Posted on 11/21/2020 6:22:13 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Campaign officials for President Donald Trump and supporters have promoted the faulty claim that Joe Biden received nearly 100,000 votes in Georgia through ballots that only included selections for president, suggesting it’s “suspicious.” But the claim ignores that some voters do not vote a straight-party ballot.
Social media posts spread by Trump campaign officials suggest that voter fraud may have occurred in Georgia, based on the claim that President-elect Joe Biden secured nearly 100,000 votes through ballots that were “ONLY” cast for Biden — and not for any candidates in other races.
But that claim rests on a flawed assessment of vote tallies.
The claim has nevertheless been passed along by thousands through various social media posts in recent days.
“Nothing suspicious about this at all!” one of President Donald Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr., wrote with a retweet of a post spreading the claim. Both tweets have since been deleted.
“In Georgia, ballots where the voter ONLY voted for President: • Trump: 818 • Biden: 95,801,” the post read. The tweet came from an account using the name “Sarah Hucklebee” that was made to look like an account for former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
The claim was put forward in a Nov. 10 video by Steve Cortes, a Trump campaign adviser, in which he outlined what he deemed a “statistical case” demanding further “investigation.”
“Biden, though, a 95,000 vote differential — there were almost 96,000 people in Georgia, allegedly, who voted Biden-only and then did not vote for Senate,” he said in the video. “That seems far too wide to be believable.”
We don’t know how many voters only voted for Biden, but Cortes’ number doesn’t represent that.
Instead, the figure refers to the fact that Biden won almost 100,000 more votes in Georgia than Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff. But it’s faulty to assume that all of those votes must have been on ballots for Biden only, ignoring that some voters in the state selected Biden for president but didn’t adhere to a strictly party-line vote for the Senate.
As of early Nov. 12, there were 4,992,420 votes counted in the presidential race in Georgia. While the total number of votes fluctuates across other races — since, indeed, some people don’t cast a vote for every race — there were 4,945,792 votes counted in the Senate race between Republican Sen. David Perdue and Ossoff.
That’s a difference of 46,628 total votes — or almost half of what’s being alleged in the viral posts.
The conservative National Review’s Dan McLaughlin said the difference between the total votes cast for the presidential race and the Perdue-Ossoff contest renders “the 95,000 number … mathematically impossible.”
McLaughlin also pointed out that one could look to the election in Maine — where Republican Sen. Susan Collins received 55,468 more votes than Trump as of Nov. 12.
That “means that some voters went for Biden and Collins, as voters have been doing as long as there have been elections,” McLaughlin wrote, later adding: “Split-ticket voting is not fraud, and there is nothing unusual about it.”
Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us in an email that it’s “difficult to assess the accuracy of the factual claims being made” about “Biden-only” ballots.
“How do these folks know how many voters selected Biden or Trump for president but skipped the Senate race?” he said. “Knowing that would require individual-level information from ballots, not aggregation information about ballots cast in each race.”
Burden also said it’s common that voters “choose a candidate at the top of the ballot and then ‘roll off’ as they move down the ballot. There is nothing suspicious about lower participation in lower level races.”
And “even in an era of strong partisanship, some voters split their tickets. That is precisely why aggregate totals can be deceptive when trying to reach conclusions about individual voter behavior.”
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, made note of many voters straying from party-line votes during a press conference on Nov. 9.
“The other thing we’ve discovered is, from our initial assessment, there was a lot of ticket-splitting going on,” he said.
Biden’s lead in Georgia stood at about 14,000 votes on Nov. 12. Georgia’s secretary of state has announced the state will conduct a hand recount of the presidential race.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here.
This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here for more.
Burden, Barry. Director, Elections Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Email to FactCheck.org. 12 Nov 2020.
“Georgia Election Results.” New York Times. Accessed 12 Nov 2020.
“Georgia Secretary of State Update on 2020 Election.” C-SPAN. 11 Nov 2020.
“Maine Election Results 2020.” Politico. Accessed 12 Nov 2020.
McLaughlin, Dan. “No, There Were Not 95,000 Biden-Only Ballots in Georgia.” National Review. 11 Nov 2020.
“News Conference on Georgia Vote Count.” C-SPAN. 9 Nov 2020.
So, then the question remains, Cortes’ assertions aside, what is the proportion of genuinely Biden-only to genuinely Trump-only ballots (where only the Presidential race was voted on) in Georgia — no disputes in frickin’ MAINE, as far as I know — compared to the Dem-to-GOP proportion in most Presidential election years?
I suppose that question would be resolved by an audit, or even a real recount — as opposed to the let’s-throw-this-thing-to-Biden exercise that just concluded — in which at least some of the hinky, genuinely Biden-only ballots would get thrown out.
Indeed. To get to the bottom of this thing, you need to go all the way, not just look in corners that favor our candidate.
Leftists suck and they ALWAYS lie. Always.
RE: what is the proportion of genuinely Biden-only to genuinely Trump-only ballots (where only the Presidential race was voted on) in Georgia
Here’s what we know as per this report:
https://news.yahoo.com/georgia-gop-chairman-citing-biden-133908310.html
(EXCERPT)
“There were unusually large numbers of people who voted only for Joe Biden and in no other election,” David Shafer, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, told National Review. “We don’t know what that means. We don’t know if it’s an irregularity or if it’s just evidence that there is support for Republicans down the ticket.”
Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff received just shy of 100,000 fewer votes than Biden. Republican incumbent Sen. David Perdue received about 800 more votes than Trump.
(End Excerpt)
What the statement above does not tell us is this -— were there ballots WITH NO OTHER VOTES IN THEM ( local or senate or congressional ) but only a mark for Biden or Trump?
If the answer is yes, by how much did Biden win in such “President-only” marked ballots?
If it’s just a few hundreds, maybe we can say it isn’t unusual.
But if it is by nearly a hundred thousand, then there is cause for suspicion of pre-designed voting.
How can we tell without an audit? Georgia never did one, all they did was a recount.
“Why do you keep posting left wing garbage on this site?”
Agreed. If I want to waste my time with this trash, I can just watch CNN, or listen to NPR.
“We found ONE - so it’s ALL not true!!!”
Let me make my example more clear.
If we have a vote and there are two races to vote for, and only the first ever gets votes, what do you take away from that?
Either something is keeping the second race from being voted on, or the first race didn’t really get all the votes it got, if any votes.
Now, what are the odds in the election covering dozens of races all were shorted the same amount and only the first one got the votes?
Also, why would numbers at night show no other race getting incremented during these overnight off hours? In other words, how does Biden jump 100,000 votes at the same time no other race gets anything? That tells us these weren’t simple situations in which people were randomly not voting for some down ballot races while making sure they voted for Biden.
So we can know individual ballots based on only Biden numbers changing during a period of time and we can know these votes had only Biden votes on the entire ballot.
No, there could be Perdue / Ossoff only votes too which did not select anyone for President, especially if they needed to dilute the vote total of Perdue to cause a runoff.
No; one does not include fraud. It has to be “not”.
I agree we can’t be afraid to see what we see. A lot of voters sickened by believing lies lies lies, fakepeachment, Russia, swamp.
I do personally think the vote counting in urban Dem strongholds was corrupt for years but was cocky and careless this time after all the propaganda and conditioning from covid, riots, etc.
The Enemedia Crime Syndicate continues to gaslight.
I agree with the posting of occasional articles like this one, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to waste my time refuting it.
I grew up on a farm, I know cattle shit when I see it.
Bullshite fact free reality check from a “fact” checker who doesn’t check.
Wait for the Audit, which will file next week. Any and all mail in ballots that cannot be verified will be... rejected and removed from the count. GA state Law applied in an Audit.
100K is a low ball figure of the biden only and no down ballot votes on pristine, single folded batches of ballots.
that and the machine vote reversals and the data dump from Germany. Bang, zoom. zip pfffft.
When those 100,000 all came in at the same time, that’s stretching the characteristization that “many voters only vote for president” way too thin.
The majority on a jury would not buy that as a legitimate explanation. Jeesh, the shit some people will spew knowing news-rags will eat it up and repeat it.
RE: My concern is a lot of people on the right are hearing what they want to hear and are not evaluating what they are hearing.
Don’t stop at the article, READ ON. There are many FReepers who responded to this so-called Fact Check with good reasoning as well. The irregularity has NOT been totally refuted by this “Fact Check”.
Ignore the usual one liners like “Fact Check sucks” they are of no use to us for purposes of finding the truth.
See Posts #25, #28 and #29 as examples of good counter arguments.
RE: When those 100,000 all came in at the same time, that’s stretching the characteristization that “many voters only vote for president” way too thin.
How did you know that all those 100,000 came in AT THE SAME TIME? This is Georgia. Where was this reported?
Talking in relativistic terms is what the left does. Truth is not subjective; we are after the truth, which “FactCheck.org” never is.
RE: 100K is a low ball figure of the biden only and no down ballot votes on pristine, single folded batches of ballots.
Yes, I’ve heard about the pristine, single folded batches of ballots. I’d like to read more about them. Did they come in the same batch? WHO was elected in them? How NUMEROUS ARE THEY? <— these questions were never answered.
The only way to truly check the votes is by a hand recount of the original ballots not the machine made ballots!!
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