Tuesday, January 22, 2019

ADD ELECTORAL FRAUD TO THE CHARGES BEING LEVELED AT KAMALA HARRIS BY THE RIGHT (updated)

Here's item #2 on Breitbart's list of "seven key facts" about Kamala Harris, who officially entered the presidential race yesterday:
2. Kamala Harris barely won her first race for California Attorney General in 2010. As in many of the 2018 congressional races in California, Harris won despite losing on Election Night: “Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley had declared victory on election night, only to see the race flip-flop between the two candidates in the coming days as counties around the state continued to tally mail-in and provisional ballots,” SFGate.com reported.
Without saying it outright, Breitbart's Joel Pollak is implying that the candidate who's "losing on Election Night" should automatically be declared the loser, even though that ignores how California elections work. It's routine for large numbers of mail-in and provisional ballots to remain uncounted on Election Night -- yes, Cooley led (and declared victory) a few hours after the polls closed, but he was trailing by the following morning, although the race wasn't officially called until a couple of weeks later. Cooley conceded -- he didn't pursue a recount and didn't level any charges of fraud.

The Breitbart piece compares Harris's 2010 victory to the wins by many California Democratic House candidates in 2018. Paul Ryan and other Republicans want those victories to be under a cloud of suspicion.
A growing chorus of Republicans are casting doubts about the integrity of the voting system in California, where the party lost at least six House seats in the midterm election — including a handful where the GOP at first appeared to have emerged victorious on election night.

A sentiment that began as a murmur among hard-line conservatives jumped to the Republican mainstream Thursday when House Speaker Paul Ryan suggested that the state’s “bizarre” voting system “just defies logic to me,” and may have contributed to the GOP’s historic thumping in California.

"We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race," Ryan said Thursday....
Like fringe-right allegations that she's not a "natural born citizen" because she was born in America as the child of two immigrants, the suggestion that Harris won a key race in her career through electoral shenanigans won't be a major part of the right's assault on her if she's on the 2020 Democratic ticket. But your right-wing relatives will definitely mention it on Facebook. It'll be out there.

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UPDATE: Sorry, did I use the word "fringe" in reference to the birther allegations about Harris? They may have started at list sites like this one, but they've moved in from the fringe:

Jacob Wohl, an Internet troll who plotted to smear special counsel Robert Mueller as a sexual predator, has launched a new conspiracy theory falsely suggesting that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is not an American citizen....


Harris was born in Oakland. She's a citizen. Case closed.

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UPDATE: Go to Media Matters if you want to know where this idea came from and how it spread. (QAnon and Reddit are involved, naturally.)

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