Let’s talk about election fraud for a minute. After the 2020 election, the State of GA undertook three separate voting audits, one of which was a hand count of all ballots received from that election. All three audits validated the original machine count was accurate.

The overwhelming number of counties had NO change to their final tally. You can find these public reports on our Georgia Secretary of State website.

The Trump Campaign initiated lawsuits claiming widespread election fraud in multiple states with 62 lawsuits filed; 61 lawsuits lost.

Dominion Voting Systems won a defamation lawsuit against Fox News. The Court found Fox News had lied about the company’s systems in order to promulgate the idea that President Trump had actually won the election. Its settlement was $787,500,500.

Governor Brian Kemp addressed election security in a social media post on August 15, 2023. “The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward – under oath – and prove anything in a court of law,”.

Finally, switching to a paper ballot only system would increase operating costs and decrease the accuracy of our elections.

“The staff size at almost every election office across the country would need to exponentially increase, and even then, hand-counting dozens of races on tens of millions of ballots would probably take weeks or months.” This and more can be found in the article published by the Election Law Journal.

I realize these adjudicated facts are inconvenient to election deniers. They are sad that their candidate lost the election and really, really, really wanted him to win. The problem is that in America, we support the peaceful transfer of power.

Or perhaps I should say, we did support the peaceful transfer of power because January 6th was the culmination of the election fraud propaganda campaign put forward by Mr. Trump and his allies where our United States Capital was taken over by those intent on killing our vice president, members of Congress, and halting the certification of our election results. Political violence of any kind and directed towards any person IS NEVER THE ANSWER.

If you deny the results of the 2020 election, you are also denying our U.S. court system. You’re denying simple mathematics. You’re denying the results of only one race out of many races that occurred on the same ballot, so you’re defying logic. Therefore, there can be only one reason that anyone would want to continue spreading this kind of propaganda and that’s to make voting more difficult and purge voters from the rolls; all of which serves to keep people that might disagree with your choice of candidate from voting. This is also called voter suppression. If the organizations that are conducting training sessions for election denialism across the country were truly concerned about voting, they might want to ensure that more people can vote, make it easier and more convenient to vote, encourage longer voting days, voting on the weekend, and absentee voting.

These are activities that support widespread participation in our democracy, especially for low-income and rural voters who have a more difficult time getting to the polls. Clearly that is not the intent of encouraging the spread of this propaganda. Let’s not be fooled into thinking otherwise.

I’m sorry your candidate didn’t win the presidency in 2020, but please consider that spreading these lies is contributing to the weakening of our democratic institutions and while that may not be your intention, it is the result. Instead, let’s come together to address the real problems in our country like child poverty, lack of access to healthcare, maternal mortality rates, and homeless veterans. Full disclosure - I’m running for Congress in order to go to work for the people of this District. I trust in our election system and hope that when my opponent loses, he does so as a true American and wishes me well in my new role as Congresswoman Hewitt. And I will do the same for him.

Patti Hewitt, Democratic Candidate for Congress, 1st Congressional District Richmond Hill, Georgia