More Than 12,000 Illegal Votes In Georgia
Clark also expressed in his draft letter a “troubling” concern over a lawsuit that was being slow-tracked by a Georgia judge. He urged action because, “Despite the action having been filed on December 4, 2020, the trial court there has not even scheduled a hearing on matter, making it difficult for the judicial process to consider this evidence and resolve these matters on appeal prior to January 6.”
His concern was extremely well-founded. That lawsuit, widely regarded at the time as being strong and based on legitimate election problems, ended up being vindicated. In their lawsuit, the Trump campaign claimed that tens of thousands of voters had moved without registering to vote in their new residence. To get the figures about changes of address, the campaign looked at the National Change of Address data set, a secure data set of information on people who have filed a change of address with the United States Postal Service.
Filing a change-of-address form with the post office doesn’t conclusively mean the person is no longer eligible to vote at his or her former address. Some of those address changes could be college students or military members serving elsewhere. They would still be eligible to vote at the address they changed their mail from being delivered to.
But many of them reflected permanent moves to new cities and states. In fact, with around 10 percent of the population moving each year, and inadequate maintenance of voter rolls, experts say there are literally millions of bogus registrations on voter rolls all over the country. Such a situation doesn’t necessitate fraud, but it does make the situation ripe for fraud or the illegal casting of votes.
There were around 122,000 Georgia voters in 2020 who told the Postal Service they were moving to a new county in Georgia with a “move effective date” of more than 30 days before the election and who failed to re-register in their new county in time to be eligible to vote in the general election.
The secretary of state specifically instructs, citing Georgia law, that doing this means “you have lost your eligibility to vote in the county of your old residence.” Voters are required to register in the new county. “Remember, if you don’t register to vote by the deadline, you cannot vote in that particular election,” the secretary of state instructed.
The vast majority of the 122,000 voters who moved obeyed the law and did not try to vote in their old county. But thousands of voters appeared to break the law by casting a vote in a county in which they didn’t live. Most did so by voting absentee ballot, albeit many by early in-person absentee voting rather than mail-in voting.
Nearly all of these voters appeared to have voted in the wrong state house district, and more than 85 percent appeared to have voted in the wrong state senate district. Nearly two-thirds appeared to have voted in the wrong congressional district. And all of them appeared to be illegal votes in all races, since they would be ineligible to vote by law. Those who made similar moves but did not register to vote at their new address, and therefore didn’t vote, had obeyed the law.
The issue is important because it shows “the folks who obeyed the law didn’t get to vote, and the folks who broke it did get to vote,” Mark Davis, a Republican data expert in Georgia who raised alarms about the problem, said last year. Davis was a fighter for election integrity in a state that could be lax about enforcing its basic laws. He drew attention to several problems, including vulnerabilities enabling double voting.
“For years and years and years, I’ve kind of been that nerd over there that will bore you to tears talking about election integrity,” he jokes. He’s been an expert witness in five different election cases, usually dealing with problems caused by failure to place voters in their proper municipal district or related to change-of-address issues.