Since Dems just won’t let the false narrative die that Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams had her election stolen in 2018, here’s Mark Hemingway with a thorough dismantling of the “conspiratorial nonsense.”
THREAD ==>
1/ So it's now a Democratic talking point that Stacey Abrams unfairly lost the GA governor's election. The claim is conspiratorial nonsense no respectable publication should promulgate and I'll explain why, but here's the NYT promoting it again today:…
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) August 13, 2019
2/ …https://t.co/7XB2EIRWTF Abrams' claim rests largely on a specific assertion. In her "non-concession" speech last fall, Abrams noted that her opponent now-Gov. Brian Kemp, because during his tenure as secretary of state, she observed, “more than a million…
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) August 13, 2019
3/ …citizens found their names stripped from the rolls.” That sounds like a big deal, and actually, the number Kemp kicked off the rolls is 1.4 million. However, it doesn't mean much of anything if you know anything about voter registrations. Federal law requires…
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) August 13, 2019
4/ …states to keep voter registration records current to avoid fraud. Georgia is a state of 10 million people. Census data tells us 11 percent of Americans move every year. Kemp removed 1.4 million people over a span of 8 years while overall voter registrations…
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) August 13, 2019
5/ …increased. There's nothing sinister about what Kemp did as SoS — it's what he's supposed to do. In fact, the latest data show that 17 counties in Georgia have more voter registrations on file than citizens of voting age that live there. If anything, Kemp…
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) August 13, 2019
Recommended
6/ …didn't kick *enough* people off the rolls. (The federally mandated process for removing people off the voter rolls is also quite involved.) And last year, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution tried to contact 50 randomly chosen names purged from Georgia’s voter…
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) August 13, 2019
7/ …rolls – “Twenty clearly would be ineligible to vote in Georgia: 17 moved out of state, two were convicted of felonies and one had died. Most of the rest left a trail of address changes and disconnected telephone numbers,” the paper reported. So I ask how is it…
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) August 13, 2019
8/ …that publications such as the Times keep allowing this claim to be made in their pages? I find it really interesting that almost no national outlet has done any critical reporting here, given how much chin-stroking the media have done about wild claims that…
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) August 13, 2019
9/ …threaten to undermine faith in the democratic process. (Read my own reporting on this here, the upshot is the whole country has a big problem with cleaning up inaccurate voter rolls: https://t.co/paYYu7IkSo) At a minimum, they are irresponsible here and at…
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) August 13, 2019
And, finally, where are the fact-checkers on all of this?
10/ …worst they're stoking resentment that feeds their preferred political narratives at a time when they are otherwise thundering about "fake news" and partisan information bubbles. Also, do note that not a single fact-checker has gone near Abrams' claims. FIN.
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) August 13, 2019
Crickets.
***
Related:
Seth Moulton appears to blame gerrymandering for Stacey Abrams' loss in Georgia https://t.co/tqbUysvGeH
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) June 27, 2019
Ratio alert! Politico stumbles over Hillary Clinton & Stacey Abrams in rush to push a 2020 hypothetical about Trump https://t.co/Zlgwol6g31
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) June 21, 2019