Once I was asked at a job interview what my biggest strength was. I replied, “forward error correction.” The interviewer gave me a look that said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
I explained that “forward error correction” is a method used during data transmission to help ensure the integrity of the data being received. That’s what I do. In short, I anticipate things that could go wrong and fix them before they can become problems.
I didn’t get the job. But I still believe that the ability to predict what might go wrong, and then make sure it doesn’t, is a pretty useful skill to have.
The elections held in Georgia on January 5th should have been the smoothest-running elections in U.S. history. Because Georgia election officials knew exactly what they had to fix, and they had the time to fix it.
For weeks, Trump Supporters have been claiming that the November elections were tainted, and that the election was filled with fraud. We’ve never gotten an explanation for any of the shenanigans we witnessed in November, other than for Georgia election officials to “debunk” the claims by simply saying that cheating didn’t happen.
But we all saw things that just didn’t add up. The state congressional hearings and private lawsuits pertaining to the November elections painted a big target on the things that people were going to be carefully watching yesterday.
Here are some examples:
- Observers blocked from monitoring the vote count
- Vote totals for Republican candidates decreased over time
- Counting mysteriously stopping in certain areas
- Voting machines broke and ballots were collected “to be counted later”
- Votes were held back from Democratic counties and submitted in large batches after nearly all the other votes had been tallied
There are other claims of malfeasance, but let’s stick with this shorter list because these are low-hanging fruit and are all easily fixable.
Georgia election officials had the opportunity to do forward error correction and make sure that none of the things that happened in November happened again in January. There was no need to guess what was required. They already had a list. They could have easily eliminated many of the larger issues that are indicative of election fraud.
- Partisan observers could have been given full access to monitor the vote counting process
- They could have provided an explanation of why votes for a candidate decreased over time (which should never happen)
- If counting stopped, for whatever reason, partisan observers could have been left on site with law enforcement to secure the area
- If voting machines broke, partisan observers and law enforcement could have been on hand to ensure the non-counted votes were secure
- Votes from all counties could have been submitted in smaller batches (let’s say every 30 minutes) as they were counted.
See? All of these things are easily correctible. Most of them just required some small process changes and they had nearly two months to put those changes in place. But they didn’t fix anything.
Sure, there were other issues with the November election but even fixing some of the problems would have been a step in the right direction. But yesterday, we saw some of the exact same things happen that we saw in November.
Georgia election officials squandered an opportunity to put many of the claims of election fraud to rest. Had they eliminated these easy-to-fix problems, and the Democrats still won, they could have claimed that their previous ineptness had no impact on the November election results.
We’re left with only two possible conclusions from which to draw. Either the election officials in Georgia are so bad at what they do that they can’t properly run an election, or they weren’t allowed to forward error correct because the bad processes were required for the desired candidates to win.
Neither conclusion is better than the other. Because both cast doubt on whether the results of Georgia’s elections truly represent the will of the voters.
