As Usual, The Washington Post Gets an Election Story Wrong

One of the problems with reporters for The Washington Post is that they repeat the claims of liberals as if they are facts, without questioning the claims or pointing out the patently obvious problems with clearly false accusations.

You can see that in a Page One story Saturday in which the Post blithely reports that “critics” of a new rule approved by the Georgia State Election Board say it “would empower county election officials to withhold certification of results without justification, potentially thwarting a popular result.”

Nothing could be further from the truth, as is discernible by a simple reading of the rule, which the five-member Georgia State Election Board approved Aug. 19 by a vote of 3-2.

Yet the Post offered no explanation as to how that claim is demonstrably wrong. Given the Post’s bias, we shouldn’t be surprised by its shoddy journalism

I was one of three experts who testified before the state board in a virtual hearing, along with former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Harry MacDougald, a former member of the Board of Registration and Elections in Fulton County, Georgia. When I was a resident of Georgia, I served for five years on the same board, supervising elections in the state’s largest county.

If the Post’s two bylined reporters had bothered to read the written comments Cuccinelli and I submitted—or done some basic research—they would have quickly learned the facts. Under current Georgia law—§ 21-2-493 (b)—county election boards are required to reconcile the number of votes cast by registered voters with the number of  ballots counted and tabulated by election officials.

In other words, Georgia requires its county election boards to make sure that if 1,000 voters check in to vote at a polling place, 1,000 votes were cast and counted.  If the numbers don’t match—if for example, 1,000 voters checked in but only 900 votes were counted—under the statute that is “deemed a discrepancy and palpable error.” 

That “palpable error” must be “investigated” by election officials. Moreover, Georgia law provides that no votes from that specific polling place “shall be recorded” until the investigation has determined the source of the error and corrected it.

So what happens if election officials can’t determine the reason for the “discrepancy and palpable error” after they carry out the required investigation? 

Paragraph (i) of the statute provides that election officials “shall compute and certify the votes justly, regardless of any fraudulent or erroneous returns” (emphasis added). Thus, election officials must do their best even under those circumstances to “justly” determine how many ballots should be counted prior to certifying the election.

It turns out that in Georgia’s counties, election officials are only haphazardly complying with the requirement. That’s why Fulton County Commissioner Bridget Thorne proposed a rule that simply sets out procedures for election boards to follow when implementing this statutory requirement, which the sworn members of these boards have a fiduciary and legal duty to carry out.

I was astonished by the liberal opposition to this rule at the Georgia State Election Board’s hearing. The essence of opponents’ position was that election officials should never engage in the type of reconciliation that, as I said in my written testimony, is standard in “every type of retail and commercial establishment, such as banks, restaurants, and other stores” when they “reconcile their receipts and cash/credit.”

That routine practice in the private sector “is no different than reconciling the number of voters with the vote cast,” I told the State Election Board.

As Thorne rightly pointed out when she submitted the rule, it simply would “operationalize an existing statutory requirement to allow counties to uniformly conduct the minimum level of review as described in the law.”

The new rule states specifically that if an error or discrepancy “cannot be properly corrected” after the required investigation, election officials will “determine a method to compute the votes justly as required” by the applicable statute. The “correct or corrected returns shall be recorded” and the “consolidated returns shall then be certified” by the date required under Georgia law.

There is nothing “illegal” about this rule, as critics have falsely claimed. It also would not delay certification, as critics claim and as The Washington Post reported.

But why bother reading a short statute when you can just parrot the Left’s talking points?

Contrary to headlines in the Post and elsewhere saying that Georgia’s new rule raises “fears of election interference,” the rule will help ensure that the ballot of every registered, eligible voter is counted and not voided by errors, mistakes, omissions, or outright fraud.

In other words, the rule will help prevent eligible, registered voters from effectively being disenfranchised.

In contrast to the deceitful claim that it will be used for “thwarting a popular result,” election officials will use it to guarantee that the “popular result” is, in fact, the declared result of the election.

Kudos to the majority of the Georgia State Board of Elections for standing up for election integrity and for ensuring that state and local election officials actually comply with the law.