Georgia election officials on Wednesday said they were blindsided by White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’s surprise visit a day earlier to Cobb County, where an audit of mail-in ballots was taking place.
Meadows purportedly gave election officials a five-minute warning that he would be showing up to the audit site with Secret Service in tow.
Meadows arrived at the Cobb County Civic Center, where investigators from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the secretary of state’s office were reviewing absentee ballot envelopes to verify whether voter signatures matched those on file.
Meadows was allowed to go to any place that was “public” but was denied access to the room where investigators were examining ballot envelopes.
“I’m not making any allegations as much as I am trying to get to the truth,” Meadows, President Trump’s closest ally, was overheard saying on Tuesday.
Trump has repeatedly claimed he would have won Georgia if there hadn’t been widespread voter and election fraud. He has criticized Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for not stepping in or doing more to overturn the election results.
Despite Trump’s claims, there has been no widespread proof of fraud in the state that would have flipped the election in Trump’s favor, Raffensperger said.
Meadows’s unannounced visit was brought up during a virtual Georgia House Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday morning.
At the hearing, Raffensperger, election manager Gabriel Sterling, and Ryan Germany, general counsel for the secretary of state’s office, also addressed a lengthy list of complaints and incorrect information that had been spread by the Trump campaign, the president’s lawyers, and his allies over the integrity of Georgia’s election system.
“The vast majority of claims we have seen online and in the media and even discussed in the halls of the Capitol are simply unfounded,” Raffensperger said, referring to it as a “tsunami of disinformation.” “It is dangerous, and worse yet, we have to respond to the disinformation and misinformation and chase it down with the limited resources we have. I’ve called it the rumor whack-a-mole. As soon as we knock one down, then another pops up.”
Raffensperger, a Republican, said he was unhappy with the outcome of the presidential election but added, “Trust me, for our office, life would have been a lot easier had the outcome been 12,000 votes the other way.”
He told the committee that his office would be launching a website to “get the raw information out and to let people judge for themselves.”
Raffensperger also said his office would be pushing for voter IDs, not signature matches, in future elections. He also said he wanted the power to fire local election officials not doing their job and that he also wanted to get rid of Georgia’s no-excuse absentee voting rule.
When it was his turn, Germany addressed several allegations Trump’s team of lawyers has made about Georgia’s election and pointed to retractions multiple conservative news organizations made concerning coverage of the election and unsubstantiated claims of fraud.
Germany said Georgia election officials faced a similar campaign of misinformation during the 2018 election cycle.
“From my perspective, any of the claims made about the 2020 election are very similar to claims made about the 2018 election, including allegations of vote-flipping and machine malfunction,” he said.
He added that most of the figures Trump’s team has floated about illegal voters have been inflated and, in some cases, flat-out false.
Trump has claimed at least 2,050 felons voted in Georgia. Germany said his team is investigating a total of 74 possible felons.
Trump also alleged that 66,000 underage people voted. Germany said the actual number was four and that all four had turned 18 prior to Election Day.
Trump’s camp also alleged that 10,000 dead people voted.
“Not true,” Germany said, adding that the secretary of state’s office was investigating a couple of incidents. If guilty, “We will seek punishment for them.”
Germany also pushed back on claims that 395 people who cast ballots in Georgia also voted in another state.
“This is an investigation we get after every election,” he said, adding that in the 2008 election, 30,000 people were accused of voting in multiple states.
Those cases were investigated, and in the end, only three people were found to have voted in Georgia and another state.
