The leftist networks think the entire concept of election integrity and voter fraud is a MAGA fever swamp. They pose as lovers of Democracy, but they don’t think anyone should ever check a voter roll and remove anybody.
Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner flagged an aggressive CBS Mornings report by Major Garrett on December 4. The words on screen were "Challenging the Vote: Conservative Activists Look to Purge Voter Rolls Ahead of 2024.” Conservatives push a Purge!
Garrett won't acknowledge there's any kind of problem here.
It was not a sketchy right-wing group but the universally respected Pew Research Center that reported in 2012 that 1 of every 8 voter registrations, about 24 million in the United States, “are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate,” that “ more than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters,” and that “approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.” Improved state laws and better enforcement since then have cleaned up some, but nowhere near all, of this mess.
Garrett pitched this as a racial conspiracy in Georgia, a white woman disenfranchising black voters. It didn't hold up.
That’s why Garrett’s report, especially as bookended by inflammatory comments by CBS Mornings hosts, was so unfair. With Garrett’s all-but-explicit endorsement of the claim, black Georgia voter James McWhorter told Garrett that a mistaken citizen challenge to his own voter registration was part of a deliberate effort “to disenfranchise certain demographics, trying to put a foot on someone else’s neck.” Garrett amplified the insinuation by asking the citizen who issued the challenge, a retired white woman named Gail Lee, if she could “understand how people who are African American might feel this deeply, personally, in that your work feels threatening to them?”
It was no wonder, then, that studio host Jericka Duncan summed up Garrett’s report by saying, “This really highlights the strategy being used to try and prevent people from having their voices heard.”
That allegation is patently unjust. Despite numerous assertions and insinuations to the effect that citizen challenges have been motivated by race and a desire to stifle otherwise eligible voters, Garrett actually provided not a shred of evidence of such intent.
Indeed, Lee, who has issued some 500 challenges to suspicious registrations, had absolutely no way to know the race of any of the names she challenged: She merely analyzed computer printouts for anomalies and filed challenges based on them. And rather than trying to stop eligible people from voting, Lee and other citizen activists quite obviously believe they are trying to identify fake registrations used to perpetrate fraud....
Other than Garrett acknowledging at the end of his report that at least 12,000 challenges in Georgia actually had been upheld, a fact he immediately dismissed as representing “overwhelmingly clerical errors and technical violations,” there was not a single other word in 7 minutes that gave credence to concerns about voting irregularities.
Hillyer turned to J. Christian Adams, who argued "the citizen-challenge method used in Georgia is well intentioned but problematic because ordinary citizens usually are not well trained to navigate complicated laws governing voter registration."
Adams said, though, that by systematically presenting data to trained election officials to investigate, errors can and should be corrected. And there are errors aplenty, such as the “27,000 dead people that Michigan kept on the rolls sometimes for 20 years after they died,” in whose names other people have indeed sometimes voted.
