A new criminal complaint in Georgia, filed in the Fulton County Superior Court by State Republican Chairman David Shafer and President Donald Trump on Friday, alleges that tens of thousands of votes cast in the presidential election were fraudulent, thus violating state election code and creating “systemic failure.”
These votes, in congruence with the reduced scrutiny applied to mail-in ballots through “unconstitutional” litigation filed by Democrats in Georgia and difficulties contesting ballots during tabulation, the lawsuit states, have created “substantial doubt regarding the results of the election” and require a complete do-over election.
“Georgia officials who have fecklessly asserted that the general election was an ‘amazing success’ ‘with no credible evidence of irregularity’ are undermining public confidence in the integrity of our elections,” Shafer warned in his announcement of the lawsuit.
“Our lawsuit does not rely on theories about the voting machines. These theories will be explored in other lawsuits. Instead, we painstakingly show thousands of examples of ‘low tech’ voting irregularities and fraud sufficient in scale to place the election result in doubt,” Shafer continued.
According to the lawsuit, “a sufficient number of illegal votes” were “jointly and severally, improperly” counted by election officials despite their disqualifications. These votes violating Georgia state law, the plaintiffs argued, mostly fall on the shoulders of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who is “required to maintain and update a list of registered voters within this state.”
Instead of properly updating the voter registration lists, the lawsuit alleges that these fraudulent votes included:
- 2,560 felons
- 66,247 underage registrants
- 2,423 people who were not on the state’s voter rolls
- 4,926 voters who had registered in another state after they registered in Georgia, making them ineligible
- 395 people who cast votes in another state for the same election
- 15,700 voters who had filed a national change of address forms without re-registering
- 40,279 people who had moved counties without re-registering
- 1,043 people who claimed the physical impossibility of a P.O. Box as their address
- 98 people who registered after the deadline
- 10,315 people who were deceased on election day (8,718 of whom had been registered as dead before their votes were accepted)
- 305,701 people who, according to state records, applied for an absentee ballot past the deadline (more than 180 days before the election)
- 92 voters whose absentee ballots were cast before they even requested one
- 13 people who weren’t registered voted with absentee ballots
- 2,664 absentee ballots were mailed from elections offices before the earliest date permitted by law
- 50 peoples’ absentee ballots were counted despite being returned and accepted before the earliest allowed date
- 2 people whose ballot applications were rejected voted anyway
- 217 people who voted by absentee ballots were “applied for, issued, and received all on the same day.”
Some of these numbers, the complaint alleges, could be higher but can’t be verified by the plaintiffs because the election officials responding in the lawsuit “have the exclusive capability and access to data to determine the true number of Double Voters.”
Instead, the lawsuit includes sworn affidavits from dozens of witnesses backing up these claims and lists out examples of acknowledged election incompetence and resignations by officials specifically in Fulton County, home to Atlanta.
It also shows comparisons of data from 2016, demonstrating the state’s extremely low rate of rejected absentee ballots in 2020 of .034 percent, compared to the 2.90 percent rejection rate in 2016, and the 3.46 percent rejection rate in 2018. They allege this is a direct result of the Democrats’ “Consent Decree” which changed the absentee ballot process and made it more difficult on election officials by tripling the number of people required to provide a ballot rejection.
“There will be irreparable damage to the Citizens of Georgia through their loss of confidence in the integrity of the election process by virtue of the illegal votes included in the tabulations of the Contested Election, which outweighs any potential harm to Respondents,” the lawsuit states.
According to Shafer, the number of these votes the lawsuit identified without the extra information held by the Peach State’s election officials still largely outnumbers Joe Biden’s just under 12,000-vote lead in the state, legally qualifying Shafer and Trump’s request for an audit of absentee signatures to ensure they match those on record with the Secretary of State’s office.
“Under Georgia law, we must show that the number of unlawful votes exceeds the purported margin of victory. It does not require us to show for which candidate the unlawful votes were cast,” he wrote.