Governance sued after noticing that someone had breached the server where voting machine software, passwords and data were stored; instead of handing over the data, the servers were wiped clean.
Then they wiped the backups clean.
Not only that:
Kemp routinely brags about his voter suppression efforts to fellow Republicans. Some allege that Kemp’s tactics come from the “king of voter suppression,” Kris Kobach, once called “the most racist politician in America. And in 2014, Kemp issued a warning his fellow party members:
I just wanted to tell you, real quick, after we get through this runoff, you know the Democrats are working hard, and all these stories about them, you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines, if they can do that, they can win these elections in November.
Stacey Abrams had far, far more reason to suspect her election was stolen from her than Trump Did. He had zero evidence that it was stolen from him and more than 60 court cases confirmed that, including cases presided over by Judges that Trump himself had appointed!
It is truly remarkable that Stacey Abrams came as close as she did to winning, despite Kemp's blatant and even freely boasted of efforts at minority voter suppression!
So I repeat the question: Do you deny that Trump lied when he claimed the election was stolen from him? If you do, you are yourself either a liar or a fool!
ETA: In all fairness, I'll have to admit, though, that Kemp had enough integrity and courage to stand up to Trump when he tried to overturn Missouri's 2020 election results. He deserves a vote of appreciation for that -- not condemnation by Trump or anyone else! Do you agree?
No precept or claim is more suspect or more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.