It seems clear that the Georgia Republicans are split between those fighting presidential electoral theft and fraud and those satisfied with the status quo. Witness two fighters – U.S. Rep. Doug Collins and State GOP Chairman David Shafer— sending a hard-hitting letter asking that Secretary of State (and fellow Republican) Brad Raffensperger “take control” of the hand count of presidential ballots and provide the transparency he promised.
Consider these excerpts from yesterday’s Nov. 12 Collins/Shafer letter:
“… the training and directives issued today do not comport with your stated goals yesterday and do not satisfy our concerns that gave rise to our request for a hand count in the first place. We write now to express our serious concerns… as to how the hand count is to be conducted by the counties. We do not believe that the protocols and procedures announced today will accomplish what we had requested in our letter or announced by your office yesterday. Absent immediate revisions, the people of Georgia cannot have confidence that the hand count and audit were meaningful or delivered on the promised objectives.
“First, the audit does not include a review of signatures on absentee ballot applications and ballot envelopes to confirm the validity of the statutory signature verification process by the counties. Our analysis of your office’s publicly available data shows that the number of rejected absentee ballots in Georgia plummeted from 3.5% in 2018 to 0.3% in 2020. This raises serious concerns as to whether the counties properly conducted signature verification and/or other scrutiny of absentee ballots. In fact, it presents the issue of whether some counties conducted any scrutiny at all. We reiterate our earlier request that this hand count and audit process include review of signatures on absentee ballot applications and envelopes in order to ascertain whether the signature verification process was properly executed by the counties. We believe that a review of the signatures is fundamental to this procedure. We do not believe it is possible to certify the results of the 2020 General Election without conducting this investigation and analysis.
“Second, we have concerns about meaningful access to the auditing process by our designated monitors. Your office announced today that the state parties can designate only one reviewer for every 10 audit teams. That makes it impossible for hand count decisions to be reviewed in real time. One designated monitor cannot observe ten tables at once. Transparency has been a very significant problem during this election. During the initial vote tabulation, some counties placed ballot reviewers in multiple rooms and aggressively enforced arbitrary distancing restrictions that prevented poll watchers from effectively observing the tabulating process. In other counties, poll watchers were not allowed an unobstructed view of the tabulating process. We are concerned that your directive today has replicated and aggravated these problems. …”
The letter goes on to cite other major complaints, including weak ballot security and lack of documentation of ballot chain of custody as required by law. You can read the entire letter by clicking on to Download PDF of Letter Here
