Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report reports on Georgia election fraud.
“This election was clearly stolen from the Georgia voters, in a
campaign of a thousand cuts and involving at least outgoing Secretary
Kemp. Undoubtedly, private profit is in there somewhere,” said Bruce
Dixon, cochair of the Georgia Green Party and managing editor of Black
Agenda Report. “Kemp acknowledges the inherent conflict of interest in
a person certifying their own election with his own resignation. It
was only after he had managed as Secretary of State his own election as
Governor that he took this step. How more clear can he make it that
his own integrity and the integrity of the election, the legitimacy of
its results were never a real concern for him.”
Over the past few years Brian Kemp has purged hundreds of thousands of
voters from the rolls. This cycle alone he closed over two hundred
polling places, mostly in precincts where republican candidates have
performed poorly. He has restricted early voting opportunities. Some
50,000 new voter registrations submitted to his office have simply
disappeared. A variety of tactics resulted in hundreds of thousands of
voters being obligated to use second class provisional ballots, which
state law requires be subsequently defended by having the voter show up
a second time to resolve questions related to their identity and
registration.
"We welcome the attention of the blue team to the critical issue of
voter suppression. We have much work to do if we want to operate our
elections with the integrity necessary that they can serve as a means
for naming a legitimate government with a popular mandate," said John
Fortuin, commenting on the pending litigation and the Democrat
Gubernatorial nominee's statements that she would not concede this
week's election. “We welcome Abrams' insistence on an accurate vote
count. We also urge her to stand firm against the pressures which will
be brought to bear as we call out the theft of this election.”
John Fortuin is a co-founder of Defenders of Democracy and a candidate
this year for the Georgia Assembly in Senate District #46 (Walton,
Oconee and Clarke Counties), a nominee of the Georgia Green Party. He
is a certified write-in candidate for the 2018 general election. His
status as a write-in candidate is due to a 75 year old voter
suppression scheme enacted in 1943 by Democrats elected by the
all-white primaries of the day. The initial intent of their rules was
to deny black veterans access to the ballot in Georgia’s General
Election. These rules continue to keep important voices, independent
of corporate wealth, off of the ballot in Georgia.
Previously, Democrat candidates have turned a blind eye to
opportunities to fight for the right of voters to have the intent
expressed on their ballots honored by the certified results of
elections; and in Georgia have actively opposed Green Party initiatives
to reform the ballot access barriers.
In 2004, in Ohio and New Mexico, witness reports gave rise to concerns
that the election had been subverted and that the results would not
represent voter intent, that the election results had been
compromised. Results that year showed irregularities that were not
credible, based on statistics and reports from voters and elections
observers. The Green Party's Cobb-LaMarche campaign launched recounts
in both states. The reports generated by the Green Party recount
effort led to an investigation by the minority caucus in House
Judiciary and became the basis for the first challenge to the seating
of an electoral college delegation in the history of the country. The
challenge was rejected and the Republican delegation was seated for
Ohio based on compromised results, changing the outcome of the
election. Ohio Green Party’s former nominee for Governor, journalist
and now attorney Bob Fritakas, continued the investigation, and the
evidence compiled by Greens led to the prosecution, conviction and
incarceration of multiple Ohio election officials, but not the
revisiting of the tainted election results in a closely divided state,
which changed the outcome of a national election.
Likewise in 2016, when Greens identified voter suppression issues in
Pennsylvania and two other states, Jill Stein, the party's Presidential
candidate for a second cycle, mobilized her campaign to raise and spend
millions of dollars to initiate recounts, which appeared likely to show
evidence of significant election fraud. The Clinton campaign sent an
observer, but otherwise stood by and watched judges appointed by
Democrat and Republican administrations shut down the effort, again
changing the outcome of the national election.
“Greens and Democrats may disagree on some points of public policy.
That does not mean we think it is OK when the will of Georgia voters is
subverted to deny their preferred candidate a place in a run-off, or
perhaps an outright majority. I urge that the Abrams campaign stand
firm; and break from her party’s pattern of conceding defeat in the
face of victory,” said Fortuin. A long time election integrity
advocate, Fortuin has just published a new report, "Brian Kemp: Like
his Democratic Predecessors, Suppressing Ballot Integrity and the
Legitimacy of Georgia's Elections".
Fortuin's report contextualizes the finding of Federal Judge Amy
Totenberg of Georgia's Northern District in her recent Order, that
"State election officials had buried their heads in the sand... [on
known computerized voting vulnerabilities]". The report documents the
revolving door relationships between state election officials and
richly rewarded private contractors doing business with the office of
the Secretary of State, to provide for the administration of public
elections.
"The Green Party has been raising the alarm on these critical election
integrity issues since at least 2003," said John Fortuin. That year
Party activists served in a leadership role with the Voter Choice
Coalition, a multi-partisan coalition originally organized to work for
reform to Georgia's ballot access barriers. Coalition participants
worked to require that the Diebold machines produce a voter verified
paper ballot, which computer scientists understood even then, as the
minimum standard for election integrity.
Greens have a long history of supporting voting integrity issues, and
welcome this focus on 'voter suppression' by a Democratic party
candidate. “But we must demand more,” said Dixon, state party chairman
and Cobb County resident. “Abrams must broaden her perspective on
voter suppression to embrace the need to replace faith-based
computerized voting with paper ballots, to enact automatic, permanent
voter registration, to provide for publicly funded election campaigns,
to end the abuse of the reapportionment process to deny voters
contested races among competing perspectives, to tear down the barriers
to ballot access used to deny voters an opportunity to vote for the
candidates of their choice, to end the exclusion of otherwise qualified
candidates from the public airwaves, news reports, polls and debates.
These mechanisms deny voters information about our options and are
fundamentally anti-democratic. The coming years will provide us an
opportunity to see if Abrams concerns for voter suppression are serious
or simply motivated by her own short term partisan interests. There is
plenty of this agenda she can contribute to.”
“Even with all the legitimate critiques of Stacey Abrams' track record
and her silence on crucial issues, there is something to be said about
her fight for a fair election in Georgia,” said Andrea Merida, a
cochair of the Green Party of the United States. “Gillum concedes
Florida, Clinton ignored evidence of flagrant 2016 violations in
battleground states, Gore abandoned the field in 2000. We do not
generally expect this from her Party, but Abrams is right to fight, not
just for herself, not just for Black women, but for all voters in
Georgia.”
References:
1-Arizona Central: Did Green Party Candidate Angela Green Spoil Race for Kyrsten Sinema?
2-Gary Swing on Election Reform
4-Afghanistan: An American Holocaust by Gary Swing
5-When Clinton Lied, Yugoslavia Died by Gary Swing
6-Gary Swing on Bernie Sanders
7-Gary Swing on the Green Party
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