National media attempted to mislead voters in the Georgia governors race

Erick Erickson:

This election should remind us how vital and necessary local journalism is to factual reporting. National media outlets routinely fell for stories about topics outside their knowledge base specially crafted by political operates wanting to shape narratives about campaigns.

All one need do is look at Georgia where its Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, won a closely watched Governor’s race against progressive darling Stacey Abrams. National reporters breathlessly reported stories about Kemp engaging in campaign shenanigans to such an extent that progressives are convinced he stole the race. What is most interesting is Georgia reporters never covered the stories or covered them with such a command of the facts that the national implications were shown to be partisan spin.

In South Georgia, national reporters covered the tale of Kemp trying to close black voting precincts in a county, forcing black voters to drive or walk many miles to predominantly white polling locations. The truth? The Democratic county commissioners and Democrat controlled local board of elections hired a consultant to review polling locations for compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. The consultant recommended consolidating several locations deemed unfriendly to handicapped voters. The locations were all the Republican precincts that went for Donald Trump. The Democrat majority precincts were not touched.

The Associated Press reported the story of a woman who was denied voter registration because of Georgia’s “exact match” law that requires a voter exactly match their voter registration form to the information on their driver’s license. This voter had a hyphenated last name and she was denied voter registration because she failed to include the hyphen. The truth? She was actually denied voter registration because she had already registered to vote and the computer system flagged her new registration as a duplicate. The Associated Press never corrected the story.

53,000 voters had their voter registration paperwork held up as “pending voters” according to the same Associated Press story. They claim it overwhelmingly impacted minority voters. The truth? There was a surge of minority voter registrations so they were disproportionately affected. But the underlying data tells a different story. Seventy-five percent of the pending voters were placed there because they put down bad social security numbers. Twenty-three percent were actually on the list from the 2014 election and had been submitted by the 2018 Democratic candidate’s own voter registration efforts from 2014. In four years, despite notice from the Secretary of State to the voters that they needed to fix their information, none of those voters ever showed up to fix the information or tried to vote.

National media outlets also reported the Georgia Secretary of State had thrown voters off the election rolls this year. The truth? The Secretary of State is prohibited from removing people from voting rolls in election years. Local elections officials do remove people from the rolls during election years, but only if the voter dies, is convicted of a felony, or is deemed incompetent by a court.
...

There is more.

The media seems to be at war with the truth in their desire to help Democrats and harm Republican candidates.