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Breaking News Alert Georgia House Guts Bill That Would Have Given Election Board Power To Investigate Secretary Of State

168,000 Georgians Moved Right Before The Midterms. How Many Will Vote Illegally This Time?

While early efforts to bolster election integrity following the 2020 election have proved successful, much work remains.

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Evidence gathered since 2020 indicates more than 12,000 Georgians may have cast illegal ballots in that presidential election. A repeat analysis just completed on voter files shows thousands of residency issues involving Georgia voters, indicating a potential repeat of the illegal voting scenario in this year’s midterm elections, according to an expert on voter data analysis.

While early efforts to bolster election integrity following the 2020 election have proved successful, much work remains. Until that happens, the public will continue to question election results — and rightly so. On Tuesday, voters across America will have a final chance to cast ballots for the 2022 midterm elections. With control of the House and Senate at stake, several battleground states such as Georgia will find themselves in the spotlight again.

Since the 2020 election debacle, the Georgia legislature has made great strides in reforming election procedures, including by prohibiting the private takeover of government election offices with bans on outside funding of elections, such as the Zuckbucks that flooded the zone during the last presidential election. Georgia also “passed much-needed reforms related to voter ID, mail-in voting, and drop boxes, in addition to the Zuckbucks ban.”

But plucking that low-hanging fruit provides no guarantee that the more systemic problems with America’s election system won’t spoil confidence in the midterm election results, and Georgia provides a prime example of the risk.

In 2020, Joe Biden won the Georgia general election by 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million ballots cast. Following the election, Trump filed suit in a Fulton County state court arguing approximately 35,000 Georgians may have illegally voted in a county in which they did not reside. Trump’s challenge relied on Section 21-2-218 of the Georgia election code, which expressly provides that residents must vote in the county in which they reside unless they had changed their residence within 30 days of the election. Those residency laws exist to prevent people from voting in county, legislative, and even congressional races where the voter does not live.

After the November 2020 election, Mark Davis, the president of Data Productions Inc. and an expert in voter data analytics and residency issues, pulled data from the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address database and cross-referenced that information with records from the Georgia secretary of state’s office. His analysis showed that nearly 35,000 Georgia voters who had moved from one Georgia county to another voted in the 2020 general election in the county from which they had moved.

While some of those moves could have been temporary, involving students or members of the military, Davis continued to pull data from the secretary of state’s office, which as of last week showed that of those 35,000 voters, more than 12,400 proceeded to update their driver’s license or voter registration information to the exact same address they had previously provided to the USPS on the change-of-address forms. By updating their addresses, these individuals confirmed to the state that their move represented a permanent change of residency. And with more than 12,000 Georgians providing the state with evidence indicating they had permanently changed their county of residence, the tally of potentially illegal votes now exceeds Biden’s margin of victory.

As Davis previously told The Federalist, “Under Georgia law, a judge can order an election be redone if he or she sees there were enough illegal, irregular, or improperly rejected votes to cast the results of the election in doubt, or if they see evidence of ‘systemic irregularities.’” Well-known Atlanta election lawyer Jake Evans confirmed for The Federalist that outside of the 30-day grace period, if people vote in a county in which they no longer reside, their vote “would be illegal.” Evans further confirmed that under Georgia law, “an election should be overturned either if (1) more votes than decided the election were illegal, wrongfully rejected or irregular, or (2) when there were systemic irregularities that cast in doubt the results of the election.”

Trump’s election challenges were never resolved, however, because the chief judge for the Fulton County court delayed appointing a judge to preside over the case until it was too late to matter. 

While following the 2020 election Georgia addressed many of the problems, Davis told The Federalist that the same scenario of illegal out-of-county voting went without adequate reforms and seems poised to reoccur. Data from the U.S. Postal Service indicates that more than 168,000 Georgians moved in-state from one county to another county more than 30 days before the date of the general election; these voters failed to reregister in their new counties before the registration deadline. That number represents a substantial increase from the approximately 110,000 Georgia residents who filed Notice of Change of Addresses in 2020, of which approximately 35,000 eventually voted in the county from which they had moved — more than 12,000 of whom later confirmed their voter registration to their new address, showing the move was in fact permanent. 

Davis told The Federalist that following certification of the Nov. 8, 2022, election, he will pull vote history data from the secretary of state’s office to see which of those 168,000 Georgia residents cast ballots and how many voted in the county from which they had moved. While he stressed that not everyone voting in their old county is doing so illegally — for instance, students, members of the armed forces, or others who are temporarily moving and not permanently changing their residence — the data analytics expert added that given what he saw in 2020, there will likely be thousands of illegal votes cast.

Hopefully, the election isn’t close this time, making this continuing problem irrelevant, Davis said, adding, “Maybe the best-case scenario is the Republicans win the Senate and the Democrats challenge the outcome based on these systemic problems I’ve been pointing out for years.”

“I might even testify for them about my analysis,” Davis quipped, noting that maybe then Democrats and the courts would take election integrity seriously.

While Democrats have already shown themselves ready to be so-called election deniers if they lose as badly as predicted when Americans cast their final ballots tomorrow, unfortunately it may take more than a loss for the left to care about election integrity.


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