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Trump tried to squeeze more votes out of a county he won by 40 points [1]
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Date: 2023-08-16
In case you missed it, over 24 hours before Fani Willis won her indictment against Donald Trump, CNN reported that her case against Trump and Trumpworld got exponentially stronger. Apparently Willis’ team has a tranche of text messages and emails tying Trump’s legal team to a voting system breach in Coffee County, west of Waycross, shortly before the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Fellow Daily Kos community member Witgren diaried on it on Sunday, but one anecdote about this story is positively comical. In his efforts to wrest Georgia’s 13 electoral votes away from Joe Biden, Trump was trying to wrangle more votes out of one of the reddest counties in the state. Specifically, Trump carried it 69-29—a whopping 40-point margin. Apparently Trump seized on the fact that Coffee County used Dominion Voting Systems to power its voting machines.
As we now know, Trump’s legal team had known as early as Nov. 14, 2020 that all the chatter about Dominion that was floating around the deplorable tubes was complete, unadulterated bullshit. And yet, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis held a bonkers press conference airing that very bullshit five days later. Now, as the indictment reveals, that very same bullshit led Trumpworld to try to wring more votes out of a county that is as red as a Georgia Bulldogs jersey.
Specifically, six counts in the indictment, along with at least 15 of the overt acts in the racketeering count, deal with an attempt to breach voting machines in Coffee County in hopes of proving that the machines had flipped votes from Trump to Biden. Powell engaged IT firm SullivanStrickler to scour voting systems across Georgia and other states for evidence of malfeasance. As part of that effort, a number of SullivanStrickler employees traveled to Coffee County and scoured election equipment. A lawyer for the firm subsequently said that it was operating under the assumption that Powell and others were authorized to access the machines, and did not know that it was doing anything illegal.
It cannot be stated enough—in his attempt to steal Georgia, Trump was trying to wring more votes out of a county that he won by 40 points. It’s also somewhat rural—only 43,000 people. Just over 15,000 votes were cast in 2016—10,600 for Trump and 4,500 for Biden. Moreover, he won it by a margin almost identical to his 68-29 margin over Hillary Clinton, in which just over 14,000 total votes were cast.
A little more history is in order here. Coffee County flipped from a 61-38 win for Jimmy Carter in 1980 to a 61-38 win for Ronald Reagan in 1984. Bill Clinton is the only Democrat to come anywhere close to carrying it since then, and he and Michael Dukakis are the only Democrats to get north of 40 percent of the vote.
This, friends, is how comical things were in Trumpworld. They were so determined to “Stop the Steal” that they were trying to wring more votes out of a rural south Georgia county that would vote for a comatose Republican—and even then, wouldn’t have given Trump even a fraction of the votes he needed to overtake Biden. From where I’m sitting, this is one situation where Trump and friends don’t have a good faith explanation. This stunt alone may have just slammed the jail door behind them.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/16/2187283/-Trump-tried-to-squeeze-more-votes-out-of-a-county-he-won-by-40-points
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