Here Are the Threats Terrorizing Election Workers

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Incendiary rhetoric by President Trump and his followers is fueling a wave of threats against election workers. Some have received death threats and images of nooses and been told “You’re a traitor.”

WASHINGTON — In his urgent demand on Monday that President Trump condemn his angry supporters who are threatening workers and officials overseeing the 2020 vote, a Georgia elections official focused on an animated image of a hanging noose that had been sent to a young voting-machine technician.

“It’s just wrong,” the official, Gabriel Sterling, a Republican, said at a news conference. “I can’t begin to explain the level of anger I have over this.”

But the technician in Georgia is not alone. Far from it. Continue reading.

Fox News reporter expertly debunks Rudy Giuliani’s nonsensical election claims: ‘Simply not true’

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On Thursday, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, held a press conference to discuss the Trump campaign’s legal battle against the 2020 presidential election results. Giuliani has claimed that Trump, not President-elect Joe Biden, is the real winner and that his client was the victim of widespread voter fraud. But when Fox News correspondent Kristin Fisher reported on the press conference, she slammed Giuliani as being “light on facts.”

Fisher, speaking from the White House, told her colleague Dana Perino: “That was certainly a colorful news conference from Rudy Giuliani, but it was light on facts. So much of what he said was simply not true or has already been thrown out in court.”

The Fox anchor added that Giuliani opened the press conference by making a “really bold and baseless claim” and saying that “a lot of this alleged nationwide voter fraud he’s referring to all came from one centralized place.” Continue reading.

Biden says it’s a good thing his ‘colleague’ Kamala Harris is still on the Senate Intelligence Committee

But warns ‘more people may die’ if Trump administration doesn’t coordinate on vaccine

President-elect Joe Biden said Monday that perhaps it was less of a concern that he was not getting top secret intelligence as part of the stalled presidential transition because his vice president-elect is still on the Intelligence Committee.

“The good news here is my colleague is still on the Intelligence Committee, so she gets the intelligence briefings I don’t any more,” Biden said in Wilmington, Del., after a meeting with business executives and labor leaders focused on the economy and the COVID-19 pandemic response. “I am hopeful that the president will be mildly more enlightened before we get to January 20.”

Biden’s penchant for Senate-speak aside, his remarks point to the curious reality of the moment: Vice president-elect Kamala Harris may know more about emerging threats to America than the next commander-in-chief. Continue reading.

Karl Rove gives Trump the bitter truth: You ‘certainly’ lost

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President Donald Trump is still refusing to concede to President-elect Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, and many of his sycophants have been joining him in making baseless claims that the election was stolen from him because of rampant voter fraud — never mind the fact that the New York Times contacted election officials in all 50 states and found no evidence of the type of widespread fraud that Trump is alleging. But veteran Republican strategist Karl Rove gives Trump and his supporters a dose of reality in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on November 11, stressing that Biden will become president whether Trump’s allies like it or not.

Rove notes that although the 2020 election was not the across-the-board blue tsunami that some pundits were predicting, one major Democratic victory was undeniable: Biden won.

He tried to couch the point in a an argument about Democrats underperforming, but the message was clear. Continue reading.

International Observers Invited By Trump Saw No Evidence Of Election Fraud

President Donald Trump resumed his usual claims of pending victory Tuesday in an election that has been called for his opponent, Joe Biden, since Saturday. “WE WILL WIN!” the soon-exiting president tweeted optimistically and with little regard for reality. Biden has earned 290 electoral votes to Trump’s 214 and secured nearly 77 million votes in total to Trump’s 72 million, according tothe Associated Press.

And to make matters worse for the persistent yet sore loser, the same international observers his administration invited to scope out alleged systematic election fraud found no such sign of deceit, according to a preliminary report The Wall Street Journal obtained. That means no such glimmer of hope for Trump.

The Organization of American States sent a team of 28 experts from 13 countries to polling places in Georgia, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, and the District of Columbia on Election Day to monitor the polls from opening to close. The team also visited centers used to tally the results, authors of the report stated. Continue reading.

Most Republicans avoid challenging Trump on election

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Republicans are largely avoiding any challenges of President Trump over his refusal to concede the election to Democrat Joe Biden.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) signaled the game plan during a Monday address on the Senate floor while giving his members cover.

McConnell’s remarks were disparaging of Democrats and the media, who have projected Biden as the winner but have no constitutional role in the process, the Kentucky Republican noted. McConnell, who is poised to be his party’s top official in Washington when Biden takes office, also said Trump was well within his rights of challenging the close results and asking for recounts. Continue reading.

Intel agencies still see no evidence of foreign attack on mail ballots

“We have nothing new to add to our previous statements,” FBI spokesperson Carol Cratty said.

Donald Trump’s all-caps warning in June — that foreign countries would surely print “millions of mail-in ballots” to upend the U.S. election — appears to have amounted to nothing.

Trump made the claim all summer and fall, but he hasn’t raised the matter in recent days, even as he fights for his political life. And intelligence officials, who for months described no evidence that such a plot was afoot, reaffirmed Friday that their earlier judgment stands.

“Our assessments have not changed,” said Dean Boyd, a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Continue reading.

5 types of misinformation to watch out for while ballots are being counted – and after

With no clear winner yet in the presidential election, there’s an opportunity for partisan activists, conspiracy theorists and others to exploit public uncertainty and anxiety to attempt to delegitimize the election results.

A growing number of narratives alleging electoral wrongdoing have been spreading on social media, shared through millions of tweets, Facebook posts and TikTok videos, often using hashtags like #riggedelection and #StopTheSteal. These types of narratives rely on “evidence” of ballots that are lost or found after the election, dubious statistics, misleading videos and allegations of foreign interference. People seeking to delegitimize election results are weaving real-world events, such as isolated confrontations with poll workers or broken voting machines, into claims of broader malfeasance by nefarious partisans on one side or the other.

As members of the Election Integrity Partnership and researchers who study online misinformation and disinformation, we have been monitoring social media. We are seeing five types of false and misleading narratives that people are spreading and are likely to spread online, wittingly or not. We urge people to be alert for – and to avoid spreading – the following types of misinformation, which erode trust in the electoral process and in one another. Continue reading.

Top election official immediately debunks Trump’s attacks on counting ballots

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Countering President Donald Trump’s false suggestion Tuesday that tallying votes after Election Day is unlawful, a top official at the U.S. Federal Election Commission said that in fact “counting ballots—all of ’em—is the appropriate, proper, and very legal way to determine who won.”

“An election is not a reality show with a big reveal at the end,” Ellen Weintraub, an election attorney and a Democratic commissioner at the FEC, tweeted in response to Trump’s insistence that a winner be officially declared on the night of November 3.

“All we get on Election Night are projections from TV networks,” Weintraub noted. “We never have official results on Election Night.” Continue reading.

Federal judge in Pennsylvania dismisses Trump campaign lawsuit on voting, calling fraud claims ‘speculative’

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A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania seeking to block the use of drop boxes as receptacles for mail ballots, require ballot signatures to match voter registration records and allow nonresident poll watchers at polling places, ruling that the president’s claims of potential fraud were “speculative.”

In a sharply worded opinion issued Saturday morning, U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan of the Western District of Pennsylvania ruled that the Trump campaign has no standing because of the lack of evidence of actual fraud.

“While Plaintiffs may not need to prove actual voter fraud, they must at least prove that such fraud is ‘certainly impending,’ ” Ranjan wrote. “They haven’t met that burden. At most, they have pieced together a sequence of uncertain assumptions.” Continue reading.