Georgia Gov. Kemp calls for signature audit

FPI / December 6, 2020

Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday called for a signature audit of the state’s election results after the Trump campaign legal team presented a long list of irregularities in the state's election.

“I’ve called early on for a signature audit, obviously the secretary of state, per the laws and the Constitution would have to order that; he has not done that,” Kemp said in a Fox News interview. “I think it should be done. I think, especially with what we saw today, it raises more questions. There needs to be transparency on that. I would again call for that, and I think in the next 24 hours hopefully we’ll see a lot more from the hearings that the legislature had today and we’ll be able to look and see what the next steps are.”

On Friday, 20 House Republicans demanded that Attorney General William Barr open an investigation into the Georgia election.

Led by Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, the Republicans also urged Barr to issue a restraining order or temporary injunction to block groups suspected of registering illegal or invalid voters from the upcoming Georgia Senate runoff election.

Brooks, who has already pledged to challenge state Electoral College votes in the House, said, “The evidence is overwhelming that Georgia’s election process has been corrupted by voter fraud and election theft. The perpetrators of these heinous acts must be investigated, and, as appropriate, prosecuted to the fullest.”

Brooks said: “No one should ever be allowed to bring an estimated 15,000 to 18,000 ballots to a vote-counting facility in suitcases; hide those suitcases under a table before the vote-counting facility opens; at roughly 10:30 PM at night, declare that vote tabulation is finished for the night and will resume at 8:30 AM the next day; order all poll watchers and media to leave the facility; and then, once the facility is reduced to a bare minimum of five co-workers (and possibly criminal co-conspirators), with no poll watchers present; roll out the suitcases from their hiding place, withdraw thousands of ballots, and stuff the vote-counting machines with what appears to be, by the conduct observed, illegal and fraudulent ballots. Yet that is exactly what a newly released video of a polling location reveals.”

What Georgia saw on Thursday was a mountain of evidence presented by Trump's team during a Georgia Senate Government Oversight Committee hearing.

The evidence included video of suitcases reportedly filled with ballots being pulled out from underneath a table after supervisors told poll workers to leave the room.

During the Thursday hearing, Jacki Pick, a lawyer volunteering for the Trump legal team, noted: “Everyone clears out, including the Republican observers and the press, but four people stay behind and continue counting and tabulating well into the night.” It occurred at around 10 p.m., while the workers stayed until after 1 a.m., according to Pick and the video footage.

Pick said that at 11 p.m., once everyone was gone, workers are seen pulling out the suitcase-looking containers and asked rhetorically whether it’s normal to “store suitcases of ballots under a table cloth.” After reviewing hours of the footage, she said that it doesn’t appear to be a normal procedure.

Election officials later said what was pulled out from under the table weren’t “suitcases” but containers used for ballots.

Two election officials in Georgia, including state voting systems manager Gabriel Sterling, told a fact-checking website that what workers were doing in the video is not unusual at all, saying that the workers who were told to leave were involved in a different process—while those who stayed behind were involved in scanning ballots. However, they did not explain why the containers were wheeled out from underneath a table at around 11 p.m. when poll observers and other workers went home.

The officials also did not say why the containers allegedly filled with ballots were placed underneath the tablecloth-clad table or who placed them there.

Pick said Thursday on Newsmax TV that a private security firm inside Atlanta's State Farm Arena provided the surveillance video to Trump campaign lawyers at 1 a.m. ET on Thursday.

"We just got it at 1 a.m., a big team watched it, and we were shocked at what we saw," Pick, a volunteer attorney in Georgia who presented the evidence to the state Senate earlier Thursday, told host Grant Stinchfield.

The video confirms what the campaign's witnesses have sworn to in affidavits, Pick said.

"Yes, people were sent home, told to stop working, stop counting, but some people stayed behind: Sure enough, just as our poll watchers – well, our monitors – had said," Pick said, saying the video shows suitcases being pulled from under a table covered by a black cloth – purportedly holding thousands of ballots.

In presenting the evidence to the Georgia state Senate, Pick rejected an official's claim that allegations of no poll monitor being present has been debunked, saying the video was just received Thursday and could not have already been debunked.

Pick said the video evidence contains more than enough votes being counted without a monitor to eliminate Biden's lead.

"The president has more than one way to meet his burden to contest the election," Pick said. "But certainly this evidence we have now in this video is quite strong to cast doubt. Because no matter what those ballots said, he does not have to show how they voted or would have voted had they not been questionable.​ It doesn't matter. They broke Georgia law here by not permitting our Republican poll watchers and press to be present. That's required by statute."

Trump legal team attorney Ray Smith said during Thursday's hearing that the following occurred in Georgia:

• 2,506 felons illegally voted.
• 66,248 underage people registered to vote.
• 2,423 people voted without being registered.
• 1,043 voters listed a Post Office as their address.
• 4,926 registered too late to vote but still voted.
• 10,315 dead people voted.
• 15,700 filed national change of address but still voted.
• 40,279 moved.

Trump tweeted about the evidence: "Wow! Blockbuster testimony taking place right now in Georgia. Ballot stuffing by Dems when Republicans were forced to leave the large counting room. Plenty more coming, but this alone leads to an easy win of the State!"

Trump added: "People in Georgia got caught cold bringing in massive numbers of ballots and putting them in “voting” machines.”



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