One Georgia election official who gained national notoriety for pushing back against former President Donald J. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the state is now shrugging off proof that such fraud existed.
After a voter data analyst named Mark Davis said thousands of Georgians voted in the wrong counties in 2020, based on data he requested from Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
Many of those voters voted in violation of Section 21-2-218 of Georgia’s election code, which provides that Georgians who move to a different county within 30 days of an election may return to their old county of residence to vote. If they move to a different county more than 30 days before an election, they must register to vote in their new county, and vote there.
According to Davis, more than 10,000 votes could have been illegally cast this way.
“It literally could have called into doubt the election,” Davis reportedly said. “And I know it sounds like a technicality but it’s actually not it’s a whole lot of laws that were broken.”
But according to Gabriel Sterling, the chief operations officer to Raffensperger’s office who is described as “famous for rebuking Trump” after the 2020 election, says that the broken laws are “normal.”
“The reality is these are normal, everyday Georgians who are just trying to exercise their right to vote in a very weird year,” Sterling said. “The frustrating thing is you have people that are intentionally conflating and obscuring things and ginning people over things that are regular elections processes.”
That message was echoed by his boss on Twitter, who claimed that he was responsible for cleaning up the voting process in Fulton County, where there was, and still is, major controversy over the 2020 election.
According to Raffensperger, there were “management issues” in the county, but not fraud.
“The decades-long elections problems in Fulton would have been much worse if not for my efforts,” he said. “The monitor I assigned to Fulton in November found significant management issues, which I have talked about since long before November, but no fraud.”
The decades-long elections problems in Fulton would have been much worse if not for my efforts. The monitor I assigned to Fulton in November found significant management issues, which I have talked about since long before November, but no fraud.https://t.co/re4x4RKwj7
— GA Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (@GaSecofState) July 16, 2021
Raffensperger bashed Trump for claims of election fraud in Georgia.
“It’s also a shame that many people – political leaders, elected political leaders in the Republican Party – didn’t have the courage to stand and say, Mr. President here’s what the real numbers are, and I believe the real numbers,” he said in a CNN interview.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a contributor at The Georgia Star News and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Gabriel Sterling” by Gabriel Sterling.
