Georgia SOS reports no voter fraud discovered with signature audit
MACON, Ga. (WGXA) – The Georgia Secretary of State's Office reports no changes to Georgia's 2020 presidential election outcomes after a signature audit.
The signature audit came after a hand recount and then a machine recount that the Trump campaign had requested.
The signature match in Cobb County uncovered "no fraudulent absentee ballots" and the SOS says Cobb County's elections office had a 99.99 percent accuracy rate when it came to performing correct signature verification policies.
SOS Brad Raffensperger requested the signature match in Cobb County on December 14 amid "credible allegations" that officials there didn't follow the process during the June primaries.
The SOS teamed up with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to complete the signature match audit.
Out of150,431 absentee ballots that Cobb County elections officials received during the November 2020 elections, the audit looked over about 10 percent of the total. The SOS says this sample size was chosen to meet the 99 percent confidence threshold.
The Secretary of State's Office said the audit didn't find fraudulent absentee ballots with a 99 percent confidence threshold.
Officials said just two ballots were discovered that Cobb County elections officials should have identified for cure notification that hadn't been. In one of those two cases, officials said the elector's spouse mistakenly signed the ballot. In the other case, the voter reported that they'd only signed the front of their envelope. Both of the voters in these cases filled out their own ballots.
“The Secretary of State’s office has always been focused on calling balls and strikes in elections and, in this case, three strikes against the voter fraud claims and they’re out,” said Raffensperger. “We conducted a statewide hand recount that reaffirmed the initial tally, and a machine recount at the request of the Trump campaign that also reaffirmed the original tally. This audit disproves the only credible allegations the Trump campaign had against the strength of Georgia’s signature match processes.”
The SOS stated in a release that "the absentee ballot envelopes for the audit were pulled from 30 randomly selected boxes of the accepted ABM ballots and one box identified as accepted Electronic Ballot Delivery ABM ballots. Each of the boxes that held the ballots were previously secured in boxes by the Cobb County Elections Department and were selected by a random number generator."
To complete the audit, officials analyzed and compared“the known signatures, markings, and identifying information of the elector as stored in databases with the signature, markings, and identifying information on the elector’s ABM ballot oath envelope.”
Officials had looked for“distinctive characteristics and unique qualities individual attributes of the signature, mark, or other identifying information” to “make a judgment of the validity of the signature on each envelope based on the totality of the documents.”
Law enforcement officials working on the audit worked in 18 teams of two as "inspection teams" as well as two "investigation teams" each made up of two members. If members of an inspection team were undecided on whether a ballot signature was valid, a third person was brought in. The SOS said this happened just six times.
When extra reviewing was needed, if there wasn't a signature on the ballot, or if additional ID documents weren't available, the absentee ballots were handed over to the investigation teams to get more information.
The release stated that "inspection teams submitted 396 envelopes to the investigation teams for comparison with additional documents or follow-up with the elector. 386 of those were accepted as valid. The remaining ten were referred for additional investigation. All ten electors were located, positively identified, and interviewed.”