November 9, 2018

Democrat Kyrsten Sinema pulls ahead in razor-close Arizona Senate race

Source: CBS

Democrat Kyrsten Sinema pulled ahead of Republican Martha McSally on Thursday in the Arizona Senate race by a margin of 2,000 votes. This marked the first time that Sinema has pulled ahead of McSally in the days since the election.

An additional 120,000 outstanding ballots were made available from Maricopa County Thursday. The county encompasses Phoenix and some of the state's liberal enclaves. There are an 345,000 ballots that needed to be counted per a knowledgeable source with the Arizona Secretary of State's office.

Republicans filed a lawsuit Wednesday night to challenge the way some Arizona counties count mail-in ballots, as election officials began to slowly tally more than 600,000 outstanding votes in the narrow U.S. Senate race. The task that could take days.

About 75 percent of Arizona voters cast ballots by mail, but those ballots have to go through a signature confirmation process, and only then can be opened and tabulated. If county recorders have issues verifying signatures they are allowed to ask voters to verify their identity.


Read more: Link to source

---

Wow.

November 8, 2018

White House shares doctored video to support punishment of journalist Jim Acosta

Source: Washington Post

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Wednesday night shared a video of CNN reporter Jim Acosta that appeared to have been altered to make his actions at a news conference look more aggressive toward a White House intern.

The edited video looks authentic: Acosta appeared to swiftly chop down on the arm of an aide as he held onto a microphone while questioning President Trump. But in the original video, Acosta’s arm appears to move only as a response to a tussle for the microphone. His statement, “Pardon me, ma’am,” is not included in the video Sanders shared.

Critics said that video — which sped up the movement of Acosta’s arms in a way that dramatically changed the journalist’s response — was deceptively edited to score political points. That edited video was first shared by Paul Joseph Watson, known for his conspiracy-theory videos on the far-right website Infowars.

Watson said he did not change the speed of the video and that claims he had altered it were a “brazen lie.” But side-by-side comparisons support claims from fact-checkers and experts such as Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, who argued that crucial parts of the video appear to have been speeded up or altered so as to distort the action.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/11/08/white-house-shares-doctored-video-support-punishment-journalist-jim-acosta/

---

Sarah Sanders' dishonesty problem just got worse.
She was caught spreading fake news.
Will Trump call her out on Twitter? He claims he dislikes fake news.

November 8, 2018

Brian Kemp's lead over Stacey Abrams narrows amid voting complaints in Georgia governor

Source: Washington Post

Among the calls logged at a voter hotline run by a consortium of voting rights groups including the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union and Common Cause were complaints from hundreds of voters who said their requests for absentee ballots went unanswered. Voters — and advocates — said they were chagrined at how many of those reports came from communities with large minority populations.

“From our vantage point, this was an intentional system failure in targeting communities where African Americans made up a high percentage of active voters,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson.

Peggy Xu, 23, was one of those voters. Xu provided emails to The Washington Post showing that she requested an absentee ballot from Fulton County on Oct. 6 and said she later saw on the secretary of state’s website that one had been sent to her. But she never received it, she said. She tried again, didn’t receive the second ballot either and was not able to vote, she said.

“I’m furious,” she said. “I was genuinely excited to vote for her. But now, seeing this razor-thin margin, and seeing how many voter suppression issues are going on, it’s driving me a little crazy, especially knowing that this has affected so many voters.”

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/brian-kemps-lead-over-stacey-abrams-narrows-amid-voting-complaints-in-georgia-governors-race/2018/11/07/39cf25f2-e2b7-11e8-b759-3d88a5ce9e19_story.html

---

Kemp also had voting machines delivered without power cords, so they would run on batteries which would quickly die.