A never-ending investigation into the unbelievable

A trio of election deniers in Georgia represent the more sophisticated side of a movement based in purposeful ignorance.

Good afternoon from Edinburgh, where I can report that the onion gravy at the Abbotsford on Rose Street in New Town is some of the finest in the world, probably because it’s some of the oldest in the world. I can also report that efforts to remake Georgia and much of the United States in the image of election denialism continue unabated — efforts that will only increase as the foundation for ensuring a win by Donald Trump in November, regardless of the actual outcome of the election, is solidified nationwide.

Today, the Guardian has published a story of mine that details a part of those efforts. In Georgia, a trio of election deniers has engaged in a relentless campaign to harass, intimidate and pressure election officials into investigating bogus claims of widespread election fraud. While that tale is important, it’s part of a much larger and more troubling story of efforts nationwide not just to spread election lies, but to manipulate the levers of government to act in support of those lies.

In the case of the election deniers at the center of my story today, this was achieved by pressuring the Georgia State Election Board to investigate what essentially amounts to technical glitches and human errors in administering elections and counting votes. Nowhere in any of the hundreds of pages of emails and many complaints filed by the trio at the center of my story is any concrete evidence of a conspiracy to flip votes or engage in other voter fraud that could have cost Trump the 2020 election. In fact, by the very nature of how much time the men I discovered hounding election officials have spent investigating bogus claims of widespread voter fraud, they succeeded in showing that elections in Georgia are mostly safe and secure. Put simply: if they spent this much looking for a smoking gun and never found it, it’s a safe bet it doesn’t exist. 

Still, they press onward. That’s partly because this isn’t really about finding actual proof of election fraud; it’s about creating a lot of smoke and then saying there’s a fire, as Rachel Maddow so succinctly put it during our discussion last week. The motivation of the trio detailed in my story and of all election deniers is never the truth; instead, the motivation has been and will continue to be making other people believe that election fraud exists, regardless of what the facts actually say.

I know this because even when the trio’s claims were investigated, that wasn’t good enough because they investigator’s results didn’t match their deeply-held beliefs in a conspiracy of election fraud that simply doesn’t exist.

“I don't believe investigator Dewesse contacted this person and closed out the file in 48 hours,” wrote David Cross, the second vice chair of the Georgia state GOP and perhaps the state’s most prolific filer of complaints to the State Election Board. “Can you please ask him for a copy of his notes / working file?”

While Cross was serving as second vice-chair of a state Republican party that is engaged in a battle for its soul between an extremist, election-denier wing and the relatively more moderate Kemp/Raffensberger faction, the party’s first vice-chair was violating election law over and over again by voting in elections while on probation for a felony.