Georgia State GOP Senators Stress Need for Ballot Signature Audit

Signatures for absentee ballots cast in Georgia’s general election need to be audited, several Republican state senators emphasized during a Dec. 3 committee hearing on election issues.

While the state performed a hand recount of the presidential race, it didn’t include signature verification. Currently, former Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump by some 12,000 votes.

More than 1.3 million absentee ballots were cast in the election, up more than five times from 2016. The state’s election authorities have acknowledged that the increase has strained the county registrar staffers responsible for verifying that signatures on the ballot envelopes match those the government has on file for the voter.

The clerks who match the signatures are trained by the county election director, who is, in turn, trained by staff of the secretary of state.

“Why not look at the signatures and have a third party look at the signatures?” state Sen. Greg Dolezal asked Ryan Germany, general counsel for the Georgia secretary of state’s (SOS) office, at the hearing.

Germany doubted the SOS office would have the authority to review all of the signatures.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate because we open our investigations based off of actionable complaints,” he said.

He said the office is looking at individual cases of issues with absentee ballots, but “haven’t got to that [signature verification] part” yet.

Dolezal said he’s not suggesting reviewing all absentee ballots.

“I think it would be highly valuable to pull a random sampling from multiple counties in this state just to know how close we got,” he said.

Germany said the point isn’t whether the signature matches, but whether the actual voter was the one who signed it.

But Dolezal retorted that a mismatch does matter.

“That should have been a provisional ballot, not a ballot that was accepted,” he said.

Sen. Steve Gooch drilled down on the matter, noting that one in four of Georgia... (Read more)

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