According to Congressman Austin Scott (R-GA-08), Georgia’s absentee ballot system has compromised election integrity.
In an interview with The Star, Scott explained that Georgia couldn’t sustain election integrity with these sudden, vast expansions of absentee ballot voting. Especially since those ballots don’t require photo identification.
“Absentee ballots are built around 5 percent in the state of Georgia, historically, and now you’re looking at around 27 percent of the election,” stated Scott. “You can’t have 25 to 30 percent of the election determined by no identification.”
Without photo identification, poll workers must compare the signatures on the ballot request, the ballot itself, and the one on file with the voter registration system. The current hand recount doesn’t undertake signature matching. In order to protect voter privacy, the ballots were separated permanently from their sleeve – rendering it impossible to put them together again.
The number of absentee ballots returned in the state increased from around 200,000 to over 1 million. Acceptance rates have increased by about 600 percent from 2016.
During The John Fredericks Show, Scott predicted that the current issues with absentee ballots in Georgia will spill over into the general election runoff:
There’s simply gaps in the integrity of the ballot system in Georgia. That leads us to the U.S. Senate race [with] our two candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. If the Democrats are able to run the same absentee ballot game or system or harvesting that they did in November, we’re concerned our candidates are going to start out 400 or 500 thousand votes behind.
To The Star, the congressman added that government officials who expanded absentee ballot voting – such as California Governor Gavin Newsom – were jeopardizing democracy.
If you look at what the Governor of California did, where he did the mass mailing of absentee ballots and the courts said, ‘You violated the law, you didn’t have the authority to do that’ – certainly that is impacting congressional races. We’re not going to win the state of California, but we can win congressional seats out there. But we can’t win congressional seats if they don’t play by the rules.
When The Star asked Scott whether he believed the electronic voting systems posed enough of a problem to warrant alternative voting methods, the congressman stated that the window of time is too small for changes.
“I don’t think we have a choice between now and the 5th [of January]. I think we’ll have to work with the system that we have – we’re going to the polls in a month, and we just have to get out there and vote,” he said.
Georgians have until December 7th to register for the senatorial election runoff; early in-person voting begins December 14th. State and local race runoffs occur December 1st. The senatorial election runoff will occur January 5th.
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Corinne Murdock is a reporter for The Tennessee Star and the Star News Network. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to [email protected].
