Images : Video Screenshots
While the state performed a hand recount of the presidential race, it didn’t include signature verification. Currently, former Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump by some 12,000 votes.
More than 1.3 million absentee ballots were cast in the election, up more than five times from 2016. The state’s election authorities have acknowledged that the increase has strained the county registrar staffers responsible for verifying that signatures on the ballot envelopes match those the government has on file for the voter.
The clerks who match the signatures are trained by the county election director, who is, in turn, trained by staff of the secretary of state.
“Why not look at the signatures and have a third party look at the signatures?” state Sen. Greg Dolezal asked Ryan Germany, general counsel for the Georgia secretary of state’s (SOS) office, at the hearing.
Germany doubted the SOS office would have the authority to review all of the signatures.
“I don’t think that’s appropriate because we open our investigations based off of actionable complaints,” he said.
He said the office is looking at individual cases of issues with absentee ballots, but “haven’t got to that [signature verification] part” yet.
Dolezal said he’s not suggesting reviewing all absentee ballots.
“I think it would be highly valuable to pull a random sampling from multiple counties in this state just to know how close we got,” he said.
Germany said the point isn’t whether the signature matches, but whether the actual voter was the one who signed it.
But Dolezal retorted that a mismatch does matter.
“That should have been a provisional ballot, not a ballot that was accepted,” he said.
Sen. Steve Gooch drilled down on the matter, noting that one in four of Georgia ballots were absentee and “weren’t verified by anyone except the person at the registrar’s office … [with] little to no professional training.
“How can we certify this election this week knowing that a fourth of ballots haven’t been verified by professionals or even audited?” he asked.
Germany said the law allows for this signature verification process, so the election can be certified.
He also said the office is looking into issues where voters apparently registered at invalid addresses. Thousands of people registered and voted in Georgia using addresses of postal facilities or businesses, while making it look like they were residential addresses, according to a former Trump campaign official whose team analyzed the state’s voter data.
Germany acknowledged that the investigation is complicated by the fact that some mail centers don’t make it apparent the address is not a residential one.
“It doesn’t say P.O. Box. It looks like a regular address,” he said.
In the second part of the hearing, the Trump campaign team presented evidence of alleged fraud and other illegal activities that they say invalidated the election. Under these conditions, they argued, the state’s electors should be directly appointed by the legislature and not based on the election results.
They presented surveillance footage that appears to show election ballot-counting workers kicking out poll observers late on Election Day, before pulling out what appear to be suitcases allegedly filled with ballots.
The campaign and other parties are suing the state over the election results, alleging fraud and other irregularities.
One of the dozens of allegations is that more than 30,000 absentee ballots were returned by voters, but weren’t counted, according to an analysis by expert witness Williams Briggs, a statistician and former Cornell Medical School professor, that was based on a phone survey of potentially affected voters by the team of former Trump campaign member Matt Braynard.
News (3)
1 Million Absentee Ballots Requested in Georgia Runoffs
Publisher : NTDTV
Nearly one million mail-in ballots have been requested for the two Senate runoffs in Georgia.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said counties have already received over 11,000 back.
The number of requests have increased by tens of thousands in just a few days.
Raffensperger and one of his top officials, Gabriel Sterling, have downplayed or dismissed allegations of election fraud. On Wednesday, Sterling clarified that even if someone voted in the Nov. 3 election in another state, they’re able to vote in the runoffs, as long as they’re a registered voter in Georgia at the time they vote.
Raffensperger’s office is investigating three groups that allegedly tried to register ineligible, out-of-state, or deceased voters for the runoffs.
A “Vote Forward” spokesperson told the Epoch Times that they use voter information from a third-party vendor. And that if letter recipients no longer live at the address, then they won’t be able to register, and the letter will have no effect.
Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are battling filmmaker Jon Ossoff and pastor Raphael Warnock.
The two races will determine who controls the Senate.
Vice President Mike Pence is going to Georgia on Friday and President Trump is traveling there for a rally on Saturday.
Joe Biden’s aides have said he plans to go there at some point as well.
Ref : https://www.theepochtimes.com/1-million-absentee-ballots-requested-in-georgia-runoffs_3603697.html
News (4)
Attorney Sidney Powell filed a lawsuit on Wednesday for Arizona’s 11 Republican electors.
The complaint alleges that at least 400,000 illegal ballots were counted in Arizona’s general election. It also alleges that Dominion software created security risks and statistical anomalies in the election results.
The allegations are based on affidavits of eyewitnesses and voter data cited.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs are listed as defendants in the lawsuit.
Both certified the state’s election results on Monday, challenging claims of voter fraud.
Powell also filed a motion (pdf) for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction.
It asks the court to block the governor from “transmitting the currently certified election results to the Electoral College” until the legal challenge is resolved.
It also asks the court to seize and impound all the “servers, software, voting machines” and all election materials for forensic audit and inspection.
In Georgia, Sidney Powell’s election lawsuit got an expedited appeal.
A judge previously blocked election officials from wiping or altering Dominion machines in three counties. But Powell wanted a statewide order—prompting her to seek the emergency appeal.
The Democratic Party of Georgia also entered an emergency request on Wednesday to grant an intervention so they can participate. Washington firm Perkins Coie is representing the party.
Powell is representing Georgia voters who argue that fraud was committed to make sure Joe Biden won the state.
Powell wants to have outside experts examine Georgia’s Dominion machines. But state election officials are trying to prevent that from happening.
Ref : https://www.theepochtimes.com/powell-files-suit-for-arizona-gop-electors_3603687.html
Reporter : Ivan Pentchoukov / Publisher : The Epoch Times PREMIUM
A witness brought forward by the Trump campaign in its election contest in Nevada alleged that the memory disks used to store vote totals from election machines during the early vote period had the vote tallies inexplicably changed overnight, according to a presentation at an evidentiary hearing in Carson City on December 3.
According to Jesse Binnall, who presented the evidence on behalf of the Trump campaign, the witness, whose name is shielded by a protective order, said that the vote tallies were collected from the machine at the end of every voting day and stored on Universal Serial Bus (USB) drives overnight.
“What they would do is they would log these disks in and out. Good practice. And the disks had a serial number on them. And numerous times that disk would be logged out with one vote total on it and logged back in the next morning during the early vote period with a different number on it. Sometimes more, sometimes less,” Binnall said.
“What that means is that literally in the dead of night, votes were appearing, and books are disappearing on these machines.”
Binnall said that the USB drives were not encrypted and the voting machines were not password protected. “And they were hooked up with laptops, then where the laptops themselves could have been compromised,” he added.
The allegation about the vote total alterations was one of several Binnall presented during an evidentiary hearing, the first of its kind for the Trump legal team’s six-state post-election effort.
At the core of the election challenge in Nevada are several batches of ballots that the Trump campaign alleges were either cast, processed, or counted illegally, including roughly 40,000 voters who allegedly voted twice. The campaign is also arguing that the signatures on more than 130,000 ballots were verified solely by a machine in contravention of Nevada’s election law.
The campaign is asking the court to affirm the contest and strike the electors representing former Vice President Joe Biden, who are the defendants in the contest, from representing the state of Nevada in the Electoral College.
“Every single one of these instances that we’ve identified has resulted again in the votes of honest Nevadans being disenfranchised,” Binnall said.
“We understand that this is an unusual situation but what we can’t do is turn a blind eye to vote fraud. If we’re going to keep being the beacon of representative Democracy in the world, when it goes bad—and here it went bad—we can’t just turn a blind eye to it. That’s not what we do in America. We make it right.”
Kevin Hamilton, the attorney for the defendants, delivered a comprehensive point-by-point challenge to all of the Trump campaign’s claims. He argued that the Trump campaign didn’t name a single voter among voluminous lists of ballots that were allegedly illegally cast.
“Simply put, breathtaking relief demands breathtaking evidence but contestants stand before you with nothing of the sort,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton argued that similar legal challenges against the use of the signature-matching machine have been overruled without exception by other courts. He also targeted the credibility of Jesse Kamzol, a key witness for the defendants whose testimony features a data analysis that points to a large number of potentially illegally cast ballots.
In a rebuttal delivered at the tail end of the hearing, Binnall pointed out that the defendants didn’t question Kamzol’s analysis and instead attacked his qualifications. Kamzol served as the chief data officer for the Republican National Committee as recently as 2017.
District Judge James Russell ordered both parties to submit proposed orders to the court by 10 a.m. on Friday so he can quickly make a ruling with enough time for either party to appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court.
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