President Trump Seeks GA Recount; Election Officials Threatened

GEORGIA — President Donald Trump's campaign has filed a petition for recount in Georgia, just a few days after the state completed its own audit. The ongoing drama over the state's closely watched election results includes death threats against top election officials, who are Republicans.

Georgia's governor and top election official both certified the presidential election results on Friday, securing President-elect Joe Biden as the winner of the state's 16 electoral votes.

"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," Trump's legal team said in a news release. "President Trump and his campaign continue to insist on an honest recount in Georgia, which has to include signature matching and other vital safeguards."

The president's claim ignores steps Georgia election workers take to ensure signatures are checked twice, once when a voter requests a mail-in ballot, and again when the ballot is returned to a local election office. So signature checks are not part of the hand recount, FactCheck.org reported.

“Let’s address this disinformation about signature match,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wrote Nov. 15 on Facebook. “We strengthened signature match. We helped train election officials on GBI [Georgia Bureau of Investigation] signature match — which is confirmed twice before a ballot is ever cast.”

According to a state law passed last year, election officials must “promptly notify” voters about a ballot rejection due to an issue with the signature, allowing them to “cure” their ballot by casting a provisional ballot — along with identification information — within three days of the polls closing on Election Day.

Raffensperger and Kemp last week "validated two vote counts: an initial machine count of paper ballots, and a manual recount to audit the outcome," the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.

The two counts showed a slight discrepancy between results, with the machine count showing Biden received 12,670 more votes than President Donald Trump, but the recount audit showing Biden ahead by 12,284 votes.

Although certified, Kemp criticized the way election officials handled the audit.

"We demand complete explanations for all discrepancies identified so our citizens have complete confidence in our elections," Kemp said. "In the runoff election, we cannot have lost memory cards or stacks of uncounted ballots. We must have full transparency in all monitoring and counting. Every legal vote must be counted, and the security of the ballot box must be protected."

During the news conference Friday, Raffensperger said he plans "to propose election-law changes aimed at increasing trust in the results, by allowing state officials to intervene in counties that have systemic problems in administering elections, requiring photo ID for absentee voting and enabling more challenges to voters who might not live where they say," WSB-TV reported.

On Monday, the State Elections Board approved counties providing drop boxes for absentee ballots and recording the boxes via video cameras. Additionally, the board approved the ability for counties to begin opening and scanning absentee ballots before the election day, although that is not required, the AJC reported.

As predicted by Raffensperger — a Republican who heads Georgia's election office — the results of the hand review of the nearly 5 million votes cast in the presidential election showed Biden won the state and its 16 electoral votes.

Raffensperger said the risk-limiting audit of Georgia's presidential contest upheld and reaffirmed the original outcome produced by the machine tally of votes cast. Due to the tight margin of the race and the principles of risk-limiting audits, the audit was a full manual tally of all votes cast. The audit confirmed that the original machine count accurately portrayed the winner of the election, his office said in a news release.

"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."

Biden defeated Trump by 12,284 votes, according to the final count from the audit.

Meanwhile, elections officials in Georgia are being harassed, prompting the FBI and Georgia Bureau of Investigation to look into concerns.

Gabriel Sterling, with the secretary of state's office, tweeted Saturday that he has had "multiple attempted hacks of my emails, police protection around my home, the threats."

A statement by the FBI states that, "the GBI has information of possible threats. We are in the process of investigating any such statements directed at Georgia officials to determine their credibility."

On Nov. 11, Raffensperger ordered a hand recount of the entire state's general election, which began the next day. He pledged the process would be transparent, with Democrats, Republicans and independents standing behind the vote counters as they checked every ballot.

The deadline for every county to complete the re-tally was Wednesday at midnight, and the deadline for the state to certify results was Friday, the Associated Press reported.

By law, Georgia was required to conduct the audit of a statewide race following the Nov. 3 elections.

The audit process also led to counties catching mistakes they made in their original count by not uploading all memory cards. Those counties uploaded the memory cards and recertified their results, leading to increased accuracy in the results the state will certify, the state said.

In Georgia's recount, the highest error rate in any county recount was 0.73 percent. Most counties found no change in their finally tally. The majority of the remaining counties had changes of fewer than 10 ballots.

According to the audit report, Georgia showed a 0.1053 percent variation in statewide total vote count, and a 0.0099 percent variation in the overall margin.

Because the margin is still less than 0.5 percent, Trump can request a recount after certification of the results. That recount would be done by rescanning all paper ballots.

The recount has shown no significant voting irregularities except for in Floyd County, where about 2,500 early-voting ballots initially went uncounted because of a malfunctioning scanner. About 1,600 of those ballots went for Trump, who had already won the Republican-leaning county by a wide margin.

On Thursday, the Floyd County Board of Elections fired chief elections clerk Robert Brady after the 2,500 uncounted ballots were discovered. Citing two reprimands in the past six months, the board terminated Brady, according to The Rome News-Tribune.

Fayette County Elections Director Floyd Jones concluded that the 2,760 newly counted ballots added a net gain of 449 votes for Trump over Biden, according to The Citizen in Fayetteville.

Trump had already beaten Biden in Fayette County's initial count, 35,653 to 30,789.