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Notes -
"Don't restart counting after telling the scrutineers you were stopping, and don't lie/hairplit/gaslight the public about that afterwards"?
What do you believe is missing? What do you believe should have been done differently with the investigation (if anything)?
I'd didn't say anything about the investigation -- if you don't want people accusing you of fraud, don't engage in fraud-like activity in the first place.
This is really good advice in general, except it wouldn't have mattered here. Sidney Powell accepted a source on election fraud that claimed they got their info from the wind and she still accused people of fraud in a very public and legal manner. Some folks in this crowd were primed to believe anything unfortunately.
You asked about untoward shit that went down on election night, you got some patient answers, and now you slide back to your weakman -- you are the only one bringing up Powell today, why are you fixating on the obviously crazy allegations instead of addressing the things that real people find concerning?
I apologize, I realize now that I misread your response. I didn't realize that your "Don't restart counting..." was a direct response to my "What do you wish was done differently?" and I lost the conversation thread in between checking notifications.
I understand that Powell is disfavored nowadays but she remains relevant as a showcase for the intense credulity many showcased at the time (including at the highest level of government). I recognize her existence is inconvenient for those who wish to believe election fraud allegations were made in good faith, but it's nevertheless still reality. It's not a weakman if it was enthusiastically endorsed at the time. The water main break story was first publicized by Giuliani claiming they were pulling out suitcases of ballots. Giuliani is also an example of somehow displaying intense credulity (or at least motivated reasoning). The water main break story keeps getting replayed and I still don't understand what the core claim is, aside from just vaguely generating smoke. @zeke5123 said "still hasn’t been fully explained" but I genuinely have no idea which part is missing, which is why my questions were about the investigation and how it could've been done differently.
Well, the issue is there was no water main break but they did stop counting / sent people home so the question is why. Perhaps it was merely incompetence but it just looks suspicious. Once again, none of this is proof. And until you have proof the election result should stand.
My overarching point is that the deep state broke laws / convention to stop Trump. Then we know about election fortification and suspect stories. Is it really unbelievable that they (or other actors) wouldn’t “steal” an election? Once again, not proof! Just a point that when you add everything up it wouldn’t be shocking in the least if real evidence ultimately emerged.
Also, Giuliani didn’t publicize the story. I remember it was reported on election night. I remember hearing the report and thinking “shenanigans!”
Well it's helpful to specify suspicious of what, exactly? The theory (as best as I can understand it) is that someone made up a story of a water main break to get poll watchers to leave, in order to...pull out suitcases full of ballots in front of several security cameras? The water main break / overflowing urinal story makes a lot more sense as an instance of a game of telephone combined with the media's shoddy record with reporting breaking news.
Sorry I wasn't clear, Giuliani publicized the "suitcases of ballots" security camera footage.
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In later reporting the issue was explained to be "a leaky toilet spilling water into a room with ballots early on Election Day", which did delay absentee ballot counting for a couple hours while the leak was fixed (on video, reportedly) late that night.
For this one the story is that "observers and media were not asked to leave. They simply left on their own when they saw one group of workers, whose job was only to open envelopes and who had completed that task, also leave" ... and ironically this more than a leaky urinal is what brings the phrase "don't piss on me and tell me it's raining" to mind. On the other hand, people misinterpreting "there's a water leak and we're going home" as "there's a water leak so we all have to go home" doesn't sound implausible. And in this case there don't seem to be recordings either way? Is "media" an inaccurate descriptor, just an aspirational long-term goal? Was there some rule against observers recording what they observe? Was all that stuff about how pocket-sized portable solid-state internet-connected A/V recorders were invented a decade ago and are now routinely carried by the vast majority of the population just a weird dream I had?
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Nobody has explained why it was reported on national media (at ~1-2AM Eastern) that a water main had broken and counting had to stop, then the next day officials claimed that it was just a leaky urinal and nobody had ever said that the counting had to stop.
You can track this back it appears, to a single story which had two separate pieces of information. 1) That a water leak delayed counting and 2) That counting was going to stop at 10.30pm. Notably however the leak is not cited as the reason why the counting is going to stop at 10.30PM rather:
"They planned to stop scanning absentee ballots at 10:30 p.m. and pick it up back in the morning. No official could explain before press time why Fulton was stopping its count of absentee ballots at that time, only saying that was the procedure.
“As planned, Fulton County will continue to tabulate the remainder of absentee ballots over the next two days. Absentee ballot processing requires that each ballot is opened, signatures verified, and ballots scanned. This is a labor-intensive process that takes longer to tabulate than other forms of voting. Fulton County did not anticipate having all absentee ballots processed on Election Day,” the county spokeswoman wrote in a statement."
and for the leak:
"Fulton Commission Chairman Robb Pitts told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday evening that the pipe burst at 6:07 a.m. and was repaired within two hours. The burst pipe wasn’t mentioned by county officials during a 10 a.m. press conference."
https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/fulton-election-results-delayed-after-pipe-bursts-in-room-with-ballots/4T3KPQV7PBEX3JVAIGJBNBSVJY/
Note that the statement was written before the counting actually stopped at 10.30PM but after the leak at 6AM which is why the vote stop part is in future tense it appears.
The headline they used was quoted heavily to show that the leak caused the count pause:
Fulton County election results delayed after pipe bursts in room with ballots
But it is simply saying the count was delayed by the leak. Not that the overnight vote pause was anything to do with the leak. Two separate delays for two separate reasons. Many stories about the leak stopping the count that night link back to this story, or link back to a story which links to this one as far as I can tell.
Interestingly though, focusing on the water leak is a red herring because there was actually a gap with no Republican observers after vote processing was resumed after midnight. However the official observer was there which is all Georgia law technically required. While there was no legal breach, that is actually a breach of the protocol put in place. And is verifiable from watching the video footage (as is the clean up of the water leak in the AM). Whether you believe the statement that they never told the Republican poll watchers to leave, just that they chose to do so when one section of the team was leaving for the night. And that the work was being divided up so no actual counting took place, just opening and preparing, doesn't really matter, the election team should have ensured Republicans had a presence.
The water leak is the big splashy (heh) distraction from the actual issue that occurred. As someone that has run elections before a lot of the "fraud" stuff was focused on big things like that, not on boring minutiae which is where (in my experience) it would be easier to hide actual issues. What Trumps team needed was an army of experienced people poring through the relevant rules and protocols and listing out the breaches, and on an election that scale there would have been hundreds, probably thousands of breaches. Mostly benign, I myself committed two breaches in two separate elections for example and my constituency was considered well run in the reviews. But you could come up with some large numbers of actual breaches. Rather than weird things that happened. But I don't think he had or was willing to spend the money to get (maybe?) the people that would have required.
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Probably for the same reason the media gets any other developing story wrong, like when they first reported the San Bernardino shooters as "three white men". It's a game of telephone and a rush to be the first with a scoop, and I don't understand why you'd find this bit so salient. If you're being consistent, would you then also have reason to suspect Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik were not the real shooters?
This is what I mean by gaslighting -- nobody other than election officials had any idea what was going on in the building; in what universe is it reasonable to believe that the media reported anything other than what they were told by the election officials? Can we at least move on to the hairsplitting?
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