data integrity gp

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">covers both hannity producr epoch BS and coffee cty dominion</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2023/08/15/here-are-19-people-named-sweeping-indictments-against-donald-trump/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2023/08/15/here-are-19-people-named-sweeping-indictments-against-donald-trump/</a></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="" /><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Here are the 19 people named in the sweeping indictment against Donald Trump</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Here is a list of who is named in Fani Willis’ sweeping indictment of the nation’s 45th president and his allies.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By Tim Darnell, Atlanta News First staff and The Associated Press</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Published: Aug. 14, 2023 at 8:32 PM PDT|Updated: 6 minutes ago</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ sweeping indictment from her investigation into alleged attempts by former President Donald Trump to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election includes some of the most prominent figures in the Republican Party.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It comes just two weeks after the Justice Department special counsel charged him in a vast conspiracy to overturn the election, underscoring how prosecutors after lengthy investigations that followed the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol have now, two-and-a-half years later, taken steps to hold Trump to account for an assault on the underpinnings of American democracy.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Though the indictment is centered on Trump’s efforts to subvert election results in just one state, its sprawling web of defendants stands apart from the more tightly-targeted case brought by special counsel Jack Smith, which so far only names Trump as a defendant. The Georgia case also stands out because, unlike the two federal prosecutions he faces, Trump would not have the opportunity to try to pardon himself if elected president.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">FULL COVERAGE: Timeline, history and key players of historic indictment in Georgia</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” says the indictment issued Monday night by the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The indictment charges Trump with making false statements and writings for a series of claims he made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other state election officials on Jan. 2, 2021, including that up to 300,000 ballots “were dropped mysteriously into the rolls” in the 2020 election, that more than 4,500 people voted who weren’t on registration lists and that a Fulton County election worker, Ruby Freeman, was a “professional vote scammer.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Here are the 19 people named in the indictment:</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- DONALD TRUMP: Then-President Donald Trump fixated on Georgia after the 2020 general election, refusing to accept his narrow loss in the state and making unfounded assertions of widespread election fraud there. He also called top state officials, including Gov. Brian Kemp, to urge them to find a way to reverse his loss in the state. In a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump suggested the state’s top elections official could help “find” the votes needed for him to win the state. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis opened an investigation into possible illegal attempts to influence the election shortly after a recording of that call was made public.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- RUDY GIULIANI: During several legislative hearings at the Georgia Capitol in December 2020, the former New York mayor and Trump attorney promoted unsupported allegations of widespread election fraud in Georgia. Prosecutors have said Rudy Giuliani was also involved a plan to have 16 Georgia Republicans serve as fake electors, falsely swearing that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- JOHN EASTMAN: A former dean of Chapman University law school in Southern California, John Eastman, one of Trump’s lawyers, was deeply involved in some of his efforts to remain in power after the 2020 election. He wrote a memo arguing that Trump could remain in power if then-Vice President Mike Pence overturned the results of the election during a joint session of Congress where electoral votes would be counted. That plan included putting in place a slate of “alternate” electors in seven battleground states, including Georgia, who would falsely certify that Trump had won their states.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- MARK MEADOWS: Trump’s chief of staff visited Cobb County, in the Atlanta suburbs, while state investigators were conducting an audit of the signatures on absentee ballot envelopes in December 2020. Mark Meadows obtained the phone number of the chief investigator for the secretary of state’s office, Frances Watson, and passed it along to Trump, who called her. He also participated in the Jan. 2, 2021, phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- SIDNEY POWELL: A lawyer and staunch Trump ally, Sidney Powell was part of a group who met at the South Carolina home of conservative attorney Lin Wood in November 2020 “for the purpose of exploring options to influence the results of the November 2020 elections in Georgia and elsewhere,” prosecutors have said. Wood, who’s licensed in Georgia, said Powell asked him to help find Georgia residents to serve as plaintiffs in lawsuits contesting the state’s election results. Additionally, emails and documents obtained through subpoenas in an unrelated lawsuit have shown that Powell was involved in arranging for a computer forensics team to travel to rural Coffee County, about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, to copy data and software from elections equipment there in January 2021.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- KENNETH CHESEBRO: Prosecutors have said Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney, worked with Georgia Republicans in the weeks after the November 2020 election at the direction of Trump’s campaign. Chesebro worked on the coordination and execution of a plan to have 16 Georgia Republicans sign a certificate declaring falsely that Trump won and declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- JEFFREY CLARK: A U.S. Justice Department official who championed Trump’s false claims of election fraud, Jeffrey Clark presented colleagues with a draft letter pushing Georgia officials to convene a special legislative session on the election results, according to testimony before the U.S. House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Clark wanted the letter sent, but Justice Department superiors refused.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- JENNA ELLIS: The lawyer appeared with Rudy Giuliani at a Dec. 3, 2020, hearing hosted by state Republican lawmakers at the Georgia Capitol during which false allegations of election fraud were made. Jenna Ellis also wrote at least two legal memos to Trump and his attorneys advising that Pence should “disregard certified electoral college votes from Georgia and other purportedly ‘contested’ states” when Congress met to certify the election results on Jan. 6, 2021, prosecutors have said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- RAY SMITH: A Georgia-based lawyer, Ray Smith was involved in multiple lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. He also gathered witnesses to provide testimony before Georgia legislative subcommittee hearings held in December 2020 on alleged issues with the state’s election.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- ROBERT CHEELEY: A Georgia lawyer, Robert Cheeley presented video clips to legislators of election workers at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta and alleged the workers were counting votes twice or sometimes three times. He spoke to the lawmakers after Giuliani.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- MICHAEL ROMAN: A former White House aide who served as the director of Trump’s election day operations, Michael Roman was involved in efforts to put forth a set of fake electors after the 2020 election.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- DAVID SHAFER: The chairman of the Georgia GOP, Shafer was one of 16 state Republicans who met at the state Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign a certificate declaring falsely that Trump had won and also declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors. He also joined Trump in a lawsuit challenging the certification of the 2020 election in Georgia.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- SHAWN STILL: He was one of 16 Georgia Republicans who signed a certificate falsely stating that Trump had won the state and declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors. Shawn Still was the finance chairman for the state GOP in 2020 and served as a Georgia delegate to the Republican National Convention that year. He was elected to the Georgia state Senate in November 2022 and represents a district in Atlanta’s suburbs.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- STEPHEN CLIFFGARD LEE: Prosecutors say Stephen Cliffgard Lee, a pastor, worked with others to try to pressure Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman and her daughter after Trump and his allies falsely accused them of pulling fraudulent ballots from a suitcase during the vote count. Lee allegedly knocked on Freeman’s door, frightening her and causing her to call 911 three times, prosecutors said in a court filing last year.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- HARRISON WILLIAM PRESCOTT FLOYD: Also known as Willie Lewis Floyd III, he served as director of Black Voices for Trump, and is accused of recruiting Lee to arrange a meeting with Freeman and Chicago-based publicist Trevian Kutti.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">- TREVIAN C. KUTTI: Prosecutors allege publicist Trevian C. Kutti claimed to have high level law enforcement connections. They say Freeman met with Kutti at a police precinct, where she brought Floyd into the conversation on a speakerphone. Prosecutors say Kutti presented herself as someone who could help Freeman but then pressured her to falsely confess to election fraud.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">- CATHY LATHAM: One of 16 Georgia Republicans who signed a certificate falsely stating that Trump had won the state and declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors, Cathy Latham was also<b> chair of the Coffee County Republican Party.</b> She was at the county elections office for much of the day on Jan. 7, 2021, and welcomed a computer forensics team that arrived to copy software and data from the county’s election equipment in what the secretary of state’s office has said was “unauthorized access” to the machines.</span></div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">- SCOTT GRAHAM HALL: An Atlanta-area bail bondsman, Scott Graham Hall was allegedly involved in commandeering voting information that was the property of Dominion Voting Systems from Coffee County, a small south Georgia jurisdiction. Also charged in the scheme were Powell, Latham and former county elections supervisor Misty Hampton.</span></div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">- MISTY HAMPTON: She was the elections director in Coffee County. Misty Hampton was present in the county elections office on Jan. 7, 2021, when a computer forensics team copied software and data from the county’s election equipment. She also allowed two other men who had been active in efforts to question the 2020 election results to access the elections office later that month and to spend hours inside with the equipment.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Willis’ indictments come after months of speculation into whether the first-term Fulton County district attorney would bring charges against the nation’s 45th president. Among the former president’s mounting legal troubles, Willis’ indictments mark the second time Trump has been linked to any alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Those charges include allegedly pressuring Georgia election officials to change the election’s results, including his now-famous phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021.</div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;"><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Act 45.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On or about the 8th day of December 2020, <b>MICHAEL A. ROMAN sent text message to unindicted co-conspirator 1ndividual 4, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, stated that he had spoken to MISTY HAMPTON</b>, and asked unindicted co-conspirator</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Individual to "get" MISTY HAMPTON to attend the hearing before the Georgia</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...</div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">144</div><div style=""><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On or about the 7th day of January 2021,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b style=""> SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL</b>,</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">and </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">MISTY HAMPTON</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">committed the felony offense of INTERFERENCE WITH PRIMARIES AND ELECTIONS,</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">in Violation of O.C.G.A. 21-2-566, in Coffee County, Georgia, by willfully and unlawfully</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">tampering with electronic ballot markers and tabulating ...</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">145</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div>On or about the 7th day of January 2021, SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, and<b> MISTY HAMPTON</b></div><div>committed the felony offense of UNLAWFUL POSSESSION OF BALLOTS, in Violation of O.C.G.A. 21-2-574, in Coffee County, Georgia, by causing certain members ofthe conspiracy, who were not officers charged by law with the care of ballots and who were not persons entrusted by any such officer with the care of ballots for purpose required by law, to possess official ballots outside of the polling place</div><div>in Coffee County, Georgia. This was an overt act in</div><div>
</div><div>furtherance of the conspiracy.</div><div>
</div><div>Act 146.</div><div>
</div><div>On or about the 7th day 0fJanuary 2021, SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, and MISTY HAMPTON</div><div>committed the felony offense of COMPUTER THEFT,</div><div>
</div><div>in Violation of O.C.G.A. 169-93(a),</div><div>in Coffee County, Georgia, by using computer with knowledge that such use was without</div><div>authority and with the intention oftaking and appropriating information, data, and software, the property ofDominion Voting Systems Corporation in Coffee County, Georgia. This was an act of</div><div>racketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 1614-3 (5)(A)(Xix) and an overt act in furtherance ofthe</div><div>conspiracy.</div><div>
</div><div>Act 147.</div><div>
</div><div>On or about the 7th day of January 2021, SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, and MISTY HAMPTON</div><div>committed the felony offense of <b>COMPUTER TRESPASS,</b></div><div>in Violation of O.C.G.A. 16-9- 93(b),</div><div>in Coffee County, Georgia, by using computer with knowledge that such use was without authority and with the intention ofremoving voter data and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation data from said computer</div><div>in Coffee County, Georgia. This was an act of racketeering...</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">148</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div>On or about the 7th day of January 2021, SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, and MISTY HAMPTON</div><div>committed the felony offense o<b>f COMPUTER INVASION OF PRIVACY,</b></div><div>in Violation of O.C.G.A. 16-9-93(c),</div><div>in Coffee County, Georgia, by using computer with the intention of</div><div>examining personal voter data with knowledge that such examination was without authority. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 16-14-3 (5)(A)(xix) and an overt act in</div><div>furtheranCe ofthe conspiracy.</div><div>
</div><div>Act 149.</div><div>
</div><div>On and between the 6th day 0f December 2020 and the 7th day ofJanuary 2021, SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM</div><div>HALL, and MISTY HAMPTON committed the felony ofiense of CONSPIRACY TO</div><div>DEFRAUD THE STATE,</div><div>in Violation of O.C.G.A. 16-10-21, in Cofiee County, Georgia, by unlawfully conspiring and agreeing to commit theft of voter data, property which was under the</div><div>control of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Rafiensperger, state officer, in his official capacity. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 16-14-3 (5)(B) and an overt act in</div><div>furtherance of the conspiracy.</div><div>
</div><div>Act 150.</div><div>
</div><div>On or about the 9th day of January 2021, the 10th day of January 2021, the 11th day 0fJanuary 2021, and the 13th day of January 2021, unindicted co-conspirator</div><div>Individual 25, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from</div><div><b>Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Office</b> in Cofiee County, Georgia, by downloading said data fiom server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. l6-l43(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.</div><div>
</div><div>Act 151.</div><div>
</div><div>On or about the 9th day of January 2021, the 10th day of January 2021, the 11th day 0fJanuary 2021, the 18th day ofJanuary 2021, and the 19th day ofJanuary 2021, unindicted co-conspirator</div><div>Individual 26, whose identity is unknown to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading</div><div>said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering...</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div>On or about the 10th day 0fJanuary 2021, the 12th day of January 2021, the 13th day of January 2021, the 25th day of February 2021, and the 26th day of February 2021, unindicted co-conspirator</div><div>Individual 27, Whose identity is unknown to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading</div><div>said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 16-14-3(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.</div><div>
</div><div>Act 153.</div><div>
</div><div>On or about the 13th day 0fJanuary 2021, unindicted co-conspirator</div><div>Individual 28, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from</div><div>Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. l614-3(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance ofthe conspiracy.</div><div>
</div><div>Act 154.</div><div>
</div><div>On or about the 18th day of January 2021, MISTY HAMPTON allowed unindicted co-</div><div>conspirators</div><div>
</div><div><b>Individual 25 and Individual 29, whose identities are known to the Grand Jury, </b>to access non-public areas of the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coflee County, Georgia, and facilitated their access to Dominion Voting Systems equipment This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.</div><div>
</div><div>Act 155.</div><div>
</div><div>On or about the 22nd day ofApril 2021, unindicted co-conspirator</div><div>
</div><div><b>Individual 28, whose</b></div><div><b>identity is known to the Grand Jury</b>, sent an email to the Chief Operations Ofiicer of SullivanStrickler LLC directing him to transmit all data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Office in Coffee County, Georgia, to unindicted co-conspirator</div><div>Individual 30, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, an attorney associated with SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL and the Trump Campaign. This</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">160</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On or about the 10th day 0fJanuary 2021, the 12th day of January 2021, the 13th day of January 2021, the 25th day of February 2021, and the 26th day of February 2021, unindicted co-conspirator</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Individual 27, Whose identity is unknown to the Grand Jury, </b>unlawfully accessed certain data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 16-14-3(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Act 153.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On or about the 13th day 0fJanuary 2021, unindicted co-conspirator</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Individual 28, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. l614-3(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance ofthe conspiracy.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Act 154.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On or about the <b><u>18th day of January 2021, MISTY HAMPTON allowed unindicted co-</u></b></span></div><div><b><u style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">conspirators</u></b></div><div><b><u style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</u></b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b><u>Individual 25 and Individual 29</u></b>, whose identities are known to the Grand Jury, to access non-public areas of the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coflee County, Georgia, and facilitated their access to Dominion Voting Systems equipment This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Act 155.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On or about the 22nd day of April 2021, unindicted co-conspirator</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Individual 28, whose</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">identity is known to the Grand Jury, sent an email to the Chief Operations Ofiicer of SullivanStrickler LLC directing him to transmit all data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Office in Coffee County, Georgia, to unindicted co-conspirator</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Individual 30, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, an attorney associated with SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL and the Trump Campaign</b>. This...</div></div></div></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mma 922 <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-producer-lynda-mclaughlin-texted-trumps-chief-staff-push-debunked-claims"> </a></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-producer-lynda-mclaughlin-texted-trumps-chief-staff-push-debunked-claims">https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-producer-lynda-mclaughlin-texted-trumps-chief-staff-push-debunked-claims</a></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Newly released text messages show that the executive producer of Sean Hannity's radio show, Lynda McLaughlin, asked then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows for a meeting with President Donald Trump to share “hard data” that “show[ed] proof of the fraud” being pushed by the White House, Fox News, and the entire right-wing media in the 2020 election.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CNN’s Reliable Sources <a href="https://view.newsletters.cnn.com/messages/16643270610489ce4ce24ba40/raw?utm_term=16643270610489ce4ce24ba40&utm_source=cnn_Reliable+Sources+-+September+27%2C+2022&utm_medium=email&bt_ee=kFbtKxM0YnBrYnhEL5iKAJJ9BK29ZEQFz6gzv6kC4%2BitC2SHl%2FcdlD9Dc353gmB3&bt_ts=1664327061051" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">newsletter</a> reported on the text messages, taken from a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/25/ex-staffers-unauthorized-book-about-jan-6-committee-rankles-members/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">new book</a> by former January 6 committee staffer (and former congressman) Denver Riggleman; as noted in the block quote below, CNN independently verified the messages as well.</font></p></div></div><blockquote class="block-quote block-quote--collapsable" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="block-quotequote" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.5rem;"><p style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hannity Producer's Big Ask: In early January 2021, during the politically turbulent time before Joe Biden assumed the office of the presidency, the executive producer of Sean Hannity's radio show sought to meet directly with then-President Donald Trump.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The producer, Lynda McLaughlin, texted Mark Meadows, the former acting chief of staff, with a big ask, claiming she had "hard data" which "show[ed] proof of the fraud" — evidently about the 2020 election. McLaughlin characterized the dubious information as "irrefutable" and wanted to take it straight to Trump.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"Mark -- are we able to present our data to POTUS?" McLaughlin asked.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">…</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The messages underscore the intimate relationship that Hannity, his team, and the right-wing media writ large shared with the Trump White House. The cozy relationship exposed in the messages lays bare that in many cases, right-wing media outlets and personalities not only positively covered the Trump White House, but actively worked arm-in-arm with it.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247);">For instance, when McLaughlin texted Meadows introducing herself ("Hey it's Lynda from Hannity") and told </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Meadows s</span><span style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247);">he was "rallying the troops,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">" </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Meadows replied by thanking her for her "wonderful" contribution and connecting her with the Trump-supporting Rep. Jim Jordan. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">"Jim Jordon [sic] will gladly coordinate with the House team," Meadows texted McLaughlin. "Do you need his contact?"</span></font></p></div></blockquote><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>CNN also reported that “Meadows seemed to stop responding to McLaughlin later in the conversation, after she asked to meet with Trump.”</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This is <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-impressed-his-producers-attempt-overturn-georgias-presidential-election" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">not the first time</a> McLaughlin has been directly involved in stoking right-wing conspiracy theories of election fraud. In December 2020, McLaughlin, as part of the so-called “Data Integrity Group,'' testified to the Georgia Senate Judicial Subcommittee that the group had proof of votes being taken from Trump and given to Joe Biden.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>During the hearing, McLaughlin never revealed her connection to Hannity.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hannity later lauded his producer for her strong efforts to overturn the election [audio]</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247);"> HANNITY (HOST): On December 30</span><span style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 0; position: relative; vertical-align: baseline; top: -0.5em; margin-top: 0px;">th</span><span style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247);">, there is this really incredible group. Lynda McLaughlin works with them, our own Lynda, Data Integrity Group, they actually gave Senate testimony on December 30</span><span style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 0; position: relative; vertical-align: baseline; top: -0.5em; margin-bottom: 0px;">th</span><span style="background-color: rgb(239, 243, 247);"> about Georgia for example, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Elections. Let's see, the people you have involved in this seem pretty impressive to me. You've got one guy is a data scientist with over a decade experience in a lot of industries, what we have here is fraud that we can prove in this election and then I begin to look at the background and the people, one is a nine-year veteran of the US Navy, worked as an electronic warfare technicians, cryptologic technician whatever the hell that is, Arabic linguist, worked at the NSA as a mission manager, later worked as a CIA contractor at the Counter-terrorism Center. And I'm like, "wow."</span></font></p></div></div><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden fielditem" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On January 2, 2021, the claims were amplified by far-right The Epoch Times and its affiliated NTD YouTube channel.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>McLaughlin <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3924586" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">appeared</a> in an interview with The Epoch Times,</b> released on its site on January 5, 2021, in which she suggests election fraud occurred in Pennsylvania as well.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Justin Mealey and Dave Lobue, other members of the “Data Integrity Group,” also appeared on Lou Dobbs' Fox Business show on January 5: vi</span>d]</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the claims from th<b>e <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Data Integrity Group</span> </b><b><a href="https://nickdepsky.medium.com/the-data-integrity-group-and-its-claims-of-election-fraud-debunked-c8307867667c" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">have been debunked</a>.</b></font></p></div></div><div class="paragraph paragraph--type--stories-text paragraph--view-mode--editorial" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="fancy-elems-wrapper field field--name-field-stories-text-formatted field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field__item" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All together, this is another example of the <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/watch-january-6-committee-read-evidence-hypocritical-and-revealing-texts-fox-news-hosts" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">close relationship</a> between Fox News personalities and the Trump White House.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">----</font></p><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://nickdepsky.medium.com/the-data-integrity-group-and-its-claims-of-election-fraud-debunked-c8307867667c">https://nickdepsky.medium.com/the-data-integrity-group-and-its-claims-of-election-fraud-debunked-c8307867667c</a></font></div><div>
</div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx grfc many</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>The “Data Integrity Group” and its Claims of Election Fraud Debunked</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Nick Depsky</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Jan 19, 2021</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">When a relative of mine cited this video by The Epoch Times as evidence that the 2020 presidential election was potentially ‘rigged’, I decided to see if its claims were any more compelling than the many brands of hearsay that had comprised most conspiratorial claims thus far. The video features testimony by four members of ‘The Data Integrity Group’, an organization that was supposedly formed by a group of data scientists that noticed “very strange behavior” in reported vote counts for Donald Trump and Joe Biden on election night and in the days that followed. Having apparently analyzed these running vote totals in every state, the group claims to have found “irregularities” in over 30 states, though this video focuses primarily on Pennsylvania and Georgia.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Video that falsely claims over 400,000 votes were “removed” from Trump in Pennsylvania.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">What sets claims made in this video apart from speculative anecdotes of vote manipulation is the fact that their evidence is purportedly based on unbiased, publicly available datasets, and should, therefore, be reproducible. In fact one of the group’s data scientists implores viewers:</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“I would love to hear it [a refutation of their claims], if you could, you know and that’s the thing, when we release these videos, we put out the dataset, this is what we use, see what you can come up with, right? If you can come up with something and an explanation for what we’re seeing, that’s what we’re here for, it’s the Data Integrity Group, not the Get Donald Trump Elected Group.” —<b> Justin Mealey (intelligence expert & data scientist)</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Deciding to heed Mealey’s call for an alternative explanation as to what they were seeing, I tracked down all of the relevant the datasets they created for Pennsylvania and Georgia, as well as some other forms of evidence they reference. Then, using their own data, I found that every single one of the claims they make is either intentionally misleading or entirely false. My findings are broken down in the following three evaluations of credibility: i) the researchers themselves, ii) the claims and evidence they present (the data section), and iii) the producers of the video.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Credibility of Researchers</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Before I dove into the numbers, I wanted to find out anything I could about the people in the video and about The Data Integrity Group in order to get a sense of likely potential bias or conflicts of interest. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The four members of the group that were interviewed are Lynda McLaughlin, Justin Mealey, Dave Lobue and John Basham, the latter three of which are presented as technical data experts and <b>McLaughlin their ‘Communications Director’.</b></span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Data Integrity Group</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>As far as I can tell, there is no website, parent company page, LinkedIn or any sort of social media account for The Data Integrity Group that provides any information or organizational validity apart from what’s described in the video</b>. There are no obvious repositories of data, scripts or documentation of methodologies associated with the group’s name. Be that as it may, they do mention in the video that they were just formed after the election, so it’s feasible they haven’t had time to form a digital presence yet. Their complete lack of presence online is suspect, but it doesn’t necessarily invalidate their claims outright.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Lynda McLaughlin (communications director)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">I found no mention of her association with The Data Integrity Group anywhere online, besides in the video. I did find her Twitter account, which mostly consists of retweets about various election theft claims. She also has a couple of profiles on some more obscure social media platforms for journalists, here and here, showing that<b> she’s apparently the executive producer for Sean Hannity’s radio show.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">John Basham (meteorologist and data scientist)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">There is also no mention of The Data Integrity Group on his Twitter or LinkedIn profiles, though his experience on LinkedIn does list meteorology and some software related jobs, so it seems likely he has some legitimate data skills and experience. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He also actually wields a pretty sizable Twitter following (>60k followers) to whom he seems to mostly tweet Newsmax updates and other far-right content.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Dave Lobue (artificial intelligence expert and data scientist)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">I couldn’t find any trace of him online, so I took him at his word regarding his data science experience.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Justin Mealey</b> (intelligence analyst and data scientist)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Again, no stated affiliations with The Data Integrity Group on Mealey’s Twitter, LinkedIn, or GitHub accounts.</b> I looked for GitHub accounts for everyone because, as the standard platform for open source data and code sharing, I figured it would be the most likely place for their files and documentation. However, Mealey was the only one with an account that I could find, which has one election-related project from 2020, though all it consists of is a copied folder from ABC data reporter Garrett Archer’s profile for some Arizona vote data, with a couple of additional scripts of Mealey’s. He mentions this work with Archer in the video, so I don’t think there’s anything particularly strange about this, but at the same time, the lack of documentation doesn’t provide any insight into how they conducted their analysis nor does it shed light on their work in any other states.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mealey’s LinkedIn lists what looks to be a software company he started in CA he mentions in the video (along with various other data-related jobs), so I don’t have real reason to doubt that he has relevant data and programming experience. Tracking down his Twitter profile proved the most helpful because I noticed that people had asked him about data sources cited in the video, to which Mealey had responded with a link to a series of election fraud videos (much of the same material shown in the <b>Epoch Times segment) on a website called “Rumble”.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">I’ve never heard of Rumble, but it looks to be an alternative video sharing site that has all kinds of different stuff, from reposts of network news stories, to rightwing vloggers and random animal videos. It’s “Top Video” on its home page this week was “Super friendly rabbit incredibly plays with wild deer” (not a lot happens, but it’s pretty cute).</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In the descriptions of his Pennsylvania and Georgia Rumble videos, I found a collection of county-level tables for vote returns in PA and GA that contained the raw data they used to make the charts in their videos and other quantitative claims. These data are stored on a file sharing platform I’ve never heard of called “gofile.io”, which looks to be an alternative site for file sharing. One tech blog I read about the platform recommended against using it since it’s apparently not as secure as it claims. Therefore, it was a bit of a leap of faith to download a pair of CSV tables (PA_County.csv & Full_GA_County.csv) from an off-brand file sharing site that were linked by a video streaming platform I’ve never heard of. However, the files seem to be virus-free and I was able to load them into R to do some analysis and data visualization.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Conclusions on Researcher Credibility</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Overall, there’s clearly some pretty clear alignment with (at times extreme) rightwing viewpoints on the social media accounts of some of these folks. That said, their personal political bias doesn’t give me any real reason to doubt their technical ability or the accuracy of the datasets they compiled. At least two of the interviewees said that they’d cross-checked their data with various state voting databases as they gathered it real-time and that they matched closely. However, the absence of any online footprint for the Data Integrity Group and the lack of technical documentation or use of standard open source project-sharing practices is not reassuring.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Credibility of Claims</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>While this video is heavily-laden with different claims of “irregularities” in voting data, which the group claims overwhelmingly favor Biden, it’s very thin on actual evidence.</b> There are a few graphs and charts presented in the first minute of the video, but the remaining 49 minutes are just spoken interviews with the Data Integrity Group team, who present some specific quantitative claims, a few vaguely technical statements and lots of speculation. I also watched a shorter video on Mealey’s Rumble page about Pennsylvania that has a few additional charts and claims and <b>looks to be a precursor to the The Epoch Times piece.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Broadly speaking, The Data Integrity Group’s <b>claims in both videos can be broken down into three categories:</b> i) suspicious decrements and switching of cumulative vote totals that systematically favor Biden, ii) an improbable distribution of votes across different voting precincts iii) the adjudication of votes in a Biden-friendly Georgia county having been done in a physically impossible amount of time.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Vote Pattern Irregularities (decrements and switching) in PA and GA</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Since I was able to obtain the actual county-level datasets of running vote totals in Pennsylvania (PA) and Georgia (GA) that the group put together, I recreated the analysis they share in the videos and then conducted a more comprehensive assessment of vote tallies for both Trump and Biden in the two states. To validate their data, I cross-checked the final counts in their tables with publicly available vote totals (GA Sec. of State, NYT) in multiple counties to make sure things lined up, which they did, leading me to believe the data they compiled are likely to be (fairly) accurate.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Pennsylvania</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The charge they level about decrements and switching of cumulative vote totals in Biden’s favor contains a couple of specific claims:</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“Every time data was changed or decreased or swapped, it almost always benefitted Biden” — Lynda McLaughlin</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“We’re not saying that negative votes didn’t occur for other candidates, which is still worrying! You know that’s still a problem. It occurs for other candidates, it occurs for Biden, it occurs for Jo Jorgensen, but the degree is, you know we’re talking about ‘magnitude degree’ of votes, you know a lot of times you see those drops in votes for other candidates, you also see them go back up and recover, but with Donald Trump, you’ll have a drop in vote, and then they just won’t recover” —Justin Mealey</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In order to assess these claims, I wanted to make sure I could recreate the analysis and numbers they presented using the tables I’d downloaded, which consist of running vote totals from Nov. 3 to Nov. 16 by county, candidate and vote type. The two vote-types tabulated are absentee (mail-in) and non-absentee/other (in-person & provisional). First, I looked at vote totals for Allegheny County, PA, whose absentee vote counts are shown as a pair of bar charts (below) in the videos.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Chart shown in both videos showing supposed removal of 145k votes from Trump in Allegheny County, PA</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Chart shown in the shorter video contrasting Biden’s vote pattern to Trump’s in Allegheny County, PA</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The timestamp and vote counts in the PA table I downloaded from Mealey’s links are identical to those shown in the charts above, making me confident they were the same tables used in the videos.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Snapshot of Allegheny Co., PA absentee voting data in the county-level dataset I downloaded from Mealey’s page. Values exactly match those shown in the videos’ bar charts for this county.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The huge, early spike in Trump absentee ballots for Allegheny Co. looks like an obvious data entry error, since it constitutes an addition of roughly 1/6th of ALL registered voters in Allegheny County being attributed to Trump in the span of a few minutes. However, the subsequent correction of this error, or “deletion of votes” is framed by the group as evidence of vote stealing</span>. They acknowledge that Biden’s vote count also drops to zero here (likely while officials were fixing the error), but point out that his count quickly returns to its value before the spike, while Trump’s do not. This is true in this particular instance, though Biden’s vote total never spiked to such an unrealistic level as did Trump’s.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Now let’s look at other vote-types and counties across the state to see if such errors are indeed widespread and lopsided in Biden’s favor, as they repeatedly claim. Sticking with Allegheny County for a moment and taking one step back to look at absentee versus in-person vote counts:</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Comparison of votes over time by vote-type in Allegheny Co., PA. showing more votes ‘removed’ fromTrump’s absentee total early on but more ‘removed’ from Biden’s in-person totals in the same timespan. Charts created in R Studio. Data source: The Data Integrity Group</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The upper graph shows the same absentee vote counts (as lines) seen in the videos’ bar charts, while the bottom shows the time-series of in-person votes. We can see that there were, in fact, strange spikes at roughly the same time for in-person votes as the absentee spike, suggesting a system-wide error at that point for both candidates’ vote types. Biden’s spike and subsequent “deletion” of in-person votes is much greater than Trump’s, but this is not mentioned in the video.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Looking to other counties, we can see that there are all sorts of errors and corrections that happen during the hectic vote tallying process, oftentimes seemingly favoring Trump. Take Lehigh County, which they show in the shorter video as a place where more votes were “stolen” from Trump:</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Chart shown in shorter video pointing to “removal” of 66k Trump votes in Lehigh County, PA</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Their chart above shows a “shocking” 66,179 votes disappearing from Trump, which takes “three vote increments to recover”. Note the conspicuous absence of Biden’s vote total here.</b> Let’s compare them:</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Vote comparison in Lehigh Co., PA. showing higher ‘vote removal’ for Biden compared to Trump. Charts created in R Studio. Data source: The Data Integrity Group</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">We see that again (and at about the same time as the Allegheny Co. errors) there were erroneous spikes in votes for both candidates and vote-types in Lehigh Co., though in this case the correcting them resulted in many more votes being “removed” from Biden, not Trump. In fact, the decline in total Biden votes (absentee & in-person) was 284,876, compared to Trump’s 66,179 during this error-and-correction period. But again, The Data Integrity Group chose not to show that in their video, instead selectively displaying data to paint a misconstrued narrative.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Vote counts in Chester County, PA, are also presented as damning evidence of votes stolen from Trump in the shorter video, where they again present (only) Trump’s absentee and in-person votes:</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">
</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Chart shown in shorter video pointing to “removals” of Trump votes in Chester County, PA</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The full picture:</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Vote comparison in Chester Co., PA. showing decrements for both candidates. Charts created in R Studio. Data source: The Data Integrity Group</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">We can see that there’s all sorts of noise and instances of decrements in the time-series for both Trump and Biden in Chester Co.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Here’s an example of “vote switching” in Armstrong County, PA, which is clearly just a brief, mistaken switch of candidate labels associated the vote totals that is then quickly corrected:</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Vote comparison in Armstrong Co., PA. showing ‘switching’ that favors Trump. Absentee vote totals are likely small and folded in to the ‘in-person’ values. Charts created in R Studio. Data source: The Data Integrity Group</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>By their logic, some 20k votes were “removed” from both candidates here, with Biden never regaining his!</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It’s also important to note that a lot of the observed decrements look to clearly be simply the product of labeling votes as absentee versus in-person. Carbon County, PA is a good example, where we clearly see that all votes are simply bundled as “in-person” to begin with, and then correctly partitioned as absentee or in-person at the end of the counting process.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Vote comparison in Carbon Co., PA. showing labeling of votes as absentee at the end of the counting process. Charts created in R Studio. Data source: The Data Integrity Group</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The bottom line is that, unsurprisingly, collecting vote returns from over 9,000 voting districts across the state while people are working around the clock is bound to result in some mistakes (though some discrepancies, like the partitioning of absentee and in-person votes, likely aren’t even mistakes). The biggest mistakes are obvious and quickly corrected. Some smaller errors may fall through the cracks undetected, which is why statewide recounts usually alter final tallies slightly, though rarely by a substantial amount. </span>The fact that the people in this video cite “37 errors” as being suggestive of a nefarious conspiracy is absurd, and in fact is an extremely small error rate given the number of human-driven data points involved (>9,000 voting districts multiplied by nearly 1,000 times updates were reported during the two-week counting period = ~9 million potential times at which an error could occur and accrue up to the county level).</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>There’s a good reason state election offices don’t release these raw time-series of vote counts in their final election results datasets, because they reflect all the errors and corrections that had to be made in real-time</b>. If interpreted with selective, biased, data-ignorant logic, benign data blips can be cherry-picked and used as fodder by those looking for a reason to cry foul or cook up conspiracy theories.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Bearing this in mind, let’s now assess their<b> flagship claim (and video title) of “over 432,000 votes removed from Trump in Pennsylvania Election”, </b>with their definition of “vote removal” being any decline in cumulative vote tallies, which in a completely perfect world should only increase over time. They clearly explain this definition of ‘removal’ that undergirds their claims both verbally and graphically. </span>Therefore, I wanted to make sure that I could arrive at the same value based on the data I obtained from them.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Summing the magnitudes of ALL decrements experienced by Trump’s absentee and in-person votes totals across the state yielded 431,219 (_432k) “removed”, or “stolen” votes. However, when you do this for Biden, you find that he actually had 960,655 votes “removed”, nearly double the number for Trump. So, based on their definition of potential “vote stealing”, you could use their own data and stated definition of vote removal to suggest that nearly twice the number of votes were taken from Biden! Again, it’s no surprise that they never present Biden’s numbers, and refer to them only in vague or abjectly false ways, like when McLaughin scornfully states that vote decrements or switching “nearly almost always favored Biden”, or Mealey stating “it occurs for Biden…but the degree is, you know we’re talking about ‘magnitude degree’ of votes” (implying Trump’s removals outstrip Biden’s by ‘orders of magnitude’).</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Georgia</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Let’s now quickly look at decrements or vote switching in Georgia, which is featured less heavily in the longer video compared to Pennsylvania. Specifically, McLaughlin cites an instance of “12,000 votes in Bibb County being switched from Trump to Biden”.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Vote comparison in Bibb Co., GA. showing ‘vote switching’ in favor of Biden. Charts created in R Studio. Data source: The Data Integrity Group</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It’s true that early on it looks like Trump and Biden’s absentee vote totals are switched, though based on what we know about absentee vote patterns, one would expect Biden to have the advantage there, so Trump’s initial lead in that category seems like a potential error. Additionally, this is the only instance in all 159 Georgia counties in which such a switch happens in favor of Trump, and only one of two times it happens at all, the other favoring Biden in Mitchell County’s in-person vote tally.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Vote comparison in Mitchell Co., GA showing ‘vote switching’ in favor of Biden. Charts created in R Studio. Data source: The Data Integrity Group</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In general, the data they compiled for Georgia showed much less growth over time compared to PA, which suggests that counties likely tallied more votes internally before releasing them publicly. This is less true in more populous counties where vote counting took many more days, like in Fulton County (Atlanta).</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Vote comparison in Fulton Co., GA. Charts created in R Studio. Data source: The Data Integrity Group</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">There are still some instances of big vote decrements, with lots of counties showing a drop to zero at some point early on. And as I did for Pennsylvania, I summed up all the decrements in Georgia for each candidate to compare the total “removed” votes for each, and found that, based on their data and definition, Trump had 2,242,193 votes “removed” and Biden 2,114,277. So in this case, both candidates had over 2 million votes “removed”, with Trump’s total slightly higher than Biden’s. But again, it’s a meaningless value that doesn’t reflect any sort of “rigging”. For reference, the total number of votes cast in Georgia was 2,473,633 for Biden and 2,461,854 for Trump, which is essentially the same number of votes that were “removed” using their definition.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“Improbable distribution” of votes in voting precincts</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">There are a series of claims made in both videos that any voting district with a very high proportion of vote share for one candidate is somehow inherently suspicious. In the longer video, they show a screenshot of their remote testimony in front of the Georgia Secretary of State, where they have a slide that states “receiving 75% or more votes for one candidate in a precinct is abnormal”.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Snapshot from the longer video showing a slide from The Data Integrity Group’s testimony to GA state officials.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">While it’s true that a candidate getting 75% of votes in a single precinct is less frequent than getting a smaller fraction, it’s by no means inherently suspicious . Voting precincts can consist of as little as a few dozen voters, and in dense, demographically-homogenous areas, the idea that voting behavior is highly uniform is not surprising at all.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But fine, let’s briefly entertain this idea of “abnormal” occurrences of vote share in precincts. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find precinct-level results for Georgia in Mealey’s data links, and the dataset he provides for Pennsylvania only consists of ~4,000 voting precincts, though according to the state’s website, there are over 9,100. Therefore, in the absence of complete data for PA, I only conducted precinct-level analysis for Georgia using raw data from the GA Secretary of State’s website that I compiled last month for a separate project on election results in the state.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Analyzing this precinct-level data in GA, I found that while Biden had 645 precincts where he notched vote shares of 75% or higher, Trump had nearly the same number at 618, showing no clear advantage for Biden in terms of “abnormal” precincts.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>In the shorter Pennsylvania video, they attempt to convey suspicion about individual precinct (called ‘districts’ in PA) total by cherry-picking one district in Pittsburgh as proof of their theory:</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Chart shown in shorter video showing outlier value in Allegheny Co. voting district.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But again, this is selective and disingenuous because of course there are going to be data points both above and below the average value across all districts in a county. That is, by definition, what an average represents. Showing a district-average across a county and then presenting a single district within that county whose value is above-average as a suggestion of fraud is nonsensical. If there weren’t any districts with values above 78%, then 78% wouldn’t be the average…</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Adjudication of Ballots in Fulton County, GA</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The last major claim in this video is regarding adjudicated ballots in Fulton County, Georgia (Atlanta) being done at a seemingly impossible rate. Mealey and Lobue state that their claim is based on a public statement that was given by a Fulton Co. election official on Nov. 4 (one day after the election) who claimed that out of 113,000 ballots cast, 106,000 had been adjudicated. Based on the fact that adjudicating a ballot typically occurs when the voting machine can’t read it, thereby necessitating a hand inspection to determine voter intent, they contend that it would be virtually impossible to physically adjudicate this many ballots in just one day’s time, insinuating that foul play must have occurred.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">When I first watched this, the argument never made sense because only a very small fraction of ballots should be unreadable by machines and require a manual inspection. This only happens if a ballot is damaged, incorrect ink is used, a bubble isn’t filled-in, or there is a write-in candidate entered (they even mention some of these causes for adjudication in the video). <b>It made no sense that these edge cases would constitute 94% of all ballots received in this Atlanta county</b>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Therefore, I did some digging and actually found the original clip of the election official that they were referencing. At 4m05s, the official clarifies what’s meant by “<b>adjudication</b>” in this context. Basically, their processing of absentee ballots consists of three steps: i) opening ballot and flattening, ii) running through voting machine, and iii) “adjudicating”. He states in the video that “so far we’ve gone through 113k ballots and 106k have been adjudicated and therefore published”, which implies that the remaining 7k had not yet been published at that time. He also states that votes are released in batches, and that the entire batch cannot be released until any ballots that need adjudicating are cleared.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Therefore, it’s clear from this video that the “adjudication” label he used there simply means the final certification for all votes. If a batch of, say, 1,000 votes has two ballots that require manual adjudication, that whole batch is held up while those two are inspected, after which the entire batch is deemed “adjudicated”. By this definition, they “adjudicate” 100% of all votes cast, which makes more sense than a claim that is premised on 94% of Fulton Co. residents submitting faulty ballots.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">I suppose it’s possible Mealey and Lobue misinterpreted this election official’s public statement, but given how completely disingenuous and intentionally misleading they are with all of the other evidence presented throughout the video, I see no reason to believe that’s not the case here as well. More likely they are simply misconstruing another detail for the sake of supporting their false claim of systematic fraud.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Conclusions on Credibility of Claims</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Upon inspecting The Data Integrity Group’s own dataset or contextualizing their other charges, I found no claims made in either video that bore any resemblance to the truth upon closer inspection</b>. Perhaps if they had only accessed data for one or two counties and found some errors in Biden’s favor, I would say they should dig a little deeper and consider other counties’ values. However, given how repeatedly they rattle off statewide totals, and selectively present Biden numbers only when it’s advantageous to their narrative, it’s clear they looked at the full picture and filtered it to their liking. After all, my calculation of the 432k “removed votes” value for Trump in from their PA table simply entailed summing up a column that sat next to the analogous column for Biden, which yielded 960k removed votes when summed, an operation they too clearly would have done but chose not to report.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The simple fact is that this video was made by a group of people that intentionally selected a small, non-representative, subset of vote data in order to cast the false perception that systemic voting irregularities occurred in favor of Biden. Their claims are not only provably false using their own data, but actually demonstrate the opposite trend, that in fact Biden had roughly twice as many vote decrements as did Trump in Pennsylvania. Again, however, these decrements don’t reflect anything nefarious for either candidate, but rather the normal, imperfect process of tabulating tens of millions of votes.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Credibility of Video Publisher</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">This brings me to my final major point of investigation, which regards the overall credibility of the media publisher responsible for this video, The Epoch Times.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The YouTube channel “American Thought Leaders by The Epoch Times”, on which the longer video appears, looks to be a series of interviews by host Jan Jekielek with different guests. A quick survey of other videos on this channel reveals some pretty outlandish material. Here’s a video that claims the initial Chinese handling of COVID-19 was done ‘deliberately’ to allow it to spread around the world and then to impact the US election the following year (specifically causing more ‘fraudulent’ mail-in ballots to be used). Not only is the idea that China would unleash a deadly virus on one of its own major population centers in the hopes that it makes it to the US and then festers for eleven months until the election a wildly unlikely claim, but it’s also impossible to prove, my point being that American Thought Leaders is not averse to platforming people with lofty, impossible-to-prove, conspiratorial claims.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>The Epoch Times as a whole is a very strange news organization that has become very popular in recent years among rightwing circles</b>. It was actually founded as an anti-Chinese Communist Party publication by members of the “Falun Gong” new religious movement in China. It seems to roughly espouse tenets of Zen Buddhism, but also has many unique beliefs about spirits and divinity, and criticizes many aspects of modern science, including the theory of evolution. During a speech at The Epoch Times’ US office in Manhattan, one of the leaders of Falun Gong, Li Hongzhi, spells out his vision for the publication and its divine imperative. Some of Li’s other viewpoints apparently include claiming that he can levitate, fly through walls, and that ‘aliens from undiscovered dimensions have invaded the minds and bodies of humans, bringing corruption and inventions such as computers and airplanes.’ All of this said, I don’t have any specific problems with Falun Gong or its followers, though distrust in science is discouraging; I just don’t think their newspapers are necessarily the most qualified arbiters of national election results, nor should they be viewed as such.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Conclusions</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">We live in a pretty terrible age of (mis)information, with so much media content across the political spectrum having no factual basis. Outlets that exist on the fringe are even less trustworthy, as they are subject to less public scrutiny, which affords them with more latitude to bend truths and cater to the fears or anxieties held by specific subsets of people. When I last checked, the Epoch Times video had almost 380k views and the shorter video over 750k, with thousands of comments by people incensed about election theft, calling for officials to be jailed or worse. I can’t help but wonder how many people watched this video and then decided to buy a plane ticket to help storm the Capitol on January 6. Or how many people gained a newfound sense of allegiance, respect, or membership with extremist groups whose senses of purpose are founded on lies like these.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As consumers of information in the modern internet-age, we must take much of what we see or read with a grain of salt, sift through multiple, reputable sources in search of the most likely truth, and ultimately to allow ourselves to accept that truth, even if we wish for an alternate falsehood. Reining in our imaginations amidst a media marketplace increasingly designed to exploit and encourage distrust isn’t easy, but it’s something we have to practice while holding those that peddle lies to account.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Data Access</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The county-level data tables for Georgia and Pennsylvania I downloaded from The Data Integrity Group can be found along with the R script I used to analyze them on GitHub here. Also included are PDFs of the vote tally graphs for every counties in the two states.</font></font></font></font></p></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></font></font></div>