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In Georgia, Officials Are Investigating Hundreds of Cases of Double Voting

Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2020 9:25 am
by Bob Juch
A week after President Trump suggested that voters in North Carolina should cast two ballots — one by mail and another at the polls — the authorities in Georgia are threatening criminal action against 1,000 Georgia voters who did just that.

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, announced at a news conference on Tuesday that investigations were underway in 100 of the state’s 159 counties after the discovery of 1,000 instances of double voting in the state’s June primary and August runoff elections.

“We will prosecute,” said Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, noting that double voting in Georgia, considered a serious felony, carries a penalty of one to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. While calling attention to the double votes could add fuel to Mr. Trump’s unfounded claim that mail voting opens the door to fraud, Mr. Raffensperger noted that double voting hadn’t changed the outcome of any races.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/us/p ... oting.html

Re: In Georgia, Officials Are Investigating Hundreds of Cases of Double Voting

Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2020 10:08 am
by silverscreenselect
Some perspective here. In Georgia, the Secretary of State's office sent absentee ballots to all registered voters prior to the June primary. (For the runoff and general election, most voters will have to request absentee ballots (senior citizens got ballots automatically, so Mrs. SSS and I got the ballots while our daughter who lives with us did not, even though she got a ballot in the mail for the original primary).

According to the Secretary of State, 60% of the supposed double votes were in the Democratic primary and 40% in the Republican. That is close to the raw vote totals in which about 56% of the votes cast were in the Democratic primary. Many of the voters who showed up to vote twice made no secret about it. They tried to check to see whether their mail-in ballot was received and got some confusing and conflicting information in a number of cases. The entire voting process was badly screwed up (long lines at many urban locations, poorly trained poll officials and the like). About 2.3 million total votes were cast in the primary. The 1,000 supposedly illegal double votes represent .04% of the total votes cast.

I will be very surprised if anyone is actually prosecuted for a supposed double vote.

Some more details:

https://www.ajc.com/politics/politics-b ... XLI7ER77M/

Re: In Georgia, Officials Are Investigating Hundreds of Cases of Double Voting

Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2020 10:55 am
by bazodee
silverscreenselect wrote:
Wed Sep 09, 2020 10:08 am
Some perspective here. In Georgia, the Secretary of State's office sent absentee ballots to all registered voters prior to the June primary. (For the runoff and general election, most voters will have to request absentee ballots (senior citizens got ballots automatically, so Mrs. SSS and I got the ballots while our daughter who lives with us did not, even though she got a ballot in the mail for the original primary).

According to the Secretary of State, 60% of the supposed double votes were in the Democratic primary and 40% in the Republican. That is close to the raw vote totals in which about 56% of the votes cast were in the Democratic primary. Many of the voters who showed up to vote twice made no secret about it. They tried to check to see whether their mail-in ballot was received and got some confusing and conflicting information in a number of cases. The entire voting process was badly screwed up (long lines at many urban locations, poorly trained poll officials and the like). About 2.3 million total votes were cast in the primary. The 1,000 supposedly illegal double votes represent .04% of the total votes cast.

I will be very surprised if anyone is actually prosecuted for a supposed double vote.

Some more details:

https://www.ajc.com/politics/politics-b ... XLI7ER77M/
Actually the Secretary of State's office sent absentee ballot REQUESTS to all registered voters. You still had to apply to receive the ballot.

The approximately thousand or so double votes were strewn across 100 different counties (Georgia has 159 counties), so they don't seem concentrated from any one location.
As SSS intimates, there is supposed to be a procedure where you can check if your mailed absentee ballot was received. If you received an absentee ballot but go to the polls anyway, you can invalidate your absentee ballot and vote in person. If you show up and say that you received an absentee ballot but want to vote in person instead, there is supposed to be a procedure in place where the poll worker contacts the county registrar to see if anything has been received.

In short, I'm guessing many of these were caused by an administrative error or bad information. There are probably a few who deliberately voted twice.