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Thursday, January 5, 2023
WND Puts Conspiracy Before Fact To Hype Quickly Dismissed Election Fraud Claims
Topic: WorldNetDaily

An anonymously written Nov. 22 WorldNetDaily article uncritically advances conspiracy theories about the midterm election in a Pennsylvania county:

Ballot counting machines that won't count ballots. Hundreds of millions of dollars handed out, outside the election financing oversight system, to mostly left-leaning local election officials.

A coordinated media and Big Tech suppression of very damaging evidence about a candidate for president of the United States.

American elections in recent years have seen a wide range of behaviors that give the appearance of bias, and may have been illegal.

But now a report at Gateway Pundit details something entirely new.

In fact, Pennsylvania election observers have filed a complaint against the Delaware County Board of Elections because county officials "took a detour on election night with the county's ballots and v-drives into a closed building."

"For six hours."

Poll watchers were banned.

Also raising concerns were the county's action to delete 194 vote registrations after people voted, ballots were mailed to unverified voters, records of requests for nearly 2,800 mail-in ballots were erased, and more.

At Bill Lawrence Online a report explained there was a nine-hour hearing before Judge Barry Dozor on election abnormalities, and a ruling was expected soon.

Voters Leah Hoopes, Gregory Stenstrom and Nicole Missino had asked that certification of the county's 2022 midterm votes be delayed until evidence about voting irregularities can be reviewed.

Note that the article doesn't actually repoirt on the hearing, just uncritically repeats the allegations -- a serious journalistic failure. Meanwhile, actual journalists covered the hearing -- and showed how shoddy the evidence was.

As one outlet reported, two of the so-called expert witnesses could not offer expert testimony, and that Dozor himself "said he had not heard any testimony to even suspect fraud or bad actors during hours of testimony." Indeed, Dozor quickly dismissed the claims as election officials such as Jim Allen explained everything, including the "detour":

Julie Yu, testifying for the plaintiffs, said she witnessed ballots taken from drop boxes on election going to the Flagship Corporate Center at 2 W. Baltimore Ave. in Media rather than the Government Center on Front Street or the Wharf building in Chester where votes were tabulated.

Allen explained that in years past, teams would go out at 8 p.m. to lock drop boxes and the county would collect those ballots later that night using a few trucks that would each go to 10 or 15 of the 40 boxes scattered around the county. Those trucks might not arrive back to the wharf until 2 or 3 a.m., he said.

But a new law, Act 88, provided grants to counties to help cover elections with some provisos, including that there had to be a “best estimate” of returns posted at 12:01 a.m. the day after the election and a running continuous count of mail-in ballots beginning at 7 a.m.

To meet those requirements, Allen said the county sent out teams of two, at least one which had to be a county employee, to collect ballots from drop-boxes and bring them to a central location: the Flagship Building. The drop-box ballots would then be collected and transported in one fell swoop to the wharf so that they could be tabulated to meet the “best estimate” requirement, he said, while all other ballots from the polling places would be returned to the Government Center.

Allen likewise dismissed the idea that any partisan third party handled any ballots whatsoever. He said there were groups of observers who could see votes being counted and ask questions, but none were allowed to touch equipment or balloting materials at any time.

But perpetuating conspiracy theories is more important at WND than reporting inconvenient facts, which means WND, anonymously or otherwise, never told its readers the conspiratorial claims were dismissed.


Posted by Terry K. at 7:17 PM EST

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