Georgia 2018 Election Irregularities Demonstrate ‘Extreme’ Drop-Off In Predominantly Black Precincts, Report Suggests

Documents which have now been turned over to Congress demonstrate the possibility of severe election irregularities in the state of Georgia during the 2018 midterm elections.

In particular, there was an extreme drop-off in one race, between Sarah Riggs Amico, a Democrat, and Geoff Duncan, her Republican opponent in the Lieutenant Governor’s race.

Within that contest, 159,000 fewer votes were recorded by state officials when compared to the highly contested governor’s race. Ballot drop-off isn’t rare in down-ballot contests, but the lieutenant governor’s race was the second on the ballot, and had 80,000 fewer votes than some races that were even further down the ballot.

There was a suspicious decline in 101 of Georgia’s 159 counties’ electronic voter machines, per reporting from AlterNet. Skeptics’ minds were piqued by the fact that those declines happened on machines, but on paper, absentee ballots, no such decline was recorded in those areas.

Imagine the different electoral outcomes if un-hackable re-countable paper ballots were the norm. Imagine the budget savings if congress didn’t need to spend time investigating ‘irregularities’ like these. https://t.co/7srI29rwJ1

— RealElections (@ElectionsReal) August 30, 2019

A Democratic-leaning data firm, TargetSmart, also reported that drop-offs tended to grow “even more extreme in precincts with large African American populations.”

More irregularities were pointed out. In Gov. Brian Kemp’s home precinct, for example, six of the seven machines demonstrated a “win” in that area for Democratic candidates on three statewide elections. A seventh machine, however, recorded Republicans winning those races.

The anomaly shouldn’t be overlooked, experts warn. In fact, one statistician described the outcome of that rogue machine as being so rare that its possibility is “less than one in one million,” Law & Crime reported.

Several groups spoke out against the discrepancies, demanding an investigation and rectifying the problems. “The rates of touchscreen machine-reported undervotes in such precincts in the Lt. Governor contest are far greater than the undervote rates in non-African American neighborhoods regardless of whether those neighborhoods lean Democratic or Republican,” one report stated.