Georgia governor calls for signature audit

“I called early on for a signature audit. Obviously, the secretary of state, per the laws in the Constitution, would have to order that. He has not done that. I think it should be done,” Kemp said of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

“I think especially what we saw today, it raises more questions. There needs to be transparency on that. I would again call for that. I think in the next 24 hours, hopefully, we will see a lot more from the hearings that the legislature had today, and we will be able to look and see what the next steps are,” he added.

Kemp previously called for a sample signature audit in a televised speech on Nov. 20 and reiterated that support on Nov. 24, but Trump and his team quickly seized on his latest comments, reacting on social media.

“FINALLY Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is calling for a signature audit. What took him so long??? This is BASIC election integrity ignored until now,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a tweet.

President-elect Joe Biden defeated Trump in Georgia in the Nov. 3 election, but the president refuses to concede, claiming the contest was rigged despite there being no evidence of widespread fraud. The results in Georgia, which had Biden leading by more than 12,000 votes, were certified, but the Trump team requested another recount.

Trump, who needs multiple states to flip if his long-shot bid of overturning the election is to work in his favor, claimed last week that an audit of signatures on absentee ballot envelopes would find tens of thousands of “fraudulent and illegal votes.”

Critics have cast doubt on whether such an audit would uncover fraud on the scale Trump and his allies are alleging, particularly after signature matching has already been performed in some cases. Even with the calls for more signature matching, it’s unlikely to happen. In order to comply with the state constitution, which says elections shall be done by “secret ballot,” voters only sign the envelope and not their ballot. The envelopes and the ballots have been separated and cannot be matched up again, and according to WMAZ 13, a CBS Georgia affiliate.

Still, Kemp said he wants to ensure the recount, specifically singling out the one in Fulton County where Atlanta is located, to be done the right way.

At one of the state Senate hearings, attorney Jacki Pick described the video as it played on a screen. “The same person that stayed behind, the person that cleared the place out under the pretense that we are going to stop counting is the person who put the table there at 8:22 in the morning,” she said. “I saw four suitcases come out from underneath the table.”

The Trump legal team claims election officials sent election supervisors home before they began counting thousands of fake ballots for President-elect Joe Biden, and the video shows briefcases full of ballots being pulled out from underneath a table.

Gabriel Sterling, a Republican who is in charge of Georgia’s voting system and has been at odds with the campaign over their tactics used in an attempt to win a handful of battleground states that went for Biden, said the video did not show any evidence of fraud.

He shared a “fact check” of the video and said that the Georgia secretary of state investigators who have combed through the footage found that it “shows normal ballot processing.”

Kemp took part in the town hall along with Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, two Republicans who are facing runoff elections in Georgia early next month.