Wednesday, October 16, 2024

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1/ A Georgia judge blocked a new state rule that would have required counties to hand-count ballots cast on Election Day. “Too much, too late,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his decision, expressing concern that the “11th-and-one-half hour implementation of the hand count rule” would undermine public confidence in the election results and lead to “administrative chaos.” The rule, passed by the Republican State Election Board, would have required poll workers in Georgia to open ballots and count them by hand to ensure that the total number of ballots matched the total counted by tabulating machines. It was set to go into effect Oct. 22 – two weeks before Election Day. Early voting in the state is already underway. Separately, McBurney also ruled that Georgia county election officials can’t delay or decline to certify election results based on suspicions of fraud, error, or abuse, writing that elections officials have a “mandatory fixed obligation to certify election results.” (NBC News / Washington Post / Axios / CBS News / Bloomberg / NPR / The Hill / USA Today / New York Times / ABC News / Associated Press)

2/ Trump’s top general called him a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country,” according to Bob Woodward’s book, “War.” Retired U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, who served as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2019 to 2023, told Woodward that Trump “is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country.” Milley repeated: “A fascist to the core.” Meanwhile, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a senior member of the Homeland, Armed Services and Judiciary committees, said he expects Trump’s suggestion that he could deploy National Guard or U.S. military on American soil to handle what he called “the enemy from within” on Election Day to generate new support for his legislation to restrict a president’s authority to deploy the military inside the U.S. (Axios / The Guardian / The Independent / The Hill / WTF Just Happened Today? for more news and headlines, brought to you by Matt Kiser. The WTFJHT Podcast is narrated and produced by Joe Amditis.