As a part of its nationwide electoral protest, the Trump campaign is calling on top officials in Georgia to initiate the necessary steps to conduct a massive statewide recount. The campaign argues that this is necessary to ensure “confidence in our electoral process.”
GOP Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia’s ninth congressional district is leading the Trump campaign’s recount team in the state. In a statement released on Tuesday, Nov. 10, Collins made a request to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for a series of election integrity-related measures to be implemented in order to amend issues relating to election fraud and irregularities.
“Most importantly, the Secretary of State should announce a full hand-count of every ballot cast in each and every county due to widespread allegations of voter irregularities, issues with voting machines and poll watcher access … We can – and we will – petition for this in court after statewide certification is completed if the secretary of state fails to act, but we are hopeful he will preemptively take this action today to ensure every Georgian has confidence in our electoral process.”
The candidate with the fewer votes in any election in Georgia may request a recount if the results are within 0.5 percent of total votes cast for their office.
Before the election protest, the state only had around 4,100 votes left to count. Even if every single vote went to President Donald Trump, it would not be enough to swing the state back to the Republican Party.
Full Georgia recount may take up to a month to complete
Collins is asking for Georgia election officials to do a full comparison between absentee ballots and in-person and provisional ballots. He also wants the state to carry out voter eligibility checks on every single ballot to make sure that no felons and non-eligible individuals “accidentally” cast their ballots.
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, said that if the state were to undertake the massive task of recounting every single ballot, it would take until the end of November for Georgia to finally process every single vote. This will be made even more difficult because of concerns regarding vote scanning machines.
In Fulton County, which contains the city of Atlanta and leans heavily Democratic, there were multiple reports of inconsistencies which prompted a rescan of several ballots. David Shafer, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, also claims that GOP poll watchers were told to go home early on Election Night “because they were closing up and then continued to count the ballots in secret.”
This claim has been disputed by Fulton County election officials, who told The Epoch Times that when staff were dismissed, supervisors advised some workers to continue working. In addition, they say that poll watchers were allowed to witness the overnight counting.
“It may be possible that observers left at the time the majority of the staff left,” said Jessica Corbitt, spokesperson for Fulton County. “But from the information we have, the processing area was never closed to observers.”
Because of these inconsistencies concerning vote scanning machines, the Trump campaign is requesting that the recount be done by hand.
Sterling and other election officials said that the beginning of the recount will start with all of Georgia’s 159 counties doing a hand-count of a deck of ballots as a test. These hand-counted ballots will then be sent to the central elections office of each county, where they will go through high-speed vote counting scanners.
If the hand count matches the results from the scanners, then every ballot in that county will be rescanned. (Related: Joe Biden is the beneficiary of statistical anomalies that “magically” impacted Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin vote counts on November 4th.)
Sterling said that all elections are “imperfect,” including Georgia’s, and that election officials will no doubt be able to find some people who did vote illegally. Despite this, Sterling said that he does not believe the scale of the voting improprieties will be significant enough to change the outcome of the election.
Georgia has had at least 31 statewide recounts since 2000. Three of those recounts were able to change the outcome of the election.
Raffensperger being called to resign for mismanaging the election
The request for a recount comes after Georgia Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who are both up for reelection, asked Rafensperger to resign following claims that the secretary of state was unable to provide Georgians with honest and transparent elections.
Perdue and Loeffler were not able to offer any concrete evidence that can prove Rafensperger’s mismanagement of the election. Local media outlets also tried to get their campaigns to comment, but they did not respond.
Raffensperger flatly refused to step down, saying in a statement, “That is not going to happen … The voters of Georgia hired me, and the voters will be the one to fire me.”
The secretary of state further did not believe that the recount will change anything. While he did commit his office to investigate every report of voter or election fraud in the state, Raffensperger said that his office does not expect to find any massive impropriety.
“Does it rise to the numbers or margin necessary to change the outcome to where President Trump is given Georgia’s electoral votes? That is unlikely,” said Raffensperger.
Learn more about how the Trump campaign is trying to fight back against massive voter and electoral fraud in Georgia and in other battleground states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and Arizona at VoteFraud.news.
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