LOVE AND MAWWIAGE! That is what brings us here today. More or less.
In fact, what brings us here today is Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s herculean efforts to drag his ratfucking carcass across the gubernatorial finish line after disenfranchising a million of his constituents who wanted to elect Stacey Abrams. Like Prince Humperdinck shouting, “Man and Wife! Say Man and Wife!” Kemp insists that the vote tally MUST be certified tomorrow, whether the counting is finished or not. And if not, well, so much the better.
The part of Westley will be played today by Common Cause Georgia — which makes perfect sense if you are a Millennial or Gen X-er. (And if not, apologies!) On November 5, Common Cause made a novel claim against the state of Georgia. They weren’t saying that Kemp was deliberately ratfucking the voter data base
himself. But they did argue that the insecurity of voter information guarded by the secretary of state violated voters’ due process rights because anyone could break in and change the data.
For example, on information and belief, at least as of November 4, 2018, an individual can access My Voter Page and click on a link to get to an insecure page, which allows the individual to view any file on the My Voter Page server simply by typing the file name into the web browser. An individual can then access any document, configuration files for the network, or cryptographic keys. An attacker can also take advantage of this vulnerability and download every Georgia voter’s personally identifiable information and change or cancel the voter registrations and data housed on the system. It is believed that an attacker could potentially automate this process to change the registration of multiple voters at once.
Hey, remember two weeks ago when Democrats pointed this vulnerability out to Kemp and he accused them of hacking the SoS database?
Common Cause argued that, If someone were deliberately corrupting voter information or purging voters from the rolls, it would likely show up as an increase in votes cast by provisional ballot on election day over prior years. So they requested information on all provisional and rejected mail-in ballots for the 2018 election.
As it turns out, there was a statistically significant increase in provisional votes cast this year over prior elections as voters who thought they were registered were forced to cast second class ballots.
But Brian Kemp has a very good explanation for that. And it is …
Just kidding. Faced with evidence of several longtime voters whose registrations were mysteriously disappeared from the Georgia database, Brian Kemp’s explanation is WE HAVE TO QUIT COUNTING VOTES NOW, EVEN IF THEY’RE NOT ALL COUNTED! Without knowing exactly how many provisional ballots are outstanding, he’s sure there can’t possibly be enough to push him below the 50 percent threshold that would trigger an automatic runoff in the governor’s race. Which may or may not be true for the governor’s race, but is certainly false for several other races where the number of outstanding provisional ballots could easily trigger or cancel a runoff election.
Besides which, the deadline for counties to submit their tallies to the SoS is tomorrow. Kemp’s deadline to certify the total isn’t until the 20th — so when he says he’s required by law to SAY MAN AND WIFE tomorrow, he is lying.
So Judge Amy Totenberg of the Northern District of Georgia has ordered Kemp to hold off on certifying the election results until Friday at the earliest. And meanwhile, he’s going to hand all the info on provisional ballots over to Common Cause for a good, hard examination.
And lookie here! It’s another judge kicking Brian Kemp in the jimmies. Judge Leigh Martin May has ordered Gwinnett County to stop rejecting absentee ballots because voters forget to write their birth year on the envelope. Because failure to tick a box isn’t sufficient grounds for disenfranchisement — and other counties don’t disqualify voters for failure to write their birthdate on the envelope. Only a handful of voters will be impacted, but Democratic congressional candidate Carolyn Bourdeaux trails by only about 900 votes there, so counting rejected absentees and provisionals might change the outcome. Remember, Gwinnett County, where a quarter of residents are POC, rejects one in ten absentee ballots. By sheer coincidence.
In sum, Brian Kemp tried every damn thing he could think of to steal this election by keeping Democrats away from the voting booths. And it might work this time. BUT IT MIGHT NOT. And we’re not going down without a fight.
Source: http://wonkette.com
