The Georgia State Elections Board (SEB) has been on a rampage this summer. After they finally realized that the 2020 election really had been stolen, and that the evidence was irrefutable, the board started passing a raft of election integrity measures that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger must implement.
They’re not done yet. In a new proposal that is expected to pass 3-2 like all the others, the SEB is going to require that the number of ballots, number of votes, and number of voters must all be equal before the 2024 election can be certified.
There were a ton of problems in the 2020 election in Georgia (and Arizona, and Wisconsin, and…). There were double-counted ballots, hundreds of thousands of missing ballot images, drop box surveillance videos that were illegally deleted, and the list goes on.
The SEB proved definitively that 3,000 ballots were double counted in Fulton County during the machine recount after the election. The extra ballots were included in the total when the recount was concluded. The number of ballots counted by the machines didn’t match the number of votes that were cast and therefore didn’t match the number of people who voted.
That’s just in Fulton County. Another 6,000 ballots in four different counties ended up either missing or hadn’t been counted. This proves that Georgia’s election problems under Raffensperger are systemic and statewide. No one is properly reconciling the vote totals, even though it’s required by state law.
As we’ve been saying for nearly four years now, this is very simple to explain if you think of it as a retail job where you’re running a cash register. The receipts have to match the cash that’s in the drawer at the end of the day. If the cash doesn’t match the receipts, someone is likely to get fired.
The new rule that is expected to pass before the end of August will break votes down by category of how they were cast. These are absentee, provisional, advance, and in-person on Election Day. If a precinct ends up with a discrepancy between the number of ballots, votes, or voters, the issue immediately gets referred to the SEB. No votes from the precinct can be added to the official vote total until the cause of the discrepancy is discovered and reconciled.
If the board cannot figure out how the discrepancy happened, it gets turned over to the District Attorney for that area and becomes a criminal matter. For any Democrats who are having trouble following along, allow us to spell it out:
If you cheat this time in Georgia, you’re going to jail.
Since the votes from a sketchy precinct cannot be added to the total until reconciliation happens, it means that the 2024 election in Georgia cannot be officially certified until an election takes place. In 2020, everyone rushed to certify their obviously fake and anomalous vote totals. That won’t happen in Georgia this year.
Another proposal will require a poll manager and two sworn poll watchers (one from each party) to independently count the number of ballots that comes off every scanner. All three of them have to agree on the number of ballots that were counted.
The proposal says, “When all three poll officers arrive at the same total ballot count independently, they shall each sign a control document containing the polling place, ballot scanner serial number, electronic name, printed name with signature and date and time of the ballot hand count.”
Georgia state law requires reconciliation of ballots and the number of voters, but there is nothing in the law that explains how to do this at the individual precinct level. That was another thing that was supposed to be Brad Raffensperger’s job. This new proposal provides uniform guidance to all the precincts across Georgia. It also sets up another layer of protection against the election being stolen. Poll watchers from both parties must be there and participate in the counting and reconciliation process. Even if a pipe breaks at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
Will this work to protect the integrity of the 2024 election? Joe Biden’s campaign certainly thought so. They pulled all funding and resources out of Georgia a couple of months ago. While they didn’t say it directly, this was an acknowledgement that they can’t win Georgia this year, because the state is going to have a fair election.
