Marjorie Taylor Greene is already lying about election fraud

Lies spreading faster than the truth in Georgia... MTG bastardizes a case of voter error to blame voting machines... And the ineligible voter problem Republicans don't actually want to solve.

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Before getting into news and thoughts on the last few weeks of this presidential campaign, I would like to take a moment to express my deepest condolences to the Gullah Geechee community on Sapelo Island. At least nine people died there on Saturday when a gangway to the main ferry dock collapsed. Sapelo is an incredibly special place and home to the last intact slave descendant community in the United States. On a personal note, it has been a refuge for myself and my wife as we’ve navigated the challenges of the last few years of our work and personal lives, and we are grateful that we’ve had the opportunity to get to know some of the descendant community there.

For the moment, I will leave it to other very capable reporters in the area like Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Benjamin Payne and the Current’s Mary Landers to relay the impact on Sapelo’s descendant community and any possible failures related to this truly unthinkable tragedy. I certainly have my thoughts as to the reasons why this occurred, but I will let future reporting bear out those facts.

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Now, onto the first big lie of the election in Georgia, brought to you courtesy of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. First, the truth: a voter in Whitfield County filled out her ballot on a voting machine only to realize her selections weren’t reflected on the paper copy of the ballot. Put another way: she screwed up her own vote. Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, a Republican, confirmed this yesterday, as did the Whitfield County election board in a statement over the weekend.

“Georgia law allows voters to spoil their printed ballot if they make the wrong selection on the ballot marking device,” the statement read. “If we had reason to suspect the machine was in error, we would have immediately taken the machine out of service. No machines have been taken out of service.”

So that’s what actually happened — a voter screwed up their ballot, asked for a new one, got it, and fixed her vote. This was the only such situation among 6,000 ballots cast since early voting began on Tuesday, Whitfield County said. 

Never one to let facts get in the way of a good story, Greene took this incident and claimed it was evidence of voting machines in Georgia “switching the votes.” This is a highly dangerous allegation to make — and one with roots in the conspiracy theories that consumed tens of millions of Americans in the wake of the 2020 election. To do this at any point during this election is incredibly irresponsible by Greene, and to do it this early into voting just shows how much election deniers like herself are champing at the bit to turn any minor error into evidence of a vast conspiracy to steal the election from Trump. 

Greene’s allegation that the woman’s votes were “switched” by Dominion voting machines in Georgia was surely taken note of the by the company’s lawyers, who sued the pants off Fox News and others, resulting in a nearly $800 million settlement with the broadcasting channel amid other successful lawsuits against people and organizations that spread election lies in 2020. But the conflation of a voter’s error with widespread fraud in Georgia’s voting machines was just the start of Greene’s weekend conspiracy theorizing.

On Saturday, Greene posted a claim that there are more than 500,000 ineligible voters registered to vote in Michigan. This claim appears to stem from a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee in March. As I reported at Rolling Stone last week, this lawsuit is among about 50 others filed across the country that seek to purge supposedly ineligible voters from voter rolls. And this lawsuit, like some of those I detailed in that story, is one in which Republicans have no apparent interest in actually removing the voters they claim are ineligible. That’s because the RNC has had since June to respond to a motion to dismiss the lawsuit that was filed by Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson — and has yet to do so. 

What do you call a lawsuit that seeks to claim voters could illegally vote in the election, and yet you haven’t filed anything to try to win that lawsuit for the last five months? I think you’d call that a lawsuit that you didn’t actually care about winning, and was more of a story-telling exercise than a good-faith attempt at solving the alleged problem of illegal voters.

Or, as a Harris campaign advisor put it to me last week, “press releases disguised as lawsuits.”

I don’t expect Greene to understand any of this, or to ever care about things like facts that could get in the way of her successful clambering to power. I’m merely interested in correcting the record for those who are willing to look and listen. Because lord knows, there are plenty of people listening to folks like Greene, whose original post on the false claim that voting machines in Whitfield County were “switching” votes has been viewed more than three million times.

The speed of the lie has always been faster than the slow work of obtaining the truth, but that phenomenon has been exacerbated in the last decade as Donald Trump’s rise was helpfully fueled by social media algorithms. That’s why we’re in the situation we’re in, and why people like Greene are even in power to begin with. 

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In other news, I’ve been talking a lot at various places to help explain what the hell is going on around here. 

My reporting on Georgia election matters was heavily featured (as was Doug Bock Clark’s at ProPublica) in a recent episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight that focused on election subversion. Last week, I also discussed election madness and the looming threats to certification on an episode of Counter Point with Scott Harris at WPKN, as well as the American Friction podcast. 

Something fun: Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal, lead correspondent for Nieuwsuur on Dutch Public Television, was kind enough to swing by Savannah to talk with me for an upcoming episode of the program. I’ll share that when it’s ready to go, as well as an upcoming episode of the Guardian’s Today In Focus podcast, which should be out in the next week or so.

Until then, keep a good thought.

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