Just a couple of days ago, it looked like the nominally Republican Secretary of State for Georgia (for the Media Matters goobers, I’m referring to the US state, not the country defeated 0-1 by North Macedonia yesterday in that sport where grown men run around a field in short pants and drop on the ground and scream whenever anyone looks at them hard) Brad Raffensperger was finally coming out of a semi-comatose state and comprehending the disaster he was presiding over when he ordered a hand recount of ballots, see Good News, Georgia Sec of State Announces Hand Recount of the Vote.

A recount, per se, would catch some shenanigans but the real purpose of the recount was to get a handle on which ballots cast were actually legal. In other words, did signatures match on absentee ballots, could one verify the chain of custody of the ballots, etc. Now it seems that all the Georgia GOP really got was a cursory recount under an extreme time crunch.

This is the letter that was just sent to the Secretary of State by the Georgia GOP asking, in essence, wtf?

Anyone who is not a cheat will be concerned by this.https://t.co/B2qDWaTiIS pic.twitter.com/lyJDtbmLBP

— CiceroConsultancy (@CiceroConsulta1) November 13, 2020

Why have Georgia counties been told to certify results by 5pm tomorrow (before the recount is finished)?

Why isn’t signature review part of the process?

If the SOS’s stated goal is to “build public confidence,” these issues need to be addressed. https://t.co/FymosDWPFO

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) November 13, 2020

Via CBS46 News:

“You stated yesterday that the process would be “an audit, a recount and a recanvass all at once” and would help “build public confidence. However, the training and directives issued today do not comport with your stated goals yesterday and do not satisfy our concerns that gave rise to our request for a hand count in the first place,” wrote Shafer and Sen. Collins.

Their issues include:

1. The audit does not include a review of signatures on absentee ballot applications and ballot envelopes to confirm the validity of the statutory signature verification process by the counties.
2. We have concerns about meaningful access to the auditing process by our designated monitors. Your office announced today that the state parties can designate only one reviewer for every 10 audit teams. That makes it impossible for hand count decisions to be reviewed in real time.
3. We are very troubled by the directive issued today that counties must certify their results by 5:00 P.M. tomorrow. Given that the audit and recount will necessarily still be ongoing, it is completely improper for counties to be directed to certify the accuracy of the results before the audit and hand count are completed.
4. We had expected to receive by yesterday the parameters for the hand count in order to provide sufficient time to the public of the process to be followed. However, your training and guidance were issued only within the last few hours and the counties are directed to start the audit tomorrow.
5. The security of the paper ballots is critically important. Aside from a single passing reference about security during today’s training, the Secretary of State’s office provided no substantive guidance regarding the necessity of maintaining the security of the ballots, the transporting of ballots, and documenting the chain of custody as required by law.

The letter continued, “We appreciate your decision to proceed with the hand count as well as your public commitment to transparency and openness. The purpose of this letter is to identify the ways in which the announced process is counter to that intended purpose.”

Read this carefully. All Raffensperger actually did was issue a recount order that is meaningless in order to be able to say that he’d done all he could do to ensure the Georgia election was free and fair. This is the kind of gutless bullsh** we’ve come to expect from GOP establishment types and it is the reason that so many problems have cropped up in this election. And it isn’t just the secretary of state, the GOP controls all the levers of state power. The governor, attorney general, and significant majorities in both houses of the Georgia legislature. And yet this bullsh** is allowed to happen.

If this goes forward, all it will do is bake in the results of the shenanigans pulled by the Democrat machine in Atlanta and in Fulton County which seems to have had a helluva lot of “good luck” in handing a “win” to Joe Biden. Worse, it won’t even provide the political cover the legislature would need to right the situation by certifying its own slate of electors to offset the ill-gotten gains in this election.

At some point the people we elect need to understand that the purpose of being elected to office is to govern in a way that forwards the policy objectives of your party. Nothing is being served in allowing the Democrats to not only get away with this but providing them with an Immunity Idol in the process.