Nothing will stop Georgia's election deniers

Lots of info in today’s special Saturday edition of American Doom about how election deniers in Georgia continue to screw with elections here. It’s going to be a mess next year thanks to their success in convincing state lawmakers that they’re serious people (they are not). Anyway, lots of messes these days. You won’t find this information elsewhere — in Georgia or anywhere for that matter. So if you appreciate my work, please consider a paid subscription to support it. A free press ain’t for free! - jg

I spent the better part of Thursday watching a meeting of a committee of Georgia state legislators discussing elections. The committee has hosted meetings around the state on various aspects of election administration, and Thursday’s was focused on Georgia’s membership in ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center.

There has been a lot of right-wing noise about ERIC since 2020 and I’m not going to rehash all that — it’s mostly reactionary nonsense that came as a result of Donald Trump losing that year and many Republican states being very sour about it.

Suffice to say that Thursday’s hearing was another example of what has become an unsettling reality in this country: conspiracists, cranks, and plain incompetents re granted the same deference and space as competent professionals who have spent years and decades gaining the respect of peers in their areas of expertise.

This phenomenon has been almost entirely facilitated by Republicans, from Trump on down to people like Georgia Rep. Martin Momtahan, who you’ll meet in a moment. The GOP has been taken over by a class of politicians with great disdain for the level of professionalization on display at places like ERIC, or Harvard University, or the FBI — unless the person is someone like Trump who is very good at making money.

Of the many shameless grifters working to climb their way up the very crowded and cutthroat ladder of modern Republican politics, election deniers are the largest group and often the most shameless — and bizarre. Their lack of shame is rooted in the fact that they never have to actually do anything. Like everyone in the highest echelons of the Trump administrations, all they have to do is go around breaking what other people have built.

Election deniers say our election systems are rife with fraud. Not only can they never actually prove it — instead, they have a lot of conjecture they say should lead to investigations by, you know, actual authorities — but they have no real way of replacing this broken system. Well, that’s not entirely true. They do have a way, but it’s absurd. I’ll get to that in a second as well.

Republicans like Momtahan want to point to things like the fact that ERIC has an address listed in Washington DC but no office there. (This, to Momtahan and others, is apparently evidence of some unexplained wickedness on the part of ERIC. For security reasons, ERIC’s director, Shane Hamlin, said on Thursday that he would not divulge the exact location of the organization’s data center, but said it was located somewhere in the Midwest.) Momtahan and Republicans want to point to “their constituents” who have questioned ERIC — nevermind that their constituents have no background in election administration and are getting their information from some of the election denial grifters who were invited to speak at today’s hearing.

Republicans in Georgia and elsewhere want to point to the men and women of the election denial movement as if they were reasonable, competent, serious people. They simply are not. But that’s the situation across our society, where unserious flamethrowers now have great power because many of our fellow Americans think that people like Trump and Momtahan are kind of cool. They tell it like it is. They’re just like them, you see — not some fancy bought-and-paid for college professor with a haughty title.

Momtahan spent today’s hearing doing his folksy, I’m a small businessman bit, something that is awfully tiring when you’ve been around long enough to realize this isn’t about small-town common sense, but about the deep insecurities of people like Momtahan who want to be liked and respected for their intelligence, but just never quite figured out how to achieve that.

I’ve watched countless hours of these types of meetings over the last four years and am always struck by the obvious and profound un-seriousness of both government officials and members of the election denial movement. But there really is something about watching these folks discuss things that are so clearly out of their depth that words just can’t do justice for, so I’ve included a few clips of some of the exchanges that caught my attention.

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Momtahan went on to grill Harris over ERIC’s security protocols, consistently conflating access to voter data via the Internet with susceptibility to hacking — despite Harris repeatedly explaining that ERIC staff only access voter data after going through several digital security checkpoints. Just really tough stuff to watch.

I’m sorry that you had to watch all of that but it’s important so that you can understand what we’re working with here as lawmakers in Georgia and elsewhere operate under the belief that anything tied to the Internet means that system can be hacked by Antifa, or whatever.

This entire exchange could be summed up by simply saying that Momtahan does not understand what a VPN is. I will also note that when Momtahan mentions digital security for his own small business, he is talking about the driver’s education company he runs — not a multi-state data-gathering operation like ERIC dealing with tens of millions of voters and untold billions of data points. Bit of a difference there.

There was plenty of other ignorance-based questioning of people like Blake Evans, Georgia’s elections director, but I want to skip ahead to the deniers who spoke at Thursday’s hearing. First up was Mark Davis, an obscure political consultant who appears to run a company that deals with campaign marketing. Last year, Davis was floated by the State Election Board’s Dr. Janice Johnston — herself an election denier — to be on a “monitoring team” for Fulton County, ground zero for Georgia election conspiracies.

Here, Davis has an exchange with Georgia Rep. Saira Draper, a Democrat. Draper points out that Davis’ research has led him to advocate for investigating virtually every single person in the state of Georgia who changes their address in an election year. Like many of the tortured theories of the election denial movement, Davis’ work does not show any purposeful acts of voter fraud — like double-voting or false registrations in order to illegally vote for one candidate or party over another — but routine technical errors, like voters forgetting to update their addresses.

Davis’ research is based on National Change of Address data, which you’ll hear a lot about if you spend as much time in election denial circles as I do.

Just to clarify: poor people move a lot. People in the military move a lot. Young people move a lot. People with aging parents might move a lot. What Davis is saying is that all of these changes of addresses are probable cause to investigate hundreds of thousands of Georgians for voter fraud under the belief — because election denialism is akin to religious belief systems — that something very bad is going on with all of this.

Next up was Garland Favorito, who if you are not familiar with, you should consider yourself fairly lucky. Favorito is perhaps the state’s most prominent election denier — and certainly one of its most colorful. Like Davis, Favorito has many theories about widespread election fraud in Georgia, but can never seem to boil them down into a succinct explanation. He’s one of those guys who insists that you listen to him for as long as he is able to speak in order for you to understand that he is correct.

But even if you give Favorito all the time in the world, most reasonable people will come away more confused about who is carrying out voter fraud in Georgia and how, let alone why. Favorito’s theories are an amalgamation of disparate bits and pieces of information, lore, and conjecture that, together, add up to his conclusion that the only way to ensure completely secure elections is to have him and all of his people looking over the shoulder of every single poll worker in the state as they hand count paper ballots. (Voting only on paper ballots and having them hand-counted by poll workers is the replacement election system proposed by Favorito and others. Trump has glommed on to this, recently issuing executive orders demanding hand-counted paper ballots.)

Draper pointed out that, for all Favorito’s advocacy for what he calls “election integrity,” he has no apparent interest in the actual breach of election equipment in Coffee County in 2020. That breach was carried out by pro-Trump election officials who gave access to their election equipment to associates of Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell. Those associates — including the Atlanta law firm who I busted for their role in the illegal breach — then turned around and published the sensitive information they’d obtained on the Internet.

Some in Georgia maintain that that information would allow anyone who accesses it to get inside every voting machine in the state. To reiterate: the most serious breach of election equipment in recent Georgia history — the very thing that Favorito, Davis, and many others are so intent on stopping — was carried out by Trump-supporting Republicans.

Favorito and his fellow election deniers have a lot of theories about election fraud in Georgia. They have successfully lobbied the State Election Board — run by a majority of Trump supporters — to pass scores of rules that will affect millions of Georgia voters. They have also called for the board and other entities to investigate supposed fraud in Fulton County.

Their claims center around about 3,600 ballots that were double-counted in the county in 2020, which one of the many recounts and audits from that year found was the result of technical errors and had no effect on the outcome of the election. Now, they’re calling for 148,000 ballot envelopes from Fulton County in order to prove their fraud claims.

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I watched the Cubs vs. Padres Thursday night and saw a trio of challenges to rulings on the field. Two were overturned and one was sustained, if memory serves me. Both teams clearly thought they were right when they challenged the rulings, but they accepted the results — even when they didn’t go their way — and played on. What Favorito and others are saying is that they simply won’t accept the results unless their team wins. Not only do they truly believe that there is no way that a Republican can lose an election, but they want to be inside the replay booth when the call on the field is reviewed.

They simply do not trust the professionals counting the votes to make the right call, and they never will. No amount of ballots handed over from Fulton County, or access as poll watchers to stand over the shoulders of poll workers, or even hand-counted paper ballots or any of the many other demands they routinely make will ever be enough. That’s why none of this is going away any time soon, and will probably get worse before it gets better.

With Trump in the White House and enablers leading every federal agency, the situation has become even worse. The Justice Department has joined people like Favorito in investigating bogus fraud claims, setting up even more distrust in elections as we head into next year’s mid-terms. Trump and Republicans will claim fraud and maybe even try to contest the results, leading to a standoff in the House of Representatives that will mirror what happened on January 6. And as long as no reasonable Republicans stand up to this madness, nothing will stop it from consuming much in its path.

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