Election Fraud: Case Study
Here is an example of a Trump accusation of fraud in the 2020 election. I chose it merely because it was the first of several cases mentioned by someone I was debating on Facebook.
Facebook quote: “It is pretty frustrating when they do a recount but refuse to allow signature verification.”
I believe that this refers to Georgia, about which President Trump tweeted “The Consent Decree signed by the Georgia Secretary of State, with the approval of Governor @BrianKempGA, at the urging of @staceyabrams, makes it impossible to check & match signatures on ballots and envelopes, etc. They knew they were going to cheat. Must expose real signatures!”
The AP did a fact check: “Trump wrong on Georgia voter signature checks” which says “There is nothing in the consent decree that prevents Georgia election clerks from scrutinizing signatures. The legal settlement signed in March addresses accusations about a lack of statewide standards for judging signatures on absentee ballot envelopes. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said that not only is it entirely possible to match signatures, but that the state requires it.”
However, conservative website Breitbart did its own fact check concluding “Trump is Right, AP Wrong, About Georgia Signature Matching.” Their argument is that, even though Georgia officials still review signatures and can still reject a ballot for a signature mismatch, the procedure is so complicated that officials won’t do it. For each mismatch, 3 election officials must compare signatures and vote on whether there is a mismatch. Breitbart’s reasoning is that there are too many ballots for officials to take the time to compare. They give no evidence for this assertion.
I went a step further and looked up numbers: in 2018, when Trump wasn’t on the ballot and a Republican narrowly won the election for governor, 454 absentee ballots out of 284,000 cast were rejected: about 1 in 620. In 2020, 2000 out of 1.3 million were rejected: about 1 in 650. So: small numbers in both cases, and almost no change in the mismatch rate. I got those numbers from a website called the centersquare.com which is sponsored by the Franklin News Foundation, which Wikipedia says has a “free market, limited government perspective”. Probably not super biased on behalf of Democrats.
So, contrary to Trump’s tweet, Georgia had a signature match, and they did use it to reject ballots. Contrary to Breitbart’s “fact check”, it was quite feasible to check for signature mismatches. Even if they had 10 times the number of mismatches than reported, that makes an average of 126 signatures to check in each of Georgia’s 159 counties.
But if you believe that the Democrats were able to force the Republican victor in the election to agree to a procedure which unfairly hurt Republicans, and that the Republican in charge of the election would lie to help the Democrats win, I suppose you may also believe that this was just too onerous a task for local election boards.
And if you can believe anything Donald Trump says given his extreme record of dishonesty, perhaps it doesn’t matter what evidence anyone brings about his claims.
Top photo: Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp with Donald Trump.