Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has called again for a signature audit of the state’s election results, pointing to a video presented Thursday by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani that appeared to show election workers in Fulton County counting “suitcases of ballots” after poll watchers were sent away.
Kemp told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham late Thursday the audit was something Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger would have to order. Since Kemp’s earlier November 20 request, however, Raffensperger “has not done that. I think it should be done,” Kemp said.
The governor’s request is to compare signatures on a sample of absentee ballot envelopes with the ones found on a voter’s registration application.
The video that spurred Kemp’s demand for a signature audit was narrated by Trump volunteer Jacki Pick at the Thursday hearing in a Georgia State Senate subcommittee. According to Pick, the footage showed an election worker retrieving four “suitcases of ballots” from beneath a table that workers tabulated after poll watchers left.
“Especially with what we saw today, it raises more questions. There needs to be transparency,” Kemp told Ingraham.
On Friday, three members of the U.S. House from the Georgia Delegation, members-elect Andrew Clyde and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Representative Jody Hice, signed a letter demanding Attorney General William Barr investigate the “suitcases of ballots” claim.
While Attorney General Bill Barr maintains the case is not closed on the voter fraud issue, he has said that the Justice Department has, thus far, not found evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome of the presidential election, contradicting claims from President Trump and his team.
“There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that,” Barr said.
Speaking to the Associated Press, the attorney general added that people have confused the use of the federal justice system with allegations that should be made in civil lawsuits, asserting that a remedy for those complaints would be a top-down audit by state or local officials — not the DOJ.
“There’s a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default fix-all, and if people don’t like something they want the Department of Justice to come in and ‘investigate,’” he said, adding that “most claims of fraud … are not systemic allegations.”
Georgia Elections Official Gabriel Sterling denied Pick’s explanation of the footage, saying certified law enforcement investigators for the Secretary of State’s office had watched the hours-long video in its entirety. “Shows normal ballot processing,” Sterling said.
The Augusta Chronicle notes:
At an earlier Thursday Senate subcommittee hearing, Ryan Germany, general counsel for the secretary of state, detailed what has already been done at county offices to verify the signatures. The process is open to the public and overseen by counties’ bipartisan election boards, he said.
“Counties are required to verify signatures on the absentee ballot applications and absentee ballots, on both the signature on the ‘counties are required to verify signatures on absentee ballot apps and absentee ballots on both the signature on eNet,” the state’s voter registration system, “and on the absentee ballot application,” Germany said.
If the signatures don’t appear to match, the counties must inform the voter within three days or the next day if it’s within 11 days of an election, he said, to give the voter an opportunity to prove his or her identity, he said.
Germany stated that once the signatures are matched, the ballots are separated from the signed envelopes, which are only stored for 24 hours. And even if they were compared again, it cannot be determined who any invalidated ballot went to because the ballots are already separated from the signed envelopes.
“We have a constitutional right in Georgia to a secret ballot. They verify it’s you, then they separate your ballot so they don’t get to see who you voted for,” Germany said.
Germany doesn’t mention the constitutional right of Americans to have their votes respected by ensuring they aren’t invalidated by fraudulent votes.
Governor Kemp’s credibility has taken a nosedive among Republicans for his perceived failure to prevent the fraud in his state. If he’s truly interested in living up to the trust his constituents have placed in him, he must stop merely talking and start acting.
