The Trump campaign seems desperate — to put the situation mildly. As their challenges to the election results continue to come up majorly short across the country, the campaign has now requested a recount in Georgia, which officially certified its results on Friday. The Georgia recount, which the president’s team was entitled under Georgia law to request because Biden’s winning margin stood at under 0.5 percent, will be funded by taxpayer money. In the recount, all ballots will be rescanned by machine, and the recount effort will follow an earlier audit in which all ballots were recounted by hand.
In a Saturday statement, the Trump campaign legal team said as follows:
‘Today, the Trump campaign filed a petition for recount in Georgia. We are focused on ensuring that every aspect of Georgia State Law and the U.S. Constitution are followed so that every legal vote is counted. President Trump and his campaign continue to insist on an honest recount in Georgia, which has to include signature matching and other vital safeguards.’
The recount process will be a machine scan of each ballot (not a signature match, as the campaign has requested).
As for cost – each county will have to pay for the manpower required to scan the ballots. (2/2)#GApol #Election2020
— Blayne Alexander (@ReporterBlayne) November 22, 2020
President Trump has publicly complained about the process in Georgia. He insisted that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, “won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud,” which is false. In fact, all signatures were checked when mail-in ballots were initially received, and election workers subsequently separated mail-in ballots from the envelopes in which they arrived, making a meaningful signature re-check physically impossible, since the envelopes contain the voters’ signatures. There’s no meaningful evidence at all for the president’s underlying premise that re-checking signatures would reveal major levels of fraud.
During an appearance on Newsmax TV on Saturday, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell sounded even more utterly unhinged. She accused Raffensperger and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, of receiving financial incentives for the usage of supposedly corruption-plagued Dominion voting machines during the recent election. Pressed for clarification, Powell said that the Trump team has “certainly been told that there is evidence of that” — which sounds laughably vague. This nonsense is what underpins the Trump team’s efforts including their request for a Georgia recount. There is no meaningful indication whatsoever that the recount will hand the state to Trump. Instead, his Georgia loss seems likely to get confirmed for a third time following the earlier unofficial results and subsequent hand audit!
Powell now accusing Kemp and Raffensperger of receiving financial benefits in exchange for using Dominion voting machines. Newsmax host asks her to clarify, she says: "We have certainly been told that there is evidence of that."
— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) November 22, 2020
The Trump campaign has requested and is paying for recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties in Wisconsin, and local officials in the Milwaukee area say that the Trump campaign’s observers have been obstructing the process. Apparently, at one recount table, an observer from the Trump campaign “objected to every ballot that tabulators pulled from a bag simply because they were folded,” according to the Associated Press. County clerk George Christenson said that some of the Trump campaign’s observers “clearly don’t know what they are doing.”
Earlier today, Trump campaign observers objected to every absentee ballot envelope from Ward 5 in the City of Milwaukee & every ballot cast in Ward 1.
Both are predominantly African American wards on the city's northwest side.
— Mary Spicuzza (@MSpicuzzaMJS) November 21, 2020
Trump has been pushing his lies about supposedly widespread fraud ever since the immediate aftermath of Election Day, but he’s still not come anywhere remotely close to overturning enough of the election results to secure a win for himself.
