President Donald Trump is continuing to baselessly allege that the recent presidential election was rife with systematic fraud, which he has yet to produce any meaningful evidence for. One of the latest targets of Trump’s ire is Georgia, which news networks have called for President-elect Joe Biden. In a pair of tweets that he posted on Saturday morning, Trump complained about a consent decree that Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger agreed to earlier this year, which beefed up the process for checking signatures that are submitted with absentee ballots in the state. Trump claimed that the changes made meaningfully checking signatures “impossible,” but this claim just isn’t true.
Trump tweeted as follows:
‘The Consent Decree signed by the Georgia Secretary of State, with the approval of Governor [Brian Kemp], at the urging of [Stacey Abrams], makes it impossible to check & match signatures on ballots and envelopes, etc. They knew they were going to cheat. Must expose real signatures! What are they trying to hide. They know, and so does everyone else. EXPOSE THE CRIME!’
….What are they trying to hide. They know, and so does everyone else. EXPOSE THE CRIME!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 14, 2020
Fundamentally, there’s just no evidence for the president’s claims. He’s basing his bombastic rants about the election on self-centered conjecture — plain and simple. Georgia’s Secretary of State and their Governor are both Republicans, so is Trump seriously suggesting that top Republican officials were somehow in cahoots with a scheme to improperly deny him a second term in office? At this point, is there any sector of society at all that Donald thinks isn’t conspiring against him? His paranoia is troubling.
A CBS affiliate explains that under the original consent decree that Trump is complaining about, “if the registrar or absentee ballot clerk determines that the voter’s signature on the mail-in absentee ballot envelope doesn’t match signatures on file, that reviewer must seek two others to also view it.” In order to throw out the ballot as invalid, two of the three reviewers must agree that the signatures don’t meaningfully match. The idea seems to be that these extra rounds of scrutiny subvert the effective completion of the process by adding too much red tape, but the Georgia Secretary of State’s office refutes this claim. Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs insisted that “signature match is intact,” adding that they “strengthened” the program and “will continue to do so, period.”
Trump complained about Georgia on late Friday evening as well. He petulantly alleged that Raffensperger “won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud,” adding that “everyone knows” that the Trump team won the state — which is just laughably untrue. Unhinged, conjecture-based conspiracy theories that untold numbers of ballots are fake don’t magically make those actually very real ballots disappear.
Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud. Why? Without this the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless. Everyone knows that we won the state. Where is @BrianKempGA?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 14, 2020
On Friday, Trump also claimed that “700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh which means, based on our great Constitution, we win the State of Pennsylvania” — which again is laughably untrue. Nowhere in the Constitution is there a clause stating that if someone like Donald Trump comes along then he gets to overrule the will of the voters. His claim that Republican observers were systematically excluded from watching ballot-processing is false. More troubling, perhaps, is his underlying assumption that the results of an election can be punitively discarded.
700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh which means, based on our great Constitution, we win the State of Pennsylvania!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 14, 2020
Check out Twitter’s response below:
