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Since she nearly lost the race to Georgia's governor six months ago, Stacey Abrams said she had "won" the elections. Recently, on April 28, she told the New York Times Magazine: "I can not say that everyone who tried to vote would have voted for me, but if you look at all the information, you just have to demonstrate that so many people have been deprived of their rights and disengaged by the mere fact of the person who won the elections that I feel comfortable saying now: "I won."
This absurd statement is based on a series of misleading statements that Abrams made about the loss of voting rights of voters. Abrams published in The New York Times on May 15 a commentary entitled "We Can not Resign to Forfeiture and Withdrawal of Voting Rights," further describes these questionable and tendentious claims.
This kind of thing started even before the end of the campaign. As for vaccinating herself, Abrams accused her opponent, Brian Kemp, of creating an "atmosphere of fear" during a debate that took place two weeks before polling day. The voters of Georgia, she proclaimed, "have been purged, they have been suppressed, they have been afraid."
With all the attention Abrams has received as a rising star of the Democratic Party and a presumptive candidate for the party's vice-president for 2020, one might think that his bragging claims about the election in Georgia will make subject to closer scrutiny. Specifically, there is a special type of journalist who exists solely to verify factual statements made by politicians.
Incredibly, however, not a single fact-finder in the media blamed Abrams for having claimed that she had "won" the election, an assertion that is based on various empirical assumptions. . PolitiFact did not do it. FactCheck.org did not do it. Snopes? Nope. The saved document has not been saved here. To his credit, the Washington Post verified some untruthful facts about the crackdown on voters in Georgia when Hillary Clinton tried to claim to have lost the year 2016 for unfair reasons. But Abrams herself has never been questioned.
Let's start with his most basic statement. In fact, she lost the election of 50,000 votes. Although this is a narrow margin in an election where millions of votes have been cast, it is not narrow enough to argue seriously who is the winner. The first answer would therefore be that Abrams's claim that she "won" the election is rhetorical.
Under pressure from the New York Times Magazine, Abrams makes some concessions. "I have no empirical evidence that I would have gotten a larger number of votes. However, I have enough doubts about the process, and I feel it is sufficient enough, on the process to say that this is not a fair election, "she said. She also tries to move "I've won" in this context to the whole metaphorical domain. "My most important point is, look, I won because we turned the electorate, we fired people who had never voted, we beat all the Democrats of the 39, history of Georgia, "she adds.
One could say that taking this literally when Abrams makes its claim with such caveats does not deserve a factual check. This does not, however, prevent fact checkers from being hyper-literal to the point of becoming completely obtuse-as long as the title is bad for the kind of politicians the auditors do not like.
For example, PolitiFact has already told Senator Rand Paul "FALSE" for saying, "The average federal employee earns $ 120,000 a year. The average private employee earns $ 60,000 a year. " Paul's numbers were not only fundamentally correct, but he slightly underestimated the actual amounts. The reasoning of PolitiFact was that because Paul used the more common verb "done" and did not specify that the figures were about total compensation rather than salary, he was misleading. Which is ridiculous, since it is unlikely that the average taxpayer would be more understanding once he learned that federal employees were just earning $ 30,000 more per year in salary, the rest of the disparity resides in the fact that federal employees get a block of benefits equivalent to four times the private salary. sector average.
It is safe to say in its degree of useless literalism, PolitiFact was more misleading than Paul. In evaluating Stacey Abrams's comments, it is far more convincing to repeatedly claim that she "wins" the election – especially when she concedes herself that she has been challenged: "I have no empirical evidence that I would have gotten a greater number of votes" – is misleading, and perhaps deliberately.
And if we want to talk about context-based literalism, it could be said that no politician has brought out the overwhelming literalism of truth auditors more than Donald Trump. The current Washington Post analysis says, as we write, "In 828 days, President Trump made 10,111 false or misleading statements," and the New York Times published equally remarkable accounts. Although it is difficult to defend Trump's relationship with the facts, to claim that he has lied, it is often necessary to remain deaf, nuance and contextual to the point of absurdity.
For example, according to the Post, this is one of Trump's lies: "It was discovered that I had more Indian blood in me than [Elizabeth Warren] made. And then, it was determined that I did not have one. Most reasonable people would read this and understand that Trump, famous for provoking opponents, uses a hyperbole to roast Senator Warren on her claims that she would be a Native American – claims she had apparently used to make advance his career in academia – when it turns out that Warren, by his own admission, may not exceed 1/1024th American by birth. The post office is reformulating an obvious joke: how exactly is there less Indian blood? – in a misleading statement.
Access Trump's factual checks and you'll find a lot more. Journalists are tired of hearing the cliché about Trump, but this sort of thing is perfectly illustrative to take it literally and not seriously. If we apply these norms of literalism in a uniform way, Abrams deserves ample verification of the facts, regardless of the rhetorical clarification that follows the statement that she "won".
Okay, let's look at the broader context and assume Abrams says "I won" on the assumption that the process was unfair and that voters were being repressed. In his "No-Concession Speech" last fall, Abrams said: "Despite a record population in Georgia, more than a million citizens have been struck off their names by the secretary of state. " the secretary of state who did that is Brian Kemp, his opponent in the elections. It is indeed true that the Kemp office has eliminated 1.4 million registered voters in Georgia since 2010.
But it is misleading to suggest that by removing voters from voters' lists, Kemp was doing anything suspicious. The law requires state secretaries to purge voter registrations. "The National Electoral Registration Act 1993 stipulates that state and municipal election officials ensure the accuracy of registration lists by removing the names of deceased, displaced or failed members in the subsequent vote. Voters convicted of a crime, declared incompetent or declared non-citizens can also be dismissed, "notes a joint Carnegie-Knight News21 report on the Center for Public Integrity website. "The United States Electoral Assistance Commission reported that 15 million names were dropped from the national lists in 2014."
Thus, the cleansing of voters lists in Georgia is not abnormal and, in fact, is required by federal law. Nevertheless, in his recent editorial in the New York Times, Abrams again asserts that this claim is unfounded, for suspicious purposes. "Across the country, electoral purges use an easy-to-manipulate rule that eligible voters who have exercised their right of first vote to abstain from voting in previous elections can be struck out of the roll. -she writes.
Yet, there is no reason to believe that this rule is being "manipulated". According to the same Carnegie-Knight News21 report, "News21 analyzed lists of nearly 50 million registered voters from a dozen states and 7 million more who were removed from the polls. last year. By comparing voter registration and purge lists with US Census data, News21 found no discrimination at the national or national level with respect to race, ethnicity, poverty, age, or age. Last name ".
Despite various highly selective and deliberately selected data points that have been launched by Abrams and his supporters, there is no good reason to believe that significant voter suppression efforts have been made in Georgia. Rather the opposite.
"If the Georgian Brian Kemp is a vote suppressor, he is the least successful suffrage suppressor.The participation rate in Georgia was huge.In the previous election as governor, the Republican Nathan Deal had obtained 1.3 Million votes in November, Abrams had lost 1.9 million votes, "David French, of the National Review, said:" In 2014, more than 3.9 million Georgians voted, almost 2.5 million in total, almost the total number of votes cast for the presidency in 2016. "
In addition, for the past eight years that Kemp has held the position of Secretary of State, the registration of African-American voters has increased by 31%, which represents 462,000 new voters, a higher total than for Whites. And while the Atlanta Constitution, Georgia's dominant newspaper, responds to the Democrats' assertions, the time has come to find some of these "repressed" and "scared" voters to have a problem. Voters purged from the lists were either dead, no longer living in Georgia, or apathetic.
"The Atlanta Journal-Constitution tried last week to contact 50 people randomly selected from the list of voters served in 2017," the newspaper reported. "Twenty people would clearly not be eligible to vote in Georgia: 17 people left the state, two were convicted of crimes and one died. Most others have left a trail of changes in address and phone numbers disconnected. "
Suffice it to say that it would be an unnecessary race at this point to revisit what the auditors said about Trump's election fraud allegations in 2016, let alone revert to the general media stigma when 39; he stated that he would not automatically accept the results of the 2016 edition. Election.
Still, we are in 2019 and the New York Times publishes titles such as "Why Stacey Abrams always says that she won" and leaves her readers misleading on the opinion page, and the auditors of Media facts are lacking in action. Someone should give Abrams a hell of pants and a ladle on some Pinocchios. She deserved it.
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