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Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Peachy Mountain!

Joe Biden has enough delegates to be the Democratic Party's nominee for president. He will face a tough road ahead. Republicans are determined to cheat yet again. Donald Trump and Republicans already proven that in the Georgia primaries.
Democratic candidate Joe Biden has managed to secure the nomination back a week ago, but today I want to proudly state that the former vice president will be the presumptive nominee going into August.

Biden won the Georgia and West Virginia Democratic Primaries.

Biden won West Virginia with nearly 70% of the vote. His opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who suspended his campaign carried only 15% of the vote while the rest earned the remaining 15%.

Biden won Georgia with 87% of the vote. Sanders won 13% of the vote. The other candidates only managed to get less than .01% of the vote.

He will face off against President Donald J. Trump, the Republican incumbent who is facing criticism and scrutiny throughout his term. Trump's surprise victory has shaken the status quo in American politics. Since he's been in office, the country is divided.

We are facing a global pandemic that has killed over 125,000 Americans. The coronavirus is not going away. The deadly virus has been spiking in the areas where restrictions were eased. Trump's failure to get control of this disease has now put healthcare front and center. Trump and Republicans are still trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.
Gov. Brian Kemp. He was then Secretary of State for Georgia. He oversaw the election results and refused to step aside to focus on his governors race. He literally cheated Democrat Stacey Abrams out of votes in cities like Atlanta, Columbus, Athens, Macon and Savannah.

We are facing civil unrest. The most recent high-profile incidents where Black men and Black women being killed by police and vigilantes has now sparked unrest in many communities. The rage sparked from the George Floyd killing. African Americans are calling for police reform, striping military equipment from cops and holding "bad cops" accountable for their actions. Trump and Republicans have opposed the notion of police reform. Trump has called most protesters, thugs and wants to label antifa a "terrorist" group.

We have an unemployment crisis. There are 45 million Americans out of the labor force. Some states are starting to ease restrictions and some furloughed are returning to a new normal. Private equity has destroyed legendary companies. With COVID-19 still an issue, Walmart, Kroger, Target, Home Depot, Lowes, McDonald's and many national brands have cut hours back and closed stores.

We now have voter suppression and Republicans deliberately trying to keep Americans from voting.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and his secretary of state Brad Raffensperger are under fire this messy primary. Many Georgians had to wait in line for hours to
Georgia voters in urban areas like Atlanta had to wait in line for hours to vote.
Biden's presidential campaign called the situation "completely unacceptable." Georgia Republicans deflected responsibility to metro Atlanta’s heavily minority and Democratic-controlled counties, while President Donald Trump’s top campaign attorney decried “the chaos in Georgia.”

It raised the specter of a worst-case November scenario: a decisive state, like Florida and its “hanging chads” and “butterfly ballots” in 2000, remaining in dispute long after polls close. Meanwhile, Trump, Biden and their supporters could offer competing claims of victory or question the election’s legitimacy, inflaming an already boiling electorate.

At Trump’s campaign headquarters, senior counsel Justin Clark blamed Georgia’s vote-by-mail push amid the COVID-19 pandemic, alluding to the president’s argument that absentee voting yields widespread fraud.

"Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud," read the conclusion of a bipartisan 2005 report authored by the Commission on Federal Election Reform, which was chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker.

That conclusion has been echoed elsewhere. A 2012 article in The New York Times was headlined: "Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises." The article states that "votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show."
Gov. Jim Justice ran as a Democrat to win the West Virginia race. He switched parties shortly after and is now running as a Republican.
Experts have said that a "genuine absentee ballot fraud scandal" is underway in a recent New Jersey city council election. Nevertheless, Twitter and other sites have suggested that mail-in balloting does not increase the risk of fraud, and have sought to censor contrary views.

"The American people want to know that the results of an election accurately reflect the will of the voters,” Clark said. “The only way to make sure that the American people will have faith in the results is if people who can, show up and vote in person."

Rachana Desai Martin, a top Biden campaign attorney, called the scenes in Georgia a "threat" to democracy. "We only have a few months left until voters around the nation head to the polls again, and efforts should begin immediately to ensure that every Georgian — and every American — is able to safely exercise their right to vote," she said.

Martin stopped short of assigning blame, but two Georgia Democrats on Biden’s list of potential running mates pointed at Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who led the selection of Georgia’s new voting machine system and invited every active voter to request an absentee ballot.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms tweeted at Raffensperger about problems in pockets of metro Atlanta. “Is this happening across the county or just on the south end,” the Democrat asked, referring to an area with a heavily black population.

Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor and an Atlanta resident, tweeted that “Georgians deserve better” and that Raffensperger “owns this disaster.” Abrams established herself as a voting rights advocate after she refused to concede her 2018 race against now-Gov. Brian Kemp.

Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, has a history of slow vote tabulation. Its local elections chief, Richard Barron, called Tuesday a “learning experience" while alluding to the state's role in the primary process.



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