On today’s BradCast: Georgia’s embattled Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger made a surprising — and somewhat bizarre — announcement at a press conference on Wednesday morning. He declared that the state would be carrying out a full, statewide hand-count in the Presidential race of “every single piece of paper, every single ballot, every single lawfully cast ballot.” As of airtime, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump in that race by more than 14,000 votes out of nearly five million votes cast this year in the Peach State, with very few ballots reportedly left to tally. [Audio link to full show is posted below summary.]
“With the margin being so close, it will require a full, by-hand recount in each county,” Raffensperger declared. “This will help build confidence. It will be an audit, a recount, and a recanvass all at once.” But, as our guest today explains, an audit, recount and recanvass all very different things that can’t and don’t actually happen at the same time.
The announcement has resulted in a lot of questions today, that we both ask and try to answer.
For a start, recount laws in Georgia only appear to allow the Sec. of State to declare a recount in the event that there is evidence of fraud that could change the final results. He has offered no such evidence. Otherwise, if the margin of difference between the two leading candidates is 0.5% or less, a candidate may then petition the Secretary for a recount. To my knowledge, however, neither candidate has yet petitioned for such a count, even with the margin currently at 0.28% and still rising for Biden. One reason is likely because a recount can’t be petitioned until after the race has been certified. County certification in the state is due this Friday, with the deadline for certification by the state not until next Friday (November 20th.)
Earlier this year, however, Georgia announced a new pilot program for a post-election Risk-Limiting Audit (or RLA) process. An RLA, in short, is a process and protocol invented in recent years by UC-Berkley Prof. Philip Stark (who has been a guest on our show) in which hand-counts of small, randomly-selected samples of ballots in a race are carried out to determine, supposedly with 95% scientific certainty, that the results reported by the computer tabulators accurately reflect voter intent. The larger the margin in a race, the fewer ballots need to be counted to achieve that certainty under the mathematical RLA protocol. In very close races, or if mistallies are found along the way while hand-counting, a larger sample is then counted, all the way up to a full hand-count of all ballots, when necessary.
In Georgia, Raffensperger had previously announced that the state’s pilot RLA program would be carried out on just one single race every two years. The race would be personally selected by the Secretary. Until today, that race was not expected to be the Presidential race in Georgia. In fact, in the first outing for the state’s pilot RLA program after their June primaries earlier this year, just 27 ballots were counted in total in the RLA. Today, however, for reasons still unknown, Raffensperger declared that the Presidential race would be selected for the RLA and that, due to its tight margin, all ballots would be hand-counted.
Raffensperger has long been under fire from Election Integrity advocates for his recent selection of the Dominion Voting Systems touchscreen Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) for in-person voting. That, after a federal judge last year ordered the state to get rid of its 20-year Diebold touchscreens which she determined to be unsecure, unverifiable and, therefore, unconstitutional. The new systems chosen by Raffensperger may eventually face the same fate, according to the judge.
The new touchscreens print out a computer-marked paper ballot summary, supposedly to be reviewed by each voter at the end of the touchscreen process. But they are 100% unverifiable after an election. Nobody can know if the summaries were reviewed or not, much less accurately. Studies show that most voters do not review them, and that 93% of voters do not notice when the computer has changed one of their votes. RLAs of paper ballot summaries produced by BMDs, according to Stark, cannot possibly confirm voter intent. They can only confirm whether the computerized optical-scan tabulators tallied them correctly as per the QRCode printed on each ballot summary. (Yes, voters who do bother to review the printouts will review the human-readable summary printed on them. That portion of the ballot is not actually tallied by the scanners — the QR barcode is tallied instead.)
And while Election Integrity folks have long been critical of Raffensperger (and, in fact, are suing the state of Georgia to get rid of the BMDs and move to a less expensive, verifiable hand-marked paper ballot system for all voters at the polling place, as recommended by cybersecurity and voting systems experts), this week, many on the Right have suddenly decided that they are also now also critical of Raffensperger’s selection of the Dominion systems and his administration of the Presidential election that Trump appears to have lost in the state. On Monday night, the state’s two incumbent Republican U.S. Senators called on Raffensperger to resign in advance of the two U.S. Senate runoffs set for January 5th, which which will determine whether Democrats are able to take back control of the upper chamber in Congress. (For my part, I’ve invited Republicans to join my call for all hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots for those easy to count runoffs, as that would provide full transparency that even the GOP shouldn’t complaint about, since it would remove Dominion’s hardware and software from the entire process.)
At the same time, millions of hand-marked paper ballots were also cast in this year’s election in Georgia, due to the COVID pandemic. A hand-count of those ballots under the RLA process may or may not reveal errors in the tabulation, but — presuming the chain of custody has been secure — would help confirm the accuracy of the reported results…at least for the hand-marked ballots.
None of this, meanwhile, will change the ultimate results of the Presidential election nationally — at least not on its own. Even if the results in Georgia were to somehow flip to Trump, Biden would still have more than enough Electoral College votes, even without Georgia, to win the Presidency if his current leads in all of the other states remain.
If all of this sounds like a confusing mess, that’s because it is. And, to be frank, it’s unclear, at least to me, whether Raffensperger even knows what the hell he is talking about in declaring this simultaneous RLA/Recount/Recanvass. Nonetheless, we try to make sense of what is known and unknown today — and both ask and answer many more questions — with my guest EDDIE PEREZ, Global Director of Technology and Standards at the nonpartisan, nonprofit Open Source Election Technology (OSET) Institute. Before joining OSET, Perez spent some 15 years as the Director of Product Management at Austin, TX-based Hart-Intercivic, the nation’s third-largest private voting systems vendor.
Jump on in to today’s full show for what I hope is an invaluable, detailed conversation about all of this, if you want to know what the hell is now going on in Georgia and whether any of it can actually work or otherwise ultimately effect the Presidential results. Perez has a lot of experience and insight to share while he expresses his own concerns that what may be going on here is “a kind of election integrity theater” being carried out by Raffensperger, “where neither side is particularly satisfied” by the ultimate result….whatever it may turn out to be.
Also on today’s program: The latest updates on several election results elsewhere; 28 election officials in one Missouri County have contracted COVID, most likely from voters during the election; A new poll from Reuters finds that nearly 80% of the electorate — including Republicans — believe Biden is the winner…
Your article sounds like you are saying that it is irrelevant to recount the Georgia vote because even if Trump wins, he would still need another reversal or two to win the Presidency. Have you ever watched Lebron James keep scoring until the final buzzer has sounded even if his team can’t win the game? Why does he do it? Not to pad his stats, but to make the score is as respectable as possible. If the Georgia recount goes to Trump that still makes the final outcome more respectable. Within a year from now most people will simply look at the electoral college final count to determine if the race was close or not.
If this were not a Presidential Election with severe time constraints, election integrity advocates could see this is as a plus, especially since, according to Marilyn Marks, Raffensperger intends to “hand tally the unofficial human readable text”.
If that tally overruled the QR Code tally, then this would be a step forward in establishing the unreliability of BMDs.
But I think both you Eddie Perez are mistaken when you identify this as merely “Election Integrity Theater”. To the contrary, there’s a sly and sinister motive behind this.
What Raffensperger has done is to assign an impossible task to County Election Officials. Under GA law, the Counties must certify the results by Nov. 13. The Secretary of State has to certify the statewide results no later than November 20.
If, by Nov. 20, Raffensperger is unable to certify the results, the issue as to the selection of a slate of Presidential Electors would be placed before the Republican-controlled state legislature.
Also, I believe that Raffensperger is well aware of the differences between a Risk Limiting Audit and a recount via a hand tally. He utilized the RLA language to evade his lack of authority to initiate a statewide recount sua sponte when it had not been requested by either candidate and to evade GA law limiting recounts to simply feeding the paper ballots thru the optical scanners a second time.
Raffensperger has just held up a middle finger to election integrity advocates, like the Coalition for Good Governance, and their ongoing legal action to force Georgia to conduct transparent elections on hand-marked paper ballots.
It appears I may have erred re @2. Mea Culpa!
GA attorney Brian Sells advises me that the Counties must complete certification before they begin the 100% audit. If that’s the case, and the hand-tally of the readable texts reveals a significant gap between the QR Code tabulation and the hand count, in the direction of either candidate, it could furnish significant evidence in support of the ongoing legal challenge to BMDs.
I remain concerned that Raffensperger may attempt to utilize the inability of the Counties to complete the hand tally as an excuse not comply with his obligation to certify the election no later than 11/20/20.
Let me get this straight. The election officials have to verify the votes from a system that is deliberately unverifiable. If they can’t do so, the election goes to the legislature, which was put in place by another unverifiable system and the current governor.
I understand that Loeffler and Perdue are putting pressure on Raffensperger to “influence” their runoff elections, at the same time he’s getting pressured to validate the win for Biden… or find some way to “influence” the race in Trump’s favor. It’s a sorry state of affairs.
Re Ralph Crown @4:
Raffensperger’s directive to conduct a hand-tally of all ballots, which he inaccurately described as a Risk Limiting Audit, pertains exclusively to the Presidential race. Whatever the results of that audit, it will not alter the fact that the two runoff races for the U.S. Senate will take place on 1/5/21.
Republicans are not interested in honest elections.
Republicans are only interested in elections they WIN, regardless of how they do it.
Before this election, I disliked Republicans.
I feel much more strongly NOW.
Brad, The SOC isn’t the problem. Those Republican Senators were trying to stop the initial full count, but he told them that ALL the votes would be counted. If they wanted a recount would happen after. So the mail in votes that were heavily Democratic DID actually get counted That way they can be shown to be legitimate or have a problem, but they are IN the count. He wasn’t necessarily on our side but he didn’t buckle under the pressure of throwing the GA election under the bus.
What’s this about Kentucky?
Link to tweet
Tweet text:
Alison Greene
@GrassrootsSpeak
Doesn’t it seem odd that in Ballard County Kentucky the State Board of Elections shows 2285 registered REPUBLICAN voters as of Oct 2020 yet 3155 people voted for Mitch McConnell?
Ballard County also has 3966 registered Dems but Amy McGrath only got 936 votes?
And theres more…
11:32 AM � Nov 11, 2020
Unrolled thread here
https://threadreaderapp.com/thr...278289920.html
Doesn’t it seem odd that in Ballard County Kentucky the State Board of Elections shows 2285 registered REPUBLICAN voters as of Oct 2020 yet 3155 people voted for Mitch McConnell?
Ballard County also has 3966 registered Dems but Amy McGrath only got 936 votes?
And theres more…
In Bath County Kentucky with 2478 registered REPUBLICAN voters McConnell got 3537 votes?
And with 6730 registered Dems in Bath McGrath only got 1827 votes?
What are the chances that 1000+ registered Dems voted for Mitch & almost 5000 Dems didn’t vote for Amy?
And theres more..
Elliott County Kentucky has 860 registered Republicans yet Mitch got 1958 votes?
Many other counties had this type of anomalies where Mitch got way more votes than they have Republican voters but there are other elements of the Kentucky Senate race that should be investigated…
Not only is there a weird pattern of Mitch getting more votes than a county has registered Republicans but Kentucky hasn’t counted all their Absentee votes.
655,000 people in Kentucky requested absentee ballots but only 329,869 were counted. What happened to the other 325,131🤔
The GOP seem to have used ‘a bag of tricks’ to mess with the results. It’s a combination of things that includes
• Somehow getting more Republican votes then there are Republican voters
• Significant absentee votes not being counted
• Suppressing the Vote in key Democrat counties
And we can prove it by simply contacting registered Dems. Call them in counties like Ballard & ask who they voted for? Ask:
• Did they vote?
• Did they vote with their party?
If Amy got 936 votes but we can show 1000+ Dems who voted for her we can go to court with affidavits🤔
This thread looks at Kentucky but we should investigate a few races (Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, Ernst)
Not only should we be fighting for Georgia, but lets look into this. The GOP claim fraud so let ’em prove their own races are legitimate…lets investigate GOP SENATE RACES
For the sources of the numbers I’ve quoted I got the data directly from the Registration Statistics & Election results published on the Commonwealth of Kentucky State Board of Elections site.
elect.ky.gov/Resources/Page
I hope the Media & @AmyMcGrathKY will look into all of this.
Eric J. Jefferson,
Wow.
Some scary inconsistencies there, for sure.
And what about MAiNE?
IMO, Susan Collins “win” smells to high heaven.