By Laura Armstrong Monica
Hope everyone enjoyed Halloween and the Georgia-Florida game, because while you were all busy living your lives the local election universe went to heck in a hand-basket.
At this writing, I’m sacrificing the preparation of tailgate food – rad Buffalo chicken dip and Kings Hawaiian ham-sammys, to follow the convoluted developments almost real-time on multiple platforms, and Florida is leading the ‘Dawgs 7-3 down in Jacksonville.
“Hey honey, forget the football game! If you REALLY want to see some goalposts moving, get over here and look at X!!! And YouTube. And look at these news releases from multiple county offices. How come they take almost a year to decide on a property tax appeal, but it takes them just a few hours to mutilate state election law, even get taken to court and come out the other end with completely new rules for the election barely 72 hours from Game Day?!”
How many Georgia counties and mystery JUDGES are changing or ignoring election law as I type? There’s no telling. Cobb, Fulton, Forsyth and Gwinnett, all reportedly with multiple irregularities. Don’t sip that weekend cocktail, or sneeze, or you might miss something.
According to multiple sources, these metro counties are spontaneously “observing special weekend operations” — taking (and maybe counting? Shredding? Adding to?) ballots (absentee? Early voting? Who knows?) this weekend and not letting poll watchers (republicans) in.
Kathryn Glenn, registration manager at the Department of Elections in Fulton, wrote today, Nov. 2, at 9:34 a.m. in an email: “Good Morning Team! There are NO WATCHERS approved for ballot drop off! Do not let them in the building. If they want to observe from the parking lot you can’t stop that but they are not allowed to sit in the building. Have your security detail enforce it!!! #iLoveMyTeam!” ❤️❤️,
🤮 🤮 How smug and totalitarian she sounds, heart heart, #hashtag isn’t she special? Earning the public trust just like bureaucrats everywhere… Was there a special school somewhere I missed that trained these government workers in obfuscating truth and the American way? And then placing them in key jobs enabling them to take over the country?
Closer to home, mere MOMENTS after it was revealed Cobb got a “last minute surge” in absentee requests – surprise, really? — the ACLU came out from under their rock along with the Southern Poverty Law Center and sued Cobb for failure to process absentee ballot requests fast enough. The suit alleged Elections Director Tate Fall’s team, bless their hearts, were behind the state average processing rate by 25 percentage points. Wow, call out the whaambulance ACLU! Does anyone else think that might’ve been an excuse to get stuff changed?
Word is that some GOPers close to the action have been sounding various alarms for weeks. Does politics truly make strange bedfellows or is something else occurring here?
Full disclosure: I’m one of those conspiracy enthusiasts. That’s someone who knows there are conspiracies and sees them all the time.
In any case, the leftist orgs somehow wrangled a court date within HOURS, even with Clerk Connie Taylor’s mess still fermenting, and they were before the bench on Friday, getting a judge to approve an extension of a kind for these 3,000 last minute ballots. These, it was ruled, will be allowed to count if people return them postmarked by Nov. 5 and they’ll be accepted by Miss Tate’s election staff until the 8th. Not to question a judge, but did the thought cross his/her mind that someone or multiple people might be Laying the Groundwork for post-election hanky panky, a very effective way to add votes?
Watch the number of these particular ballots, and don’t let them tell you there are more than 3,000 in this batch. Things like this are why we say make it too big to rig.
But what’s the explanation for all this? Miss Tate and staff, bless their hearts again, just did the best they could with the broken equipment needed to process these last minute ballots, which they finally got fixed but…. That doesn’t even make sense because the news release about the slow ballot counting also blames a non-staff, independent VENDOR under contract it would seem, to do this job. So who didn’t finish their job? Did they really leave ballot requests on the table, putting their contract at risk? Seems unlikely. Did the ballot requests just come TOO LATE? More likely, imo.
Meanwhile, good people want to know: Should we blame the in-house equipment fail or the contracted vendor fail?
And other questions: Who’s that vendor? How much are we paying them for their failure? Who will be held accountable? Who will pay the over night shipping fees and court costs… did the Cobb Elections Board ever find that guy who yelled “heil Hitler” at their meeting? Maybe it was all HIS fault.
Fourth Quarter UPDATE: Apparently the GOP made some small progress with getting observers inside this weekend, just barely. No details, just that tidbit. And game score now 34-20 Georgia!
But Governor Kemp must be at the game, because his last news release was all about hurricane relief. Normally governors would lead on something like this, but I guess only if they know which party they’re in. Ditto Raffensperger and what about Attorney General Chris Carr? Helloooo?
Somewhere, one has to hope, there are adults monitoring this situation. Because it’s almost impossible for the average person to follow, even with a dozen windows opened up and press releases from everyone. Yet again, blame that infamous rat-batard Cloward-Piven, overloading the system. The motto should be “Cheat everywhere so no one can prove it anywhere and no one can even keep up.”
Lord be with us this week and after.
P.S. I’ve NEVER ended a column with a prayer, but it seems quite appropriate tonight. Oh, and go you hairy Bulldawgs! And MAGA. Please.
Laura Monica is a 36-year resident of Cobb County and holds an ABJ from the Grady School of Journalism at UGA. She loves freedom and her family. Contact her here
