Posted on 11/22/2020 10:07:59 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Ray Charles might have sung “Georgia on My Mind,” but Georgia has been on everybody’s mind from Election Day on. Following a hand recount of presidential votes, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp certified the election results late Friday.
The hand recount affirmed Georgia’s election results, and as reported by the Associated Press, “No individual county showed a variation in margin larger than 0.73%, and the variation in margin in 103 of the state’s 159 counties was less than 0.05%, a memo released with the results says.”
Georgia’s certified results showed Biden beating Trump by 12,670 votes out of about 5 million cast, or 0.25%. Georgia state law allows a candidate to request a recount if the margin is less than 0.5%.
JUST IN: Trump campaign files for new recount in Georgia https://t.co/LtMcKpq2eX pic.twitter.com/HdqyMngJXm
— The Hill (@thehill) November 22, 2020
The Trump campaign then sent a hand-delivered letter to the secretary of state’s office requesting a second recount. A statement from Trump’s legal team said, in part:
“Today, the Trump campaign filed a petition for recount in Georgia. We are focused on ensuring that every aspect of Georgia State Law and the U.S. Constitution are followed so that every legal vote is counted. President Trump and his campaign continue to insist on an honest recount in Georgia, which has to include signature matching and other vital safeguards.”
In response to the Trump camp’s request, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asked his deputy in a written message to “officially notify county election directors to prepare for the recount and to notify political parties so they could muster observers at the respective sites,” which he said would be “highly scrutinized,” reported AP.
Sen. Kelly Loeffler, one of two Republicans who face runoff elections in Georgia on January 5 tweeted on Sunday that she fully supports Trump’s request for a second recount.
“I fully support President Donald Trump’s request for a recount in Georgia. We must match and verify absentee ballot signatures to their corresponding voter registration signatures, investigate all voting irregularities, and count only the votes that were legally cast.”
Amen.
I fully support President @realDonaldTrump‘s request for a recount in Georgia. We must match and verify absentee ballot signatures to their corresponding voter registration signatures, investigate all voting irregularities, and count only the votes that were legally cast.
— Kelly Loeffler (@KLoeffler) November 22, 2020
However, in a Saturday Washington Post op-ed titled “Georgia’s election results are sound,” Raffensperger wrote that “Georgia’s election results are sound,” and its voting system “has never been more secure or trustworthy.” Don’t they all say that?
Georgia’s elections have received a lot of unfair and unwarranted criticism over the past two years, much of it spurred by disinformation. The successful November election and the smooth hand recount have proved our critics wrong.
[…]
Georgia’s voting system has never been more secure or trustworthy. A newly implemented statewide voting system gave Georgia voters paper ballots for the first time in nearly 20 years. This month, voters could review those paper records and verify that their choices were correct before casting their ballots.
Raffensperger said signatures on mail-in ballots are verified twice and steps are taken to assure that ballots go the correct addresses. Don’t they all say that, too?
In Georgia, signatures for absentee ballot voters are verified twice to ensure that each voter gets one vote — and only one vote. Voters who request an absentee ballot through the state’s new online portal provide a driver’s license number for verification. Voter rolls are maintained to ensure that only living and qualified voters remain on the registration lists — and, importantly, that each ballot goes to the correct address.
“Disinformation about the reliability of Georgia’s voting machines” began in 2018, the secretary of state wrote, while noting the hypocrisy in the media for its attacks against Trump — but Raffensperger clapped at Trump at the same time.
Disinformation about the reliability and security of Georgia’s voting machines had been percolating since 2018 — long before we even selected a system. A failed gubernatorial candidate refused to accept the outcome of an election she lost by 50,000 votes — and is praised for it by media pundits to this day, even as they attack a presidential candidate for running the same playbook.
Here’s more from the AP on what happens next.
The recount will be done using scanners that read and tabulate the votes. County election workers have already done a complete hand recount of all the votes cast in the presidential race. But that stemmed from a mandatory audit requirement and isn’t considered an official recount under the law.
State law requires that one race be audited by hand to ensure that the machines counted the ballots accurately, and Raffensperger selected the presidential race. Because of the tight margin in that race, a full hand count of ballots was necessary to complete the audit, he said.
With the clock steadily clicking toward December 14, when the members of the Electoral College will cast their ballots, the Trump campaign’s legal maneuvers, with few exceptions, have not fared well in the courts.
As I reported on Saturday, the Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in Arizona voted unanimously Friday night to certify the election results of the county — Arizona’s largest — cementing Biden’s win in the highly contested state.
As my RedState colleague streiff also reported on Saturday, a Pennsylvania judge dismissed the Trump campaign’s challenge to the state’s election law, which it charged were unconstitutional — claiming the way mail-in ballots were handled in Pennsylvania resulted in the disenfranchisement of in-person voters.
Finally, the plot thickened on Saturday when Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell told Newsmax TV that cases she and her colleagues plan to file this week “will be biblical,” as I reported earlier today. It’s going to be an interesting week. #Popcorn
May be doing this to give some time.
PA appeal filed on a very narrow issue.
Counting the same bogus ballots isn’t going to change anything; and now you can’t tell the difference between bullsh*t ballots and legit ballots.
that’s why you got to keep sh*t ballots out of the count on the front end; vote by mail needs an overhaul, same day registration is crap, registration rolls need a cleansing, and photo ID is an absolute must. we can start there.
Plus more time to expose the fact that there was only a .5% rejection rate with 5x more absantee ballots, when, in normal times the rejection rate is 3.5%.
They requested signature validation and envelope matching. This is different from the two previous counts.
Most every state has a requirement to sign in to a voter log if voting in person. If it's a mail ballot then the ballot processing center scans the signature on the outside of the envelope and stores it. All of this data must be retained for a period of 22 months.
The action that needs to happen is signature verification of those stored signatures against the respective county voter registrar and/or motor vehicles.
That would blow the fraud wide open.
Ballots have already been separated from the envelopes. That's water under the bridge.
However, signature verification would uncover huge amounts of fraud.
very lengthy, from the Prog Left, but lots worth reading, re Voting Works(Soros) and their Arlo so-called RLA (risk-limiting audit), chosen by Krebs/CISA/DHS.
Rosenfeld expected more Biden votes would be found, which might put off some of you, but lots of detail I didn’t know.
some excerpts:
22 Nov: Voting Booth: Georgia’s Hand Count of 2020 Ballots was No Risk-Limiting Audit, Says Audit Creator
by Steven Rosenfeld
(Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others)
Risk-limiting audits, of which there are several varieties, were invented by Philip Stark (PS), a University of California Berkeley statistician...
Steven Rosenfeld: You have some concerns about Georgia’s audit...
PS. The way that Gabe [Sterling, the state’s elections operations manager] is being incredibly misleading about all of this is saying, ‘Look how great it was that we audited and we uncovered the fact that some batches of ballots were never scanned, and some memory cards [from ballot scanners with vote totals] were never uploaded and what not. All of that has nothing to do with the risk-limiting audit. That is all a precursor to starting a risk-limiting audit.
SR: You’re saying that the lapses they found should have been found and fixed earlier.
PS: Yes. Those are all ballot accounting measures. They’re standard canvass activities. They’re reconciliation measures like checking the number of poll book signatures against the number of ballots, so that you have a separate physical count of the number of ballots against the reported tallies from the voting machines. That is all stuff you have to do before you start the audit.
If you don’t have control over how many ballots there are, you would never notice if there were 100,000 ballots missing from the machine totals. Right? So, one fundamental flaw in what Georgia is doing is they’re relying on the voting system to tell them how many ballots there are, rather than relying on other procedures and cross checks to tell them how many ballots there are. Because some ballots were never scanned and some memory cards were never uploaded, the voting system doesn’t know about those ballots, and a random sampling based RLA would not have had any chance of selecting those ballots. The sample needs to be drawn from a comprehensive list of ballots, not just the ballots the voting system happens to have a record of...
PS: It’s clear that Georgia’s process has been anything but transparent. Observers have been kept away from the ability to actually verify the counts. Even observers with party credentials couldn’t verify that what’s being input to ARLO [the vendor’s counting software] accurately reflects those counts, or [examine] the inner workings of ARLO—which has had a number of changes in the course of this. ARLO was never designed for this kind of thing. They [Georgia] would have been better off using Google Sheets. They could have let the rest of the world watch in real time, with a read-only version to see as they enter the data. They could have given separate logins to everyone in the county election offices who were entering data, so that they can trace the edit history of any cell in the [overall vote counting] spreadsheet. Instead, they’ve got people sharing logins. They’ve got an opaque system that nobody can watch...
Georgia’s canvas [ballot-accounting] procedures aren’t providing the foundation needed for a risk-limiting audit...
PS: The other thing that Gabe kept saying is this [audit] is uncovering human errors in the count, not machine errors. We know that the scanner settings on the Dominion scanners erase voter marks [because lightly marked ballots are not read]. We know the majority vote-by-mail voters were Biden voters. I would expect their hand count to pick up [missed] votes and to get more votes for Biden than for Trump. And we’re not seeing any of that. There’s no reason to presume that it’s the people who are wrong and it’s the machines that are right...
So rather than an audit, recount, and re-canvass, it [the presidential re-tally] seems to have been their first canvass, because it’s the first time they looked to make sure that they actually had all their ballots accounted for. If they’re going to just keep counting until you get the same answer the machine did, that’s obviously biased procedure. That’s nowhere close to a risk-limiting audit.
https://votingbooth.media/georgias-hand-count-of-2020-ballots-was-no-risk-limiting-audit-says-audit-creator/
And, if they're using machines to do the signature verification it should be configured to the most restrictive setting...and then all that do not match should go thru a second eyeball check with both parties there to witness.
To be legal, this stage of the process (including signature match) must have been properly witnessed by observers from both sides.
A proper audit would include checking that this was carried out.
Unless I am mistaken, GA “Absentee Ballots” and mail-in ballots are not the same. My elderly mother used an absentee ballot, and it didn’t look like the mail-in ballots counted in Fulton and Gwinnett counties.
Never mind, I found the difference.
We should really make everything uniform and DO AWAY with mail-in ballots altogether.
p
Not in Colorado - and probably most states.
The signatures go through an automated verification process - supposedly checking 30 points of each signature against a known valid one.
This process approves about 40% of the overall signatures.
The 60% that are left then get compared manually - first by one person who can either approve the signature to move forward to count - or mark the signature as needing further verification.
Those needing further verification are then looked at by two people - supposedly one from each major party. They can either approve a signature or mark it as suspect.
All signatures marked as suspect then have an email (if available) and letter sent to the voter informing them of a need to "cure" their ballot - and give info on other documents that would prove their identity.
As you can see, there are multiple places along the line were fraud can occur - in the automatic verification, and in the single person "phase 1" manual verification process.
Dateline 23 Oct. 2021:
Georgia today announced that it would start it’s 53rd recount. Sources close to the Board of Elections have revealed that the canvassers are planning to use knotted string, in a manner similar to that used by the Inca, to talley whackers, er, votes. The process will take considerably longer than the 52nd recount due to the discovery of an addional 160,870 mail-in ballots from Waycross.
Of the 7.6 million registered voters 9.724 million have voted. Totals at the last recount were:
BIDEN: 9,723,997
TRUMP: 3
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