**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Subject: “The Massie Primary Glitch: Voter Database Shows 47,000 Ballots Cast for a Candidate Who Doesn’t Exist”

RIVERDALE, GA – A routine audit of the early voting data for Georgia’s 13th Congressional District primary has unearthed what technicians are calling a “statistical singularity,” sending shockwaves through the state’s election integrity community.

According to leaked internal logs from the county’s tabulation server, precincts in the town of Massie recorded exactly 47,003 votes for a candidate named “Bartholomew T. Rhoades.” The problem? Bartholomew T. Rhoades never filed to run for office. He isn’t on the ballot. He doesn’t even have a driver’s license record.

“We thought it was a rendering error from a corrupted poll pad,” said a senior IT contractor who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But the numbers are consistent across three separate audit trails. It’s like the machine wanted a candidate named Bartholomew T. Rhoades to exist.”

Stranger still, every single one of these phantom ballots was cast at a single voting machine—Machine #404—located inside the Massie Community Church. The machine was scheduled for decommissioning last year. When technicians reviewed the physical ballot bin, they found it completely empty.

“The machine ran the count, but it never printed a receipt. No paper trail. It’s a ghost vote,” the contractor added. “We call it ‘The Massie Primary Glitch.’ It’s the most elegant, inexplicable data anomaly we’ve ever seen.”

Local election officials have dismissed the finding as a “bad checksum error,” but social media is already buzzing with the hashtag #WhoIsBartholomew. Conspiracy theorists are pointing to the fact that “Bartholome