{"id":258661,"date":"2021-05-25T20:40:22","date_gmt":"2021-05-25T17:40:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/push-to-review-2020-ballots-spreads\/"},"modified":"2021-05-25T20:40:22","modified_gmt":"2021-05-25T17:40:22","slug":"push-to-review-2020-ballots-spreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/push-to-review-2020-ballots-spreads\/","title":{"rendered":"#Push to review 2020 ballots spreads"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Push to review 2020 ballots spreads<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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ATLANTA \u2014 Six months after\u00a0Donald Trump\u2019s loss<\/a>, conspiracy theorists and Trump backers are continuing their push for repeated examinations of ballots and finding limited successes.<\/p>\n

A Georgia judge last week awarded a group the chance to review mail ballots in a large Georgia county that includes Atlanta. Officials in a rural Michigan county have expressed interest in a review of their voting machines. A similar debate has caused sharp divisions in a New Hampshire town. In some cases, the efforts have been inspired by an audit of the votes in Arizona\u2019s Maricopa County, an elaborate exercise engineered by the GOP-led state Senate.<\/p>\n

The efforts are unlikely to yield any new revelations about President Joe Biden\u2019s victory in the 2020 election. The votes have been counted \u2014 and often recounted \u2014 and certified by local officials. Still, the lingering debate and legal wrangling have propelled suspicions and advanced\u00a0debunked theories<\/a>. And their sometimes misleading conclusions have been amplified by Trump, whose\u00a0false allegations of election fraud<\/a>\u00a0sparked the push.<\/p>\n

The profusion of audits alarms election experts, who note that\u00a0the Arizona audit<\/a>\u00a0has set a troubling new precedent of third-party, partisan review of the ballots, long after elections are over.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is bad enough to see it happ<\/a>en once,\u201d said Eddie Perez, an expert on voting systems at the OSET Institute, said of Arizona, but seeing it elsewhere in the country is \u201cdangerous for democracy.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The audits are serving a clear political purpose in firing up the Republican Party\u2019s base. At a rally outside Phoenix last week featuring GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, references to the Arizona audit drew much more enthusiastic applause than even immigration, normally the top hot-button issue on the right in the border state.<\/p>\n

In a statement Monday night, Trump criticized Republican Party leaders for not doing more about \u201cwhat went on\u201d in November. He cited the ballot reviews underway and promised \u201cmore to follow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Maricopa
Maricopa County ballots are examined and recounted by contractors working for Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.<\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Arizona audit has been cited as a template for the others, although each is distinct. In Arizona, the Republican-controlled state Senate\u00a0subpoenaed more than 2 million ballots\u00a0<\/a>and voting machines from Arizona\u2019s most populous county, which includes Phoenix, and gave control of the review to a small cybersecurity firm whose founder, Doug Logan, had tweeted pro-Trump election conspiracies.<\/p>\n

Logan has ties to the Michigan effort as well. In April, Logan and another cybersecurity expert involved in the Arizona audit, Ben Cotton, filed separate expert witness reports alleging security problems in voting machines in a lawsuit filed in rural Antrim County, Michigan, that sought to compel a statewide election audit there. That case was dismissed by a judge last week \u2014 one of more than 60 court losses for pro-Trump groups in\u00a0lawsuits challenging the 2020 election<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But Logan\u2019s and Cotton\u2019s claims were used by a Michigan attorney to bolster the case for a \u201cforensic audit\u201d of voting machines in rural Cheboygan County, in northern Michigan, earlier this month.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t have your vote counted as it was intended to count, we don\u2019t have a free country,\u201d attorney Stefanie Lambert, who had filed an appeal of the dismissal of a separate, unsuccessful lawsuit challenging Trump\u2019s loss in Michigan, told the Cheboygan County elections committee. She offered to provide auditors free of charge.<\/p>\n

Arizona has also inspired calls by pro-Trump groups to push for their own pick to take over a\u00a0post-election audit of a statehouse race in Windham, New Hampshire<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 home of former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.<\/p>\n

But the biggest new entry into the audit field is in Georgia\u2019s Fulton County, where a judge on Friday ruled that plaintiffs could inspect 147,000 mail ballots as part of their lawsuit alleging fraud in the most populous county in the state.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit was spearheaded by Garland Favorito, a longtime skeptic of Georgia\u2019s voting systems who has embraced conspiracy theories about 9\/11, Clinton-era scandal and Supreme Court justices. Favorito says he voted for Don Blankenship, the U.S. Constitution Party candidate, last year.<\/p>\n

\"
The Arizona audit has been cited as a template for the others, concerning experts. <\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cOur ultimate objective is the truth. What is the truth of this election?\u201d Favorito said in an interview. \u201cDon\u2019t tell us what the results are and then hide it from us and pretend we have to accept whatever you tell us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fulton County Chairman Robb Pitts said in a statement: \u201cIt is outrageous that Fulton County continues to be a target of those who cannot accept the results from last year\u2019s election. The votes have been counted multiple times, including a hand recount, and no evidence of fraud has been found.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both sides are scheduled to meet Friday to discuss how to review the mail ballots. Favorito said Jovan Pulitzer, an inventor and key figure in the pro-Trump movement to overturn the 2020 election, may be one of the people he consults for the ballot examination.<\/p>\n

Pulitzer had pushed unsuccessfully for a statewide audit of Georgia\u2019s election results, even after two recounts by the Republican secretary of state confirmed that Biden won the state. That finding\u00a0infuriated Trump<\/a>, who has slammed both Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and the state\u2019s Republican governor, Brian Kemp.<\/p>\n

Former state Rep. Vernon Jones, a Trump backer who is challenging Kemp in the GOP primary, held a news<\/a> conference outside the state Capitol last week to hammer the governor for not commissioning a statewide audit. \u201cThere\u2019s a dead cat on the end of this line, and we just want to find out what it is, that\u2019s all,\u201d Jones said. \u201cPeople have a right to know. What are you hiding?\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the sort of sentiment that alarms Tammy Patrick, who used to oversee post-election audits in Maricopa County. Those examinations are essential, she argued, but must be done by election experts, not ideologically interested novices, and should be completed soon after voting.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a healthy democracy, you have a an auditing process, you have legal recourse, and when that period is over, all the candidates who have won take over and you move on,\u201d said Patrick, an adviser at The Democracy Fund, adding that the people calling for audits clearly want only one result.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are not going to be satisfied,\u201d Patrick said. \u201cThis is just going to play out in perpetuity.\u201d\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Push to review 2020 ballots spreads” ATLANTA \u2014 Six months after\u00a0Donald Trump\u2019s loss, conspiracy theorists and Trump backers are continuing their push for repeated examinations of ballots and finding limited successes. A Georgia judge last week awarded a group the chance to review mail ballots in a large Georgia county that includes Atlanta. Officials in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":258662,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/05\/Arizona-3.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[69441,107165,28794,4941,991,70473],"class_list":["post-258661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-2020-election","tag-5-25-21","tag-arizona","tag-donald-trump","tag-joe-biden","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}