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  • 2020-11-30 (xsd:date)
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  • Debunking Trump Tweets: Should Georgia Conduct a Ballot Signature Audit? (en)
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  • One of the many claims U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters made in flailing attempts to reverse Trump’s defeat by Democratic challenger Joe Biden in the 2020 general election was the assertion that Georgia officials were refusing to match the signatures on the envelopes of absentee (i.e., mail-in) ballots with the recorded signatures of the corresponding voters, because that process would produce evidence of widespread voter fraud in a state which Trump lost by less than 16,000 votes: However, forcing Georgia to conduct a signature audit of absentee ballots, as Trump and other Republicans (such as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp) have called for, is something exceedingly unlikely to occur, or to change the election outcome if it did, for a number of reasons. First of all, absentee voters' signatures were already checked twice during the voting, once when they requested their absentee ballots and again after they submitted those ballots: Additionally, the rejection rate for absentee ballots due to signature issues in 2020 was consistent with the rejection rate in 2018 (even though absentee ballots were much more heavily utilized in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic), a statistic which counters the notion of rampant absentee voter fraud occurring only in 2020: Finally, even if a signature audit of absentee ballots identified some mismatched signatures that had been missed during the original process, nothing could be done to rectify those votes. Absentee ballots are separated from their envelopes during the tabulation process in order to protect secrecy and prevent votes from being traced back to the individuals who cast them, so it would not be possible to determine which candidates absentee ballots submitted in envelopes bearing mismatched signatures were cast for and negate those votes. Both Republican and Democratic party representatives declined to exercise their right to observe the signature-matching process for absentee ballots in Georgia, and no state law requires that (or specifies how) a signature audit should be conducted: (en)
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