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      Two Election Workers Targeted by Pro-Trump Media Sue for Defamation

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      The two Georgia workers were falsely accused of manipulating ballots by Trump allies and right-wing news sites. Election officials said the workers did nothing wrong.Two Georgia election workers who were the targets of a right-wing campaign that falsely claimed they manipulated ballots filed a defamation lawsuit on Thursday against one of the nation’s leading sources of pro-Trump misinformation.The suit against the right-wing conspiratorial website The Gateway Pundit was filed by Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, both of whom processed ballots in Atlanta during the 2020 election for the Fulton County elections board. It follows a series of defamation claims filed by elections equipment operators against conservative television operators such as Fox News, Newsmax and One America News.The lawsuit from Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss is among the first to be filed by individual election workers who found themselves unwittingly dragged into the alternate universe of far-right media that claimed, and still does, that Donald J. Trump won last year’s presidential election.“I want the defendants to know that my daughter and I are real people who deserve justice, and I never want them to do this to anyone else,” Ms. Freeman said in a statement.Ms. Moss, who continues to work for the Fulton County elections board, and Ms. Freeman, a temporary employee during the 2020 election, were ensnared by the Trump-supporting media and Mr. Trump himself after Gateway Pundit published dozens of false stories about them, starting last December and continuing through this November. The stories called the two women “crooked Democrats” and claimed that they “pulled out suitcases full of ballots and began counting those ballots without election monitors in the room.”Investigations conducted by the Georgia secretary of state’s office found that the two women did nothing wrong and were legally counting ballots.It all began one month after the 2020 election, on Dec. 3, when a lawyer for Mr. Trump’s campaign played a spliced segment of surveillance video footage for a Georgia Senate committee. The lawyer falsely claimed Fulton elections workers pulled 18,000 fraudulent ballots from a suitcase and illegally fed them through the voting machines.The accusation, which was quickly debunked by Fulton County and Georgia elections officials, was nevertheless amplified by Rudolph W. Giuliani and other Trump allies. A week after the first Gateway Pundit story, Mr. Giuliani compared Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman to drug dealers and called for their homes to be searched during a hearing with Georgia state legislators.Mr. Trump himself invoked Ms. Freeman’s name 18 times during his Jan. 3 call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state. The call at the time was among the president’s most egregious efforts to overturn the results of the election he lost to Joseph R. Biden Jr., who defeated Mr. Trump in Georgia by 11,779 votes.The Gateway Pundit is published by twin brothers, James and Joseph Hoft. The Hoft brothers did not respond to requests for comment.The lawsuit, filed in a Missouri circuit court in St. Louis, where James Hoft lives, articulates a litany of trauma the two women and their family suffered after Gateway Pundit began its campaign against them.They received death threats, unending harassment from phone calls and text messages, and unsolicited pizza deliveries to their homes. Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, both of whom are Black, were also subjected to racial slurs.The harassment was detailed in a Reuters article published Wednesday that included recordings of 911 calls Ms. Freeman made when Trump supporters came to her home and banged on her door last December.According to Reuters, Ms. Moss earns about $36,000 a year for her full-time job with Fulton County. Ms. Freeman, a temporary worker, was paid $16 per hour. Ms. Freeman was forced to shut down her online business selling fashion accessories once she became inundated with threats.On Jan. 6, as thousands of Trump supporters gathered in Washington for a rally that led to the storming of the Capitol in an effort to block the congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s victory, another crowd surrounded Ms. Freeman’s home in suburban Cobb County, the suit read, “some on foot, some in vehicles, others equipped with a bullhorn.”But, according to the lawsuit, Ms. Freeman had by then fled her home on the advice of the F.B.I. She did not return to her home for two months.The harassing calls to Ms. Moss came on a cellphone she had given her teenage son. He turned the phone’s cellular data off to stop the unsolicited calls, but he was unable to do so during school hours. He used the phone as a mobile hot spot to connect his computer to the internet for his virtual high school classes during the coronavirus pandemic.Her son failed his classes; Ms. Moss enrolled him in summer school to catch up, according to the suit.Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss are represented in their suit by Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group focused on resisting authoritarianism in the United States. Protect Democracy has also sued Project Veritas, the conservative group that conducts undercover sting operations, on behalf of a Pennsylvania postmaster who was falsely accused of tampering with election returns.Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss did not specify an amount they are seeking from the Hoft brothers. They asked for compensatory and punitive damages “to be determined at trial.” More

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      Stacey Abrams Says She’s Running for Georgia Governor

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      Ms. Abrams, a Democratic voting rights activist, will aim to unseat Gov. Brian Kemp in a rematch of their contentious 2018 race for governor.Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat whose narrow loss in the governor’s race in 2018 catapulted her to national prominence as a voting rights advocate, said Wednesday that she would run again for governor in 2022, setting up a high-profile potential rematch with Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican.Three years after Ms. Abrams lost to Mr. Kemp — a longtime political rival — by about 55,000 votes, her candidacy ensures that voting rights will remain at the center of the political conversation in Democratic circles and in Georgia, where Republicans enacted a sweeping law of voting restrictions this year.Ms. Abrams’s campaign also carries historic significance: If she is successful, she would become the first Black governor of Georgia and the first Black woman to serve as governor of any state.“Opportunity in our state shouldn’t be determined by ZIP code, background or access to power,” Ms. Abrams said on Twitter, posting an announcement video with the slogan “One Georgia.”Her prospective face-off with Mr. Kemp — along with a critical Senate race and several important House contests — means that Georgia will again be a major political battleground in 2022. Last year, the state backed a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1992, held two runoff elections that gave Democrats control of the Senate and was a central focus of former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.Democrats had widely expected the announcement by Ms. Abrams, a former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives who has come to embody the state’s changing racial and political makeup and was previously considered to be President Biden’s running mate. Though some Democrats and activist groups have courted her to pursue a Senate seat or run for president, her long-held goal has been to become governor of Georgia, according to longtime allies.Ms. Abrams has often rejected strict ideological labels in interviews, and she has been embraced by members of both the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party. Activist groups have highlighted her focus on voting rights and her political strategy, which emphasizes cross-racial voter turnout in an increasingly diverse state.Moderate Democrats point to her policy stances, which have often stopped short of embracing left-wing litmus tests on issues like single-payer health care and a Green New Deal to combat climate change. Ms. Abrams’s first campaign video took a hyperlocal approach, showcasing the breadth of Georgia’s diversity and describing what she has done since the 2018 race, with a nod to the coronavirus pandemic.“We helped finance small businesses trying to stay afloat,” she says in the video. “And I spoke up for families being left behind.”The candidacy of Ms. Abrams, who was not on the ballot in 2020 but was a visible figure in the Democratic presidential primary contest and also completed a book tour, ensures another cycle of closely watched Georgia races that will attract millions of dollars from grass-roots donors and advocacy groups..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democratic civil rights activist and pastor who won a special election in 2020 and became the first Black senator to be elected in Georgia, is expected to run for a full term. Georgia’s congressional district lines are still in flux, but Republican state lawmakers may pit some of the state’s Democrats against one another, in an aggressive redistricting maneuver.Mr. Trump also remains an important figure who could upend Republican unity, motivate the party’s base, inspire backlash among Democrats or some combination of all three. The former president targeted Mr. Kemp and Georgia’s top election official, Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, during the 2020 election aftermath.In a statement on Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump sent the governor a warning shot, taking credit for the 2018 victory over Ms. Abrams and saying that a Republican triumph in 2022 could be “hard to do with Brian Kemp, because the MAGA base will just not vote for him after what he did with respect to Election Integrity and two horribly run elections.”Mr. Trump added that “some good Republican will run, and some good Republican will get my endorsement, and some good Republican will WIN!”While several high-profile Republicans in Georgia have been floated as possible contenders for governor next year, including former Senator David Perdue, none have yet entered the race. Without a viable challenger to Mr. Kemp, the former president has backed the Senate run of Herschel Walker, a former University of Georgia football star.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who has caused several controversies in Congress, has also disrupted the state’s political class in the name of Mr. Trump’s grievances.After Ms. Abrams’s announcement, Republicans immediately sought to cast her as an out-of-touch national figure and the face of the Democratic Party.Mr. Kemp wrote on Twitter that if Ms. Abrams had been governor during the pandemic, “Georgia would have shut down, students would have been barred from their classrooms, and woke politics would be the law of the land and the lesson plan in our schools.”He added that “next November’s election for Governor is a battle for the soul of our state,” reversing a theme Mr. Biden used in his 2020 campaign.Dueling statements issued on Wednesday by governors’ groups from both parties made clear that Democrats and Republicans now had their marquee matchup for 2022. Less than an hour after Ms. Abrams announced her bid, the Democratic Governors Association said that “it’s clear Brian Kemp’s days as governor are numbered.” People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group, endorsed her within 90 minutes.On the Republican side, party leaders sought to present a united front, irrespective of Mr. Trump and his personal vendettas. In January, the state’s Republicans had been split among loyalties to Mr. Kemp, Mr. Raffensperger, the state’s two Senate incumbents and Mr. Trump.In recent months, according to Republicans in Georgia, Mr. Kemp and his allies have staved off a credible primary challenger — and sought to win back Mr. Trump’s base — by positioning Mr. Kemp as the only person capable of beating Ms. Abrams.“Stacey Abrams is once again using Georgia to boost her own star while she plots a path toward her real career goal: President of the United States,” Maddie Anderson, a spokeswoman for the Republican Governors Association, said in a statement. “Stacey Abrams spent her time touring the country in search of fame and fortune.”Over the last decade, Ms. Abrams has risen quickly from toiling voting rights activist and Democratic state legislator in the Republican bastion of Georgia to a household political name nationally.At the end of 2013, she founded the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit voting rights group, which claimed to have registered more than 200,000 voters in the run-up to her candidacy for governor in 2018. Before the 2020 election, Ms. Abrams leveraged both the New Georgia Project and her second organization, Fair Fight Action, to expand registration efforts.By last year’s election, the groups said they had registered roughly 800,000 voters in Georgia, and Democrats credited them with helping lay the groundwork for flipping the state blue at the presidential level. Two Democratic victories in Georgia’s Senate runoff in January only enhanced Ms. Abrams’s status among Democratic voters, complete with a new mantra: “Trust Black women.”In an interview with The New York Times after the election, Ms. Abrams said the iconography had made her uncomfortable, as did the phrase.“I appreciate the necessity of that battle cry,” she said. “And in my approach, in Georgia in particular, Black women have been instrumental. But I chafe at this idea that we then objectify one group as both savior and as responsible party” if Democrats lose elections.Voting rights will again become a dominant electoral issue in a state that has a long history of discrimination at the polls, and that has sought to restrict voting access in recent years. From 2012 to 2018, for example, Georgia shuttered more than 214 voting precincts around the state, according to an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Of the 53 counties that have closed voting locations, more than half have significant African American populations, making up at least 25 percent of residents.Ms. Abrams sued the state of Georgia after her loss to Mr. Kemp in 2018. The lawsuit is ongoing, and a trial date has been set for next year.In addition to her political advocacy, Ms. Abrams has also published two books since 2018, the latest in a line of published works that has included both nonfiction and romance novels — often under the pen name of Selena Montgomery.Ms. Abrams published “Our Time Is Now,” a nonfiction book about voter suppression and political strategy, in 2020. Her political thriller “While Justice Sleeps,” about a law clerk who becomes the legal guardian of a gravely ill Supreme Court justice, came out in May 2021.“One is struck by Abrams’s considerable powers of invention,” read a review of the thriller in The Times. “Her narrative never pauses for breath — let alone contemplation.”Ultimately, it concluded, “those desirous of perils and surprises will encounter them in abundance.”Nick Corasaniti More

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      in US Politics

      Justice prevailed in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. In America, that’s a shock | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Justice prevailed in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. In America, that’s a shockMoustafa BayoumiThe jury reached the right verdict – even as the criminal justice system did everything it could to exonerate the three men It’s shocking that Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan were found guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia. Yet the shock doesn’t stem out of any miscarriage of justice. On the contrary, the jury in Glynn county deliberated and reached the correct decision. Stalking an innocent Black man, chasing him, cornering him, and then killing him must come with criminal consequences in this country, and each of the three murderers now faces the possibility of a life sentence.But the shock is that justice was served in a case where it seemed the criminal justice system and substantial portions of media coverage were doing all they could to exonerate these men. In fact, everything about this case illustrates how difficult it is to get justice for Black people in this country, starting with how often Fox News and other media outlets referred to the case as “the Arbery trial”, as if Ahmaud Arbery were the perpetrator here and not the victim.Kyle Rittenhouse wasn’t convicted because, in America, white reasoning rules | Michael HarriotRead moreThe facts of the case have never been in dispute, and yet they were also often distorted or ignored to aid the defense. The McMichaels claimed they were trying to make a citizen’s arrest of Arbery, an avid athlete who had been out jogging a mere three miles from his home that day. Father and son McMichael found Arbery suspicious, they told police, because there had been “several break-ins in the neighborhood”. This statement has been repeated so often in the last year that it has assumed the status of fact.And yet, according to the local Brunswick News, there had been just one burglary reported to county police between 1 January and 23 February 2020, the day of Arbery’s murder. That singular incident referred to property taken from a Satilla Shores vehicle – Travis McMichael’s truck. (McMichael reported a theft because, after he left his truck unlocked, his gun had been taken, he said at trial.) While surveillance video also captured an unidentified white couple possibly taking some property belonging to Larry English, a man building a home in the area, English testified that nothing had been stolen from the construction site of his second home, where Arbery stopped directly before being chased by the McMichaels. And during the trial, we heard that in all of 2019, there had been only four reported car break-ins. So, yeah, hardly a runaway crime spree.Then why did it keep getting reported this way?There’s more, of course. It took almost three months for the Georgia bureau of investigation, which took over the case, to arrest Travis and Gregory McMichael. (Bryan was arrested months later.) The elder McMichael had been a police officer and investigator for the district attorney’s office. The favoritism shown the men ran deep, so deep that the Brunswick district attorney, Jackie Johnson, who first oversaw the case, was later indicted on charges of violating her oath as a public officer and obstructing a police officer, as she was accused of “showing favor and affection to Greg McMichael during the investigation”, according to the indictment.Like Johnson, the next prosecutor, George E Barnhill, was also forced to recuse himself from the case. His son had previously worked with McMichael in what again was a clear conflict of interest. Barnhill wrote a letter to the police department explaining his recusal. “It appears Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael, and Bryan William [sic] were following, in ‘hot pursuit’, a burglary suspect, with solid first-hand probable cause, in their neighborhood,” he wrote. We now know just how completely and utterly false this account of events was. By the time the trial began, jury selection was also looking highly problematic. The population of Glynn county is over a quarter Black, and yet the seated jury for the trial was overwhelmingly white, with only one Black juror selected. Even the judge acknowledged the appearance of “intentional discrimination” in this outcome, as defense attorneys struck virtually every Black potential juror from serving on the jury.Defense attorneys also used every tool at their disposal to dehumanize Ahmaud Arbery. Laura Hogue, lawyer for Greg McMichael, characterized Arbery as a “recurring night-time intruder” whose presence was “frightening and unsettling”, as if adopting every stereotype of “the dangerous young Black man” she could find. It got even worse when she told the jury that Arbery had “long, dirty toenails”.What a morally bankrupt and shameless statement, but such are the lengths that this system will go to preserve its ill-gotten power. Any honest student of the history of this country will recognize what was happening in this case and in this trial. On display was nothing short of an American fear in all its guises.First, there is the irrational and racist fear of Black people that has motivated so much white vigilantism. It’s no mere coincidence that Georgia’s (now-defunct) self-defense statute dates to the civil war era. As Carol Anderson, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and many others have shown, the violence at the heart of the American system begins with a fundamental fear of Black and Indigenous people.Then there’s the establishment’s fear that its power will be exposed for what it too often is, a precarious system that serves and protects not the public but its own interests through its prejudices and favoritisms. And finally, there’s the fear that those who don’t look like us will stand in judgment. Thus a system of power built on racial hierarchy will seek its own self-preservation.The good news, heard in the courtroom, is that the rest of us are not afraid. The mostly white jury was not afraid to return the proper verdict. The assistant district attorney Linda Dunikoski was not afraid (and was completely convincing) in her prosecution. The attorney S Lee Merritt was fearless and eloquent in his advocacy for justice. But the bravest, most fearless, most admirable person in this saga has to be Wanda Cooper-Jones, Arbery’s mother.It’s hard to believe that justice would have prevailed here were it not for Cooper-Jones’ indefatigable efforts to push and challenge prosecutors like Johnson and Barnhill and the whole damn system at every turn. She pushed Georgia’s legislature to pass a hate crimes bill. She filed the federal lawsuit against the men now convicted of killing her son. She even met with the then president Donald Trump to discuss police reform.Cooper-Jones is a real hero, both for her son and in the fight for a truly just society. She was willing and able to fight a system that, if the past be a guide, was more than willing to exonerate itself.But here’s the problem: what happens when there is no Cooper-Jones? Why should our rights depend on grieving mothers fighting for the rights of their murdered children? What kind of justice system is that?I’m thankful that people like Wanda Cooper-Jones exist, but what we really need is more than that. We need a justice system that isn’t afraid of power. We need a justice system that isn’t afraid of doing what’s right. What we really need is a justice system that doesn’t depend on grieving mothers at all.
      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
      TopicsAhmaud ArberyOpinionUS justice systemGeorgiaRaceUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      This is justice of a kind. But don’t forget Ahmaud Arbery’s killers almost got away | Akin Olla

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      This is justice of a kind. But don’t forget Ahmaud Arbery’s killers almost got awayAkin OllaThe verdict is welcome, but it rings hollow given the underlying systems of white supremacy that have long justified the vigilante actions of Arbery’s attackers The three white men who hunted down Ahmaud Arbery in a neighborhood in Glynn county, Georgia, have been found guilty in court. The US held its breath as the jury deliberations entered their second day this Wednesday. Travis McMichael, who fired the shots that killed the 25-year-old Black man, his father, Greg, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan were all convicted of the 23 February 2020 murder. While the verdict is a welcome one, it rings somewhat hollow given the recent not guilty verdict in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse and the underlying systems of white supremacy that have long justified the vigilante actions of Arbery’s attackers.How the murder of Ahmaud Arbery further exposes America’s broken and racist legal systemRead moreDespite the trial’s outcome, the actual process of the case was steeped in various justifications of the killers’ actions, from the racially-tinged fearmongering of the defense attorneys to the fact that the killers were arrested 74 days after Arbery’s murder. Justice cannot be served as long as the current system remains, and it seems unlikely that even this verdict will dissuade future vigilantes.A defense attorney must, of course, make the best case for their client. It speaks volumes about our country that much of what could be mustered during this trial were attempts to attack Arbery as a person – a tactic commonly deployed to justify the murders of Black Americans. The judge dismissed attempts by the defense to introduce prior acts by Arbery into evidence, and a move to include the fact that trace amounts of THC were found in his system when he was killed. After those failed efforts, the defense moved to disparage the young man’s body, telling jurors that Arbery had “long, dirty toenails”, and criticizing the shorts that he wore the day he was shot – as if Arbery had called this crime on to himself for the way he dressed; as if the McMichaels and Bryan were aware of anything about him before they decided to chase him down and execute him; as if it was Arbery’s toenails that caused Travis McMichael to exclaim “fucking nigger” above the dying man.Though many of the defense’s attempts to use racist dog-whistles were defeated in pre-trial decisions by the presiding judge, they were still successful in ensuring that the jury would be nearly all white, despite the county itself being about 27% Black. This effort is not uncommon among attorneys and is seeped in a larger system of racism that leads to underrepresentation of people of color on juries.There were many others who participated in the process of justifying the vigilante behavior of the father-and-son duo and their neighbor, who captured it all on video. The police who arrived at the scene took the word of the murderers and did not place them under arrest. The officer accepted their story of self-defense, that these men were simply defending the neighborhood from a Black burglar. Greg Michael had, luckily for their little lynch mob, served as a county police officer for seven years and 30 as an investigator for the local district attorney’s office. The same district attorney’s office was later accused by county commissioners of preventing the arrests of the killers. According to Allen Booker, commissioner: “The police at the scene went to [district attorney Jackie Johnson], saying they were ready to arrest both of them … [s]he shut them down to protect her friend McMichael.” The district attorney shifted blame to police and claimed that they could have used their own discretion to make the arrest.After the video of Arbery’s death went viral and fueled protests demanding action, it still took two months for police to arrest his killers. This bias in favor of police officers and former police officers is all too common in the US, and definitely not rare in Glynn county, known for allegations of officers being shielded from consequences.While crimes like this allow us to focus on the individual white vigilantes, it is important to zoom out and see the many others – from the defense, to the district attorney, to the arresting officers and the institutions they influence and control – who are implicated. Arbery’s murder was of a pattern with a history. It is rooted in the segregation and violent racism that shaped the borders of towns and countries across the US. It is rooted in the legacies of the mobs that killed 14-year-old Emmett Till and overthrew the government of Wilmington, North Carolina, in a white supremacist coup. It is also reflected in other modern examples, like the “Karens” who unleash police officers onto their Black neighbors, or Rittenhouse, who was recently found not guilty of a crime not so different from that committed by the McMichaels and Bryan.Like Rittenhouse, this was a case of white Americans taking up arms to protect what they perceived as Black threats against property. Although the people whom Rittenhouse shot were white, he chose to arm himself during an uprising following the shooting of a Black man, and it is difficult to believe that stereotypes about violent Black looters and killers did not play a role in his perceptions of the uprising – the same kinds of stereotypes that fueled the attack on Arbery.Much like Rittenhouse’s case, the defense lawyers of Arbery’s three assailants claimed their clients engaged in self-defense. Despite showing up to the scene with weapons, Rittenhouse and the men who killed Arbery thought they were the ones under threat. The verdict against the McMichaels and Bryan may feel like a victory, but Rittenhouse’s verdict has done more than enough to justify future vigilantism by white men deeply fearful that somewhere out there Black people might be disrupting the status quo.The verdict here matters for the family. Arbery’s father, Marcus Arbery, reacted to the verdict saying: “We conquered that lynch mob.” This case exposed the various layers of the justice system that work in tandem to justify murders committed by white men on a political mission. But justice cannot be truly served until this entire system is ripped down and built anew. Rittenhouse’s claims of protecting property are already being used by the defense attorney of a member of the far-right Proud Boys group. And despite the scrutiny the Proud Boys received for participating in the 6 January riot in Washington DC, the organization has begun showing up at rightwing marches and protests claiming to be there for security purposes.While the desire to celebrate the Arbery verdict is understandable, the decision will not stop white men from murdering Black people and others they deem to be a threat to property or the political order. It will take a movement to do that, a movement that will have to overcome the violence of white vigilantes and an entire system held up by their atrocities.
      Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian
      TopicsAhmaud ArberyOpinionRaceUS politicsGeorgiacommentReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Brad Raffensperger: ‘I haven’t talked to Trump. I don’t expect that’ll happen’

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      The fight to voteGeorgiaBrad Raffensperger: ‘I haven’t talked to Trump. I don’t expect that’ll happen’ Georgia’s top election official was pressured by Trump to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory. What does he think about it now?The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkThu 11 Nov 2021 05.00 ESTLast modified on Thu 11 Nov 2021 10.21 ESTBrad Raffensperger, Georgia’s top election official, was sitting at his kitchen counter with his wife, Tricia, in early January, his cell phone on a metal stand so he could take notes. On the other line was Donald Trump, who had lost Georgia to Joe Biden in November, a result confirmed by multiple recounts.The president had a blunt and unimaginable request for Raffensperger: find enough votes to flip the results of the election in Georgia.Raffensperger, a mild-mannered engineer by training, refused to go along with the president’s request, but saw it as a threat, he writes in his new book Integrity Counts.He and his family have since been subject to a barrage of harassment, including death threats, from Trump and his supporters. Republicans in the Georgia state legislature have stripped him of his role as the chair of the state election board. Now, he’s running for re-election next year in what is expected to be an extremely difficult primary for him, in a field that includes at least one candidate, endorsed by Trump, who tried to overturn the 2020 election results.The Guardian spoke to Raffensperger about the January phone call with Trump, threats to election officials, and whether he thinks there’s a place in the Republican party today for officials who resist attempts to undermine the 2020 election results.Have you talked to Trump since that January call? Do you expect to ever talk to him again?No, I haven’t talked to him, and don’t expect that’ll happen in the future.Were you scared in the moment of [the phone call]? You have the president of the United States, the leader of your party, in a very heated environment in the days after the election, pressuring you to do something that could affect whether he serves another term. And did you ever doubt yourself in what you were doing?I wanted to make sure that we had all the facts. That we weren’t missing something. Our team was continuously asked by me: “What about this? What about that?” And so we ran down every single allegation. Then I sent a letter to Congress, it’s a 10-page letter, which I put in the book – they got it on 6 January and I know they were busy with other things. But it really goes through, point by point, every single allegation that was made.I understand my side is grieving and has difficulty understanding this, but 28,000 people, 28,000 Georgians, did not vote for anyone for president. They skipped that and yet they voted down-ballot. And when I give those three data points to Republicans it starts to really dawn on them, they start to understand that there was [tail-off] at the top of the ticket.But people are still talking about the ballots that were stuffed in the suitcase and whatever else. People don’t seem to be persuaded by facts.I think that everyone is best served when they have intellectual honesty. And to get intellectual honesty you have to have intellectual curiosity. That you actually want to uncover the facts and have the courage to actually look into it and maybe have your paradigm shifted and challenged because what you’ve been told has been wrong.At some point, I know that if I was lied to by all these people, and they know that they’ve been lying to people, I think that they may rise up in anger and really understand that they’ve been played.Does it worry you to see the Republican party flirting with these claims, and in some cases not disavowing them and even embracing them?Well, let’s be fair and balanced. It bothers me that both parties are doing that. Because Stacey Abrams was in Virginia less than three weeks ago, and she said “just because you win doesn’t mean you’ve won”. Her narrative of voter suppression has been parroted by many people, from Hillary Clinton to many other notable national figures. (Note: Abrams has strongly repudiated attempts by Raffensperger and others to equate her decision not to concede Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race to Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.)So it’s actually both sides are guilty of this. And both sides need to pull back, stop, and walk that line of integrity. When you walk that line of integrity, then you can start rebuilding trust.Are you continuing to get threats?Every once in a while, now that the book’s out, you get a text or a voicemail. It’s people that really don’t want to know the truth and don’t want to dig into the truth. I understand where they’re coming from. They’re not happy with losing an election. They’re not happy with the direction of the country and they’re not pleased probably with President Biden. There’s a lot that’s happened in the last year under his leadership that is very disappointing and alarming.Are you concerned about experienced election officials leaving their jobs?I’m concerned that we have seen in Georgia, probably less than a handful of county election directors leave, retire a little bit early.And so you hate to see that happen. And you just hope they’ll have a team in place that’ll pick up that mantle and lead with strong leadership.I wanted to ask you a little bit about the provisions of Georgia’s new election law that dealt with your authority specifically on the state elections board. How concerned are you about efforts to give legislatures in Georgia and elsewhere more control over the bodies like the state elections board and election administration?I’ve always believed that these boards should be held accountable to the voters.If you look in Georgia, the state elections board chair has always been an elected position. And so for that reason alone, I don’t believe it was wise. I believe in some point in the future, they’ll regret the decision they made. But it was made with the thought of payback, petty retribution, blame-shifting, to placate people looking for, you know, a head on a platter.So you’re still very opposed to it?Well it’s bad policy. I don’t support bad policy.You’re in a competitive primary with at least one opponent who has voiced serious doubts about the integrity of the 2020 election. How concerned are you that someone could get into power that gets a call from the president or someone else and is willing to go along with the kind of thing that you weren’t willing to go along with in 2020?I believe that Americans overwhelmingly are good, honest, people. And they’re looking for honest government. And they’re looking for people that will stand in the gap and do the right thing. And I’ve shown that I will make the tough calls to make sure that we follow the constitution, we follow state law.I talk to Republicans. I talk to a lot of them. And yes I get dog-cussed by a few. But many Republicans support what I did. They’re disappointed in the results. They wish that the president would have won. That runs the whole gamut. But people recognize that when people do what is right, even when it can appear to be difficult, that that is really something that should be modeled and esteemed.I’m curious what message you think it would send if people didn’t vote for that. If what you did in 2020 wound up costing you the election next year, what message would that send?Well, people have to decide individually and corporately what they want our country to look like. And I think that Americans, as I said, the vast majority are good, honest, taxpaying, law-abiding Americans. And what they want is people who will make the right decision.TopicsGeorgiaThe fight to voteUS elections 2020US politicsUS voting rightsnewsReuse this content More

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      Max Cleland, Vietnam Veteran and Former Senator, Dies at 79

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      He lost both legs and an arm in the war. Republicans impugned his patriotism by linking him to Osama bin Laden in an infamous TV spot.Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm during the Vietnam War and who became a Senator from Georgia, only to lose his seat after Republicans impugned his patriotism, died on Tuesday at his home in Atlanta. He was 79.The cause was congestive heart failure, said Jason D. Meininger, a close friend. After a grenade accident in Vietnam in 1968, Mr. Cleland spent 18 months recuperating. He served in local politics in his native Georgia and as head of the federal Veterans Administration, now the Department of Veterans Affairs, before he was elected in 1996 to the U.S. Senate.But it was his treatment at the hands of Republicans while he was seeking re-election in 2002 that made him a Democratic cause célèbre.Running for another term just a year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he was the target of an infamous 30-second television spot that showed images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein while it questioned Mr. Cleland’s commitment to homeland security and implied that he was soft on the war on terror.It was the ad’s images in particular that created the uproar. Even prominent Republicans, including Senators John McCain and Chuck Hagel, both Vietnam veterans, were outraged.“I’ve never seen anything like that ad,” Mr. McCain told The Washington Post. “Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to a picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield — it’s worse than disgraceful, it’s reprehensible.” Mr. Hagel said he recoiled when he saw the ad, and it rankled many others, who noted that Mr. Cleland’s Republican opponent, Representative Saxby Chambliss, had avoided military service.When Mr. Cleland lost the election to Mr. Chambliss, 46 to 53 percent, which helped the Republicans narrowly recapture the Senate, the ad was perceived as having made a difference.In fact, Mr. Cleland had been losing ground in the polls before the ad was aired. He was already seen as too liberal and out of step with Georgia voters.But the ad was so explosive that Democrats seized on it and made the attacks on Mr. Cleland emblematic of the low road that they said the Republicans, led by Mr. Bush’s aggressive political operative, Karl Rove, would take to achieve their ends.At a veterans event, Mr. Cleland with Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee. Both were Vietnam veterans and were targeted in political ads that questioned their patriotism.James Estrin/The New York TimesIn the fraught post-9/11 era, the ad was also a harbinger of things to come. Two years later, as Mr. Cleland predicted, a small group of veterans sought to undermine the wartime record of Senator John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran and the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee.At the Democratic convention in Boston, where Mr. Kerry was nominated, James Carville, the party strategist, introduced Mr. Cleland by saying he would go down in history for the injustice he suffered in 2002. Whipping up the crowd by recalling old slogans like “Remember the Alamo” and “Remember the Maine,” Mr. Carville declared: “We’re going to Remember Max.”“In some ways,” wrote The Los Angeles Times, “Cleland is more powerful as a symbol than he ever was as a senator.”Beyond what he came to symbolize, Mr. Cleland was crushed by losing the race, which plunged him into a deep depression.“It broke his heart,” Mr. Kerry recalled in a phone interview. “That ad was such a dastardly, disgraceful hit. And it set the template.”The loss of his seat and the start of the Iraq war in 2003 triggered a long-dormant case of post-traumatic stress disorder that sent Mr. Cleland back to Walter Reed hospital, outside Washington, where he had been treated after his injuries in Vietnam.“After I lost the Senate race in 2002, my life collapsed,” he told History.net. “I went down in every way you can go down. I lost my life as I knew it.”His anxiety was compounded, he said, because he had voted for the Iraq war, a stance he took, he said later, because if he had voted against it, he would have been “dead meat” in his re-election bid. He said it was the worst vote he had cast.As therapy, he wrote a book, “Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove” (with Ben Raines, 2009).“Through weekly counseling, medication for anxiety and depression, and weekly attendance at a spiritual Twelve Step recovery group, I began to heal,” he wrote, adding that he gained strength from being among veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. “My personal recovery and renewal have taken years.”Joseph Maxwell Cleland was born on Aug. 24, 1942, in Atlanta, Ga. His mother, Juanita Cleland, worked as a secretary for Standard Oil. His father, Hugh Cleland, was in the Navy at the time. After the war, he moved the family to Lithonia, Ga., outside Atlanta, where he worked in the granite quarries. He later became a traveling salesman.As a boy, Max, as he was called, became enthralled with cowboys, and for the rest of his life, he loved watching Westerns. Even as an adult he kept pictures of the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers on his wall, among those of other heroes like Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.Max was a top student and star athlete at Lithonia High School, excelling in baseball, basketball and tennis and graduating in 1960.At Stetson University in Florida, he majored in history before graduating in 1964. He later received a master’s degree in history from Emory University. It was during a summer semester at American University in Washington in 1963 that he resolved to become a senator.But first, he would enlist. His father and most of his male relatives had fought in World War II, and Max did not want to miss the war of his generation. He joined the Army in 1965 and volunteered for Vietnam in 1967.On April 8, 1968, just days before his tour was to end, Capt. Cleland was on a rescue mission in the village of Khe Sanh when he noticed a hand grenade on the ground. He picked it up and it detonated, instantly severing his right leg and right arm; his left leg was amputated within the hour. He was later awarded the Bronze Star and a Silver Star for meritorious service.After recuperating at Walter Reed, he moved back to Georgia and at 28, became the youngest person elected to the Georgia State Senate, where he helped make public facilities accessible to people with disabilities.Mr. Cleland and President Jimmy Carter, who had named him head of the Veterans Administration, at a Veteran’s Day celebration in 1977.Teresa Zabala/The New York TimesPresident Jimmy Carter, a fellow Georgian, named him head of the Veterans Administration in 1977, and Mr. Cleland soon instituted psychological counseling for vets. After Mr. Carter lost the presidency, Mr. Cleland returned to Georgia and wrote about the challenges of being a triple amputee in a memoir, “Strong at the Broken Places” (1980), taking his title from Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms.” He also was a consultant on the movie “Coming Home” (1978), starring Jane Fonda and Jon Voight as a disabled Vietnam veteran.Mr. Cleland was elected secretary of state in Georgia and served for 14 years, until 1996, when Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, a Democrat, announced his retirement. Mr. Cleland ran for the seat and narrowly defeated the businessman Guy Millner.In the Senate, Mr. Cleland was liberal on social issues and conservative on fiscal matters. He was a reliable vote for increased military spending but was wary of committing troops overseas. In 2001, he broke with Democrats to vote for tax cuts proposed by Mr. Bush, but by and large he went along with the Democratic agenda.With the Senate race in 2002 drawing national attention, President Bush, who was popular in Georgia, visited the state multiple times on behalf of Mr. Chambliss. By Election Day, polls showed Mr. Cleland retaining a small lead. But they failed to predict a huge turnout by rural white men, many of them angry that Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, had removed the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag. Both Mr. Barnes and Mr. Cleland were tossed out of office.Mr. Cleland later taught at American University, in the same program that had inspired him as a youth. He served briefly on the 9/11 Commission before President Bush nominated him to a four-year term on the board of the Export-Import Bank.Through it all, Mr. Cleland commemorated the date of his accident, April 8, which he called his “Alive Day.”“He’d call me and say what he was grateful for,” Mr. Kerry said. “Usually it was his gratitude about his fellow vets.”Mr. Cleland left no immediate survivors but had maintained a circle of close friends. For the last three decades his caretaker was Linda Dean, who also managed his affairs.In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Mr. Cleland secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission, the federal agency that manages monuments and cemeteries in 17 countries honoring the tens of thousands of American servicemen and servicewomen buried overseas and the more than 95,000 troops missing in action in foreign wars.Mr. Cleland in Alabama in 2004, trying to build support for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry among veterans.Dave Martin/Associated PressMr. Cleland said in an interview with ABC News that he expected the job to give him “a sense of meaning and purpose.”He then quoted a line from a poem, “The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak,” by Archibald MacLeish, in which the dead address the living: “We leave you our deaths: give them their meaning.”“It is really up to us, the living,” Mr. Cleland added, “to provide that meaning for those who have given their all for this country.” More

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      in US Politics

      In Trumpland parallel reality, election was stolen and racism was long ago

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      GeorgiaIn Trumpland parallel reality, election was stolen and racism was long ago Monroe county, Georgia, where Donald Trump won 74% of the vote, is home to views on everything from education to vaccines that are untethered from factsTimothy Prattin Monroe, GeorgiaSun 7 Nov 2021 02.00 ESTLast modified on Sun 7 Nov 2021 02.02 ESTIt’s a gray afternoon, promising rain and with temperatures in the 50s, people have taken their jackets out of the closet.The streets of downtown Monroe, Georgia, a town of about 14,000 residents 45 miles due east of Atlanta, are quiet for a Saturday. It’s the county seat of Walton county and a monument honoring Confederate veterans stands tall outside the county courthouse. The soldier carved from granite looks across Broad Street to the town’s police station and is flanked to the south by the Walton Tribune’s office and a district office for representative Jody Hice.Locator map of Monroe, GeorgiaHice, a Republican and former pastor and talkshow host, has announced his candidacy for Georgia’s next secretary of state and is one of three candidates for statewide offices in next year’s national elections who have received Donald Trump’s endorsement. Unsurprisingly, 74% of Walton county’s residents voted for Trump last November.And, although Monroe had the opportunity on 2 November to vote for Democrat Emilio Kelly as the town’s first Black mayor in its 200 years of history, residents three days before election day wanted to talk about what one man called the “disastrous” state of affairs they see in the US. (Kelly would go on to lose.)A year on from an election Trump lost, they believe they’re living in a country where Joe Biden was not legitimately elected, the government is paying people not to work and the state is contaminating children’s minds in public schools, while violating the rights of parents by insisting on teaching about racism that “happened a long time ago”. Some are pretty sure Covid was created in a lab, that “natural” immunity works fine and that vaccines could make you sicker.The situation is so dire that the current administration has “possibly damaged our country permanently”, said Patrick Graham, owner of the Tribune and author of a recent editorial titled, “Y’all Biden Folks Proud Yet?”Poll chart showing 32% of US adults, 57% of Republicans, 38% of Independents and 4% of Democrats believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election due to voter fraud.None of the Trump supporters picking up pizza or visiting candle and antique stores downtown believed the presidential vote tallies announced a year ago were accurate. They pointed to the allegations made prominent in Trump’s failed lawsuits across the country and in Georgia.“With everyone screaming, ‘Let’s Go Brandon’, there’s no way in the world he had 81m votes,” said Mark Kramer, a 68-year-old retiree who moved from nearby Lawrenceville a year ago.A couple of blocks south, Mike, a 53-year-old, self-described “good ol’ country boy” who didn’t want his last name known, had stopped at a gas station before heading home to watch the Atlanta Braves in the World Series. He believes the 2020 election was “fixed”.“I’m not a conspiracy person … but the more thought I put into it … not in the state of Georgia, I don’t believe it happened,” he said, referring to Biden winning the popular vote.“I don’t want to go so far as to say it was stolen, but ballots were trashed and a lot of things went wrong – including here in Georgia,” said a 54-year-old legal assistant at an Atlanta corporate law firm who was walking her dog Henry in the late afternoon drizzle.About half the people the Guardian spoke to in Monroe had been vaccinated, a figure in line with Georgia as a whole, consistently in the bottom of national rankings for vaccination rates. Graham, the Tribune editor, expressed concern over the “government forcing an experimental chemical into people’s bodies to keep them employed … If we keep going in this direction, it’s going to erode our freedoms.”“I don’t care for masks or vaccines,” said Jason Mealer, a 38-year-old McDonald’s employee. “We had Ebola here and that was deadly. Why do something about it now? I say, just live your life.”Retiree Mark Kramer said “there’s no ingredients you can read” in Covid vaccines, and that they are “poison – they’ll cause you more disease than anything else”. No one in his family had been vaccinated, he added, pointing to a restaurant nearby where they were waiting for him. Kramer didn’t want his picture taken; his son-in-law standing nearby explained their objections: “You have BLM, antifa – you have no idea what they might do” if a photograph were to appear online.The personal impacts of global or macroeconomic forces were also on people’s minds in downtown Monroe, without much interest in the global or macro sides of the equation. High gas prices, bottled supply chains, short staffing – consensus was, they are all due to the current administration.“I went to Ihop and their schedule had changed to 7am to 4pm due to staff shortages,” said Holland. “People in my own town are staying at home instead of working,” she said. “Biden is paying people to stay home.”The notion that radical changes have taken place in how students from kindergarten through grade 12 are taught about race and racism in US history – tagged as CRT or critical race theory – is not absent among Trump supporters in Monroe, where most Black and white residents live in separate parts of town to this day. CRT is an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society. It is not taught in Georgia schools.“I don’t agree with what’s being taught in schools,” said Holland. “Parents should have a say, and teaching kids that white people are racist is the wrong thing. It’s almost like they want to recreate history,” she said.“Bringing in CRT is not what teaching is all about,” she said. “Preparing for college, for the real world, is what it’s about. Not about race, or anything else.”But race – and racism – is woven into Monroe’s history.A few miles from where Holland spoke, in 1946, a mob of several dozen white people shot and lynched two Black couples, by Moore’s Ford Bridge, which crosses the Appalachee River.The gruesome act of violence led a 17-year-old Martin Luther King Jr to write a letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and President Harry Truman ordered the FBI to investigate. No one was found guilty. In an ongoing lawsuit, the 11th circuit US court of appeals ruled in March of last year that grand jury records from the case must remain sealed, keeping all of us from potentially learning what happened that day, and who was responsible.The Moore’s Ford lynching persists not just in the courts, and the memories of many; only two months ago, Monroe’s current mayor, John Howard, presented a statement to the town’s city council publicly acknowledging it for the first time. One Black city council member refused to sign the statement, calling it a political stunt aimed at currying favor among the town’s Black voters in Howard’s bid for re-election.Should schools in Monroe teach children about the lynching at Moore’s Ford? If so, how? “That sort of history – though it was ghastly – should be taught,” said Jeff Blackstone, a 58-year-old who owns a company that installs hotel TV systems. “But – we have all learned from our mistakes. Although there are still some outliers who go back to the horrid ways of previous years, that should not be tolerated. And I … don’t agree with what the government is trying to do with our lives – like CRT – trying to teach us societal views.”“I think we need to move beyond Black, white and brown,” Blackstone said. “I hire and fire people and don’t judge by their color, but what they can do to help me.”James “Trae” Welborn III, associate professor of history at Georgia College & State University, says racism and its expression has changed over time.“Racism now takes seemingly benign forms – talk of personal liberties, colorblindness … The idea is that racism is people running around in white hoods, burning white crosses. So you say, ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ and anything that falls short of that isn’t racism.”Welborn also pointed to the idea that racism happened a long time ago, the shared urgency among Trump supporters to “deny and marginalize the issue of race and racism, in favor of ‘the beacon of liberty and freedom’ narrative in American history”. A civil war historian, Welborn sees parallels between the views and rhetoric of Trump supporters and those of the Confederacy. “There’s even similar language – the threats of violence: ‘Come to the Capitol and give ’em what for,’” he said.Meanwhile, in the present, many Trump supporters in Georgia are following Garland Favorito and his organization, VoterGA, which has two lawsuits in state courts tied to last year’s elections. Favorito’s organization is 15 years old and works on election integrity – a term which was then used in public discourse in reference to issues such as how to employ audit methods that could truly verify elections results, and now is mostly used to underline any supposed evidence that Trump won. Until last year, VoterGA was primarily supported by progressive Democrats. Now, Favorito receives social media followers, and donations, from thousands of Trump supporters, in Georgia and elsewhere.As for last year’s election, he said, “the truth is, nobody knows who won. The secretary of state [in Georgia] can tell you he knows, but he has no idea.” This is because, he said, allegations of ballot stuffing have not been satisfactorily investigated by the state and a “forensic analysis” of election system servers in the state’s 159 counties has not been performed. The problem is that “nobody wants to get to the truth”.Asked about the process followed in Arizona, where a group called Cyber Ninjas took months to review election materials from the state’s largest county – and still concluded that Joe Biden won – Favorito said that the group’s work was never really completed, because the state didn’t supply them with everything they sought to examine. This means “we will never know who won in Arizona”, he said.Asked if it concerns him that many of the Trump supporters supporting his work in Georgia are the same people who hold positions such as the vaccine being “poison”, he said, “No, it doesn’t concern me to speak truth … Trump supporters have just as much a right to say Trump won as the secretary of state says Biden won, because we don’t know the truth.”TopicsGeorgiaUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More