If facts had anything to do with President Donald Trump’s delusional obsession with voter fraud, he would have conceded the election to Joe Biden a long time ago.
Alas, they don’t. But in Georgia, even more news emerged Tuesday that the presidential race was free and fair: A law enforcement audit of more than 15,000 absentee ballot envelope signatures in Cobb County, Georgia found no fraud or irregularities at all.
Between the Secretary of State’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, investigators found just a handful of minor issues among the randomly-selected envelopes they reviewed.
Nine envelopes total had signatures that investigators believed didn’t match official records, in one case because a voter’s spouse signed his envelope for him. Another envelope was missing a signature. Investigators confirmed with all 10 voters that they’d cast the ballots in question.
The bottom line? “No fraudulent absentee ballots were identified during the audit,” investigators said.
Remember, a signature audit was supposed to prove that 2020 was a fraudulent election in Georgia: The Trump campaign sued Georgia officials earlier this month in an attempt to force a signature audit. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the audit a few days later.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows made a pointless pilgrimage to Cobb County last week to smile and nod at the process.
“This audit disproves the only credible allegations the Trump campaign had against the strength of Georgia’s signature match process,” Raffensperger said Tuesday of the Cobb County audit’s results.
The Trump effort to overturn the election has moved on, focusing now on a slate of parallel electors that would ignore the will of the voters in several states and deliver Trump a second term in spite of the democratic process.
Seemingly responding to the audit’s results, Trump on Tuesday moved the goalposts yet again.
When are we going to be allowed to do signature verification in Fulton County, Georgia? The process is going VERY slowly. @BrianKempGA Pennsylvania just found 205,000 votes more than they had voters. Therefore, we WIN Pennsylvania!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2020
Trump also complained about the Raffensperger’s “brother,” who conspiracy theorists assert is Ron Raffensperger, an executive at a Chinese tech company. Despite sharing a last name with the man, Georgia’s secretary of state isn’t related to him.
…The consent decree signed by the “Secretary”, with the consent of Kemp, is perhaps even more poorly negotiated than the deal that John Kerry made with Iran. Now it turns out that Brad R’s brother works for China, and they definitely don’t want “Trump”. So disgusting! #MAGA
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2020
