Results Of Georgia Audit

Posted on 4/15/2022by admin

Results Of Georgia Signature Audit
Results Of Georgia Signature Audit

Third and final Georgia audit rejects Trump fraud claims and confirms Biden victory. Signature audit was the first of its kind ever conducted in the state, and the third recount held amid Trump. The Department of Audits and Accounts exists to provide decision-makers with credible management information to promote improvements in accountability and stewardship in state and local government.

Nov. 18 (UPI) -- Officials in Georgia said an audit of the presidential election was on track to be completed by Wednesday, as President Donald Trump sought new challenges in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Gabriel Sterling, Georgia's voting systems implementation manager, said the state had about 300,000 ballots left to count by hand as of Tuesday, saying the state was on a 'good schedule right now' to complete the audit and certify the election results by Friday.

Sterling added that most of the counties in the state had reported results that were 'spot dead on' to their initial counts, reporting only minor discrepancies.

President-elect Joe Biden holds a lead of about 13,000 votes in the state, which launched a recount as the margin between the two candidates was smaller than 0.5%.

Floyd County's election board will rescan all early votes and provisional votes after 2,600 ballots that were not scanned when the county tallied its early vote were found in the recount.

Sterling said the updated results will grant Trump a net pickup of 778 votes.

Trump lost one vote and Biden lost seven after the audit in Effingham County and there was a one-vote discrepancy in Oglethorpe County but officials did not provide details.

Biden gained a write-in vote for 'Biden Harris' in Coweta County, while a Biden vote in Catoosa County was reclassified a Trump vote.

In Wisconsin, Trump paid the state $3 million and filed a petition for a recount of ballots in Dane and Milwaukee counties, both of which voted overwhelmingly for Biden.

'We will not stop fighting for transparency and integrity in our electoral process to ensure that all Americans can trust the results of a free and fair election in Wisconsin and across the country,' said Jim Troupis, a former Dane County circuit judge who is representing the campaign in the recount effort.

Biden won the state by 20,608 votes but Trump's campaign says its observers at Milwaukee's central counting facility were required to stand 30 feet to 35 feet away from the area where ballots were being counted, asserting that observers will find mistakes and fraud if allowed to observe from a closer distance.

In its request, the Trump campaign sought to void absentee ballots where clerks filled in the addresses of witnesses as well as ballots from voters who declared themselves indefinitely confined -- allowing them to receive an absentee ballot without providing a copy of an ID -- even if they did not meet that definition.

Additionally, the request seeks to throw out votes of those the campaign said did not submit a written application for an absentee ballot, including voters who participated in early in-person voting, although election officials said those who vote early place their ballot in an envelope and sign a statement identified as an 'absentee ballot application/certificate.'

'The official canvass results reaffirmed Joe Biden's clear and resounding win in Wisconsin after Wisconsin voters turned out to cast their ballots in record numbers. A cherry-picked and selective recounting of Milwaukee and Dane County will not change these results,' Biden spokesman Nate Evans said.

Trump's campaign also filed an amended complaint in Pennsylvania seeking to block the state's efforts to verify its election results. The campaign said the state violated its federal due process rights and undermined legal protections.

Wednesday's filing comes a day after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled officials in Philadelphia did not prevent observers from overseeing the counting of ballots.

© Joe Raedle/Getty Images President-elect Joe Biden speaks as he addresses the media after a virtual meeting with the National Governors Association's executive committee in Wilmington, Del., Nov. 19, 2020.

The results of Georgia's first-ever risk-limiting audit, which entailed counties recounting by hand every vote cast in the presidential race, reaffirmed that President-elect Joe Biden is the victor in Georgia, according to the secretary of state.

'The audit confirmed the original result of the election, namely that Joe Biden won the Presidential Contest in the state of Georgia,' the audit report plainly states.

MORE: Refuting falsehoods, Georgia election officials defend integrity of audit, election

It will be the first time since 1992, when then-candidate Bill Clinton's margin of victory was similarly close, that a Democrat will earn the Peach State's 16 electoral votes. Edison Research, the company ABC News uses to report votes, projected that Biden would win Georgia on Friday.

'The recount process simply reaffirmed what we already knew: Georgia voters selected Joe Biden to be their next president. We are grateful to the election officials, volunteers and workers for working overtime and under unprecedented circumstances to complete this recount, as the utmost form of public service,' Jaclyn Rothenberg, the Biden campaign's Georgia communications director, said in a statement.

However, the Trump campaign said that Biden is not the winner, even though the audit report states he is, because Georgia hasn't certified its election results. The campaign also said Georgia shouldn't certify them.

'This so-called hand recount went exactly as we expected because Georgia simply recounted all of the illegal ballots that had been included in the total. We continue to demand that Georgia conduct an honest recount, which includes signature matching. We intend to pursue all legal options to ensure that only legal ballots are counted,' Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis said in a statement.

Republican Brad Raffensperger, the state's top election official, has been under fire from members of his own party, who've made unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud, since before the full, by-hand recount of the presidential race was announced on Nov. 11. The state was always planning to conduct an audit on one contest following the general election, as is now required by law following the passage of a 2019 election reform bill, but it was up to Raffensperger to choose which race to audit, and he selected the presidential race because of its 'national significance.' Since the margin in the contest was so tight, the secretary, in consultation with audit experts assisting with the process, determined that the most efficient and accurate way to do the audit would be to hand count every one of the approximately 5 million votes cast in the race.

According to VotingWorks, the organization that helped implement the audit, it's the largest hand count of votes in U.S. history.

Video: Biden promises to prioritize state virus funding (Associated Press)

In the results of the audit, Biden's lead was 12,284 votes. The statewide variation of the machine-counted results and the hand counted results was 0.1053%. According to the report, prior research indicates that the expected variance between hand and machine counts is between 1% and 1.5%. No county has a variation greater than 0.73% and 103 out of 159 counties had variations less than 0.05%.

'Georgia's historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state's new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,' Raffensperger said in a statement. 'This is a credit to the hard work of our county and local elections officials who moved quickly to undertake and complete such a momentous task in a short period of time.'

The deadline for Raffensperger to certify the general election results is 5 p.m. Friday, and the secretary's office has said the announcement of the certification's completion will likely come in a press release.

MORE: Georgia senators call on secretary of state to resign; secretary says, 'That is not going to happen.'

Since the margin of victory is still within 0.5% of total votes cast in the contest, the Trump campaign can request a recount. The recount would be conducted using high-capacity scanners and not be done by hand. Under state law, counties bear the costs associated with a recount.

The deadline to request a recount is 5 p.m. Tuesday.

Republicans, including the president, railed against the audit's process because it did not entail re-verifying the signatures accompanying the approximately 1.3 million returned absentee ballots.

'Thousands of uncounted votes discovered in Georgia counties. When the much more important signature match takes place, the State will flip Republican, and very quickly,' Trump tweeted Thursday.

Looking at signatures again would still not take place as part of a recount. Absent a court order, or the presentation of 'credible evidence to pursue on a specific issue,' re-verifying signatures will not take place, according to Gabriel Sterling, the statewide voting system implementation manager in Raffensperger's office.

During the audit, election officials in four counties discovered uncounted votes that were not included in their originally reported results.

In Fayette, Walton and Douglas counties, election officials learned that memory cards -- just one in each county -- containing votes were erroneously not uploaded. In Fayette County, 2,755 votes were on the memory card; in Walton County, 284 votes were on the memory card; in Douglas County, 293 votes were on the memory card.

In Floyd County, election officials found a batch of ballots that had never been scanned at all, an error that Gabriel Sterling, the statewide voting system implementation manager, called an 'amazing blunder.' Raffensperger called on the county's chief clerk of elections, Robert Brady, to resign because of the mistake. On Thursday, the Floyd County Board of Election voted to fire Brady.

Sterling said Wednesday that the issue in Floyd was 'a lot more dangerous' because unlike the memory card issue, 'there wasn't a reconciliation process that was going to catch' the error in Floyd, so without this audit, there's a real possibility those votes never would have been found. If the other three counties had conducted their reconciliation process properly, the missing memory card would have been found.

MORE: Trump to meet with GOP state lawmakers in effort to override election loss

He said that reinforcing the reconciliation process to county officials will be a priority looking toward the next election.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Sterling, who has been the public face of the audit representing the secretary's office, said that he was 'prayerful' that when the audit was completed, everyone -- regardless of party affiliation -- could trust the results.

Results Of Georgia Signature Audit

'Everybody who's involved in this -- even the parties -- they need to have faith in the outcome of these elections, whether they win, or whether they lose, because that's the bedrock of how we have a transfer of power,' he said.

Results Of Georgia Signature Audit

ABC News' John Verhovek contributed reporting.