The Daily Signal - What You Need to Know About the Georgia Recount

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

The deadline for the Georgia recount is 11:59 p.m. EST on Wednesday. What is happening with the recount, is there a threat of voter fraud, and how that is being addressed? Additionally, former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has also begun a voting rights organization, Fair Fight. What are the big players in the state’s politics and elections?  Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, joins The Daily Signal Podcast to discuss. We also cover these stories:  Massachusetts biotech company Moderna says their coronavirus vaccine is 94.5 percent effective.  Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, is firing back against President Trump’s claims of a lack of voter integrity in Georgia. Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin say they are going to continue investigating Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden.  “The Daily Signal Podcast” is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Pippa, Google Play, and Stitcher. All of our podcasts may be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You also can leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail].  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, November 17th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. The deadline for the Georgia recount is 1159 p.m. on Wednesday. What do you need to know about the recount and is there a threat of voter fraud? Jason Sneed, executive director of the Honest Elections Projects joins me on the Daily Signal podcast to discuss. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcast. and encourage others to subscribe. Now on our top news. Massachusetts biotech company Moderna says their coronavirus vaccine is 94.5% effective. Their announcement comes after pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced last week that its coronavirus vaccine is 90% effective.

Per CNBC, Medina's interim analysis was based on 95 infections among trial participants who received either a placebo or the vaccine. Of those, only five infections occurred in those who received the vaccine. Stephanie Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Medina, said in a call with journalist Monday, Percy and BC, that given the importance of severe disease that sometimes leads to hospitalization and those hospitalizations that sometimes lead to ICU and in the worst-case outcome, death, is a very important impact that we see in our vaccine. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's Republican Secretary of State, is firing back against President Trump's claims of a lack of voter integrity in Georgia. In a series of Facebook posts late Sunday night,

Raffensberger laid out a defense of Georgia's election process. Trump tweeted at the end of last week, the Georgia's consent decree makes it impossible to check and match signatures on ballots and envelopes, etc. They knew they were going to cheat, must expose real signatures. In response, Raffensberger wrote on Twitter, the state of Georgia strengthened signature measurements. match this year. Elections officials received GBI, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, signature match training, requiring a confirmed match twice before a ballot is cast. And in response to the president's claim that GOP poll watchers are not being allowed into ballot counting rooms, the Georgia's Secretary of State wrote, the state of Georgia placed the responsibility of recruitment of monitors

solely on both parties. Don't have credentials. Call your state party and demand monitor credentials, find them horribly disorganized, show up to their office, and demand credentials. Raffensberger also made it clear that he has outlawed ballot harvesting in Georgia. The social media sparring between Raffensberger and the president come amid the Georgia presidential election ballot recount, which is scheduled to be completed by midnight Wednesday. Republican senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin say they are going to continue investigating Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden. This comes after Brassely and Johnson investigated Biden this year and after the New York Post published an article

on October 14th on the business dealings of Hunter Biden. The article alleged that an email on what is believed to be the younger Biden's laptop indicated Hunter Biden had introduced a Ukrainian business executive from Burisma to his dad. Hunter Biden served on the board of the Ukraine-based natural gas company. Per the Hill, Grassley sent a seven-page letter to Attorney General William Barr on Monday, requesting the Department of Justice to review the business dealings of Hunter and James Biden, Joe Biden's brother, and whether they require resignation under the Foreign Agents Restoration Act. Johnson, speaking about our former colleague of Hunter Biden, said, Tony Bobby Lindsay coming forward, the computer being revealed, the FBI possibly starting an investigation.

We had a hard enough time getting what evidence we got even to write a report, and then all of a sudden our reports sort of opened up this logjam. Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced new COVID-19 restrictions in Michigan as cases surge. Beginning Wednesday, in-person learning at high schools and colleges must cease, and restaurants are not allowed to host guests inside. Businesses such as casinos and movie theaters are also required to close. The new order is being imposed by Michigan's Department of Health and Human Services through December 8th. Michigan is one of several states to announce new COVID-19 restrictions as cases hit all-time highs in a number of places across the country. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Jason Sneed on the latest with the recount in Georgia. This is Virginia Allen, host of the Daily Signal podcast.

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I'm joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Jason Sneed, executive director of the honest elections project. Jason, thank you so much for being with us again on the Daily Signal podcast. Well, it's great to be back. So we're talking about the Georgia recount. The deadline for this recount is 11.59 p.m. on Wednesday. Can you just start off by talking about the recount and what all is going on here? Sure.

So this is a hand retallowing of all of the votes that were cast in Georgia for the presidential election. Georgia law actually requires that there be an audit conducted in at least one race, as I understand it, following an election. And Georgia Secretary of State Raffensburgers selected, as we all might expect, the most contentious and high-profile race, which happens to be the race for president. And so as the vote count stands, the unofficial results place Biden just about four. 14,000 votes ahead of Trump in the state. The retelling is going back and by hand checking to ensure that the vote count is accurate, essentially. So it's not technically a recount. It's not technically an audit. It's kind of in between a little bit. That's going on right now. As you said, it's due to wrap up midnight Wednesday, at which point we'll know how many votes were flipped

or affected as a result of this retallet. Well, can we talk a little bit more about the recount? how it practically works and what are the practices the full workers go through to conduct this recount? Sure. So the way that this audit works is essentially, well, I guess I'll back up here. So this year, Georgia rolled out some new voting equipment in the state. It's a new system that uses a touchscreen so voters check in. They get given a card. They put that card into the machine, pops their ballot. Then they use a touchscreen. device to actually input their votes. That's when the machine will print out what what amounts for their ballot essentially. They can look at it, review to make sure

that everything was was properly collected and tallied. So if they voted for Trump, it says Trump, or if they voted for Biden, it says Biden. Then they run it through a Scantron machine, a scanner, and that scanner will actually record the vote. So what you get in terms of the initial count for ballots that are cast using that equipment, you will get the machine count, right? This is the scanning equipment that either takes the in-person votes or absentee ballots and tallies that up. The purpose of the audit is to go back by hand and ensure that those results are accurately

presented. So they're actually going through and they're retallowing the votes, making sure that the initial outcome that was reported by the machines is in fact accurate. Well, the Atlanta Journal of Constitution pointed out that this is the first statewide manual recount of paper ballots in Georgia to validate the accuracy of an election that showed Joe Biden with that 14,000 vote lead over Donald Trump. Why do you think, Jason, that Georgia went blue or appears to have gone blue? Well, I'm not sure exactly what the particular political thinking is on the ground down there. It certainly seems like this was a high turnout and very animated

election, there was a lot of ground game activity from both sides, and obviously the president is a polarizing figure. I think that all of those issues certainly affected both the turnout and potentially the outcome here. I guess that now the question is, is this outcome a valid one? And that's something that this retelling is designed and I think wisely being implemented to help assure people that it is. And of course, it will also help to detect any potentially regularities, run those to ground, and then also put to bed any rumors that there might have been something untoward that happened to the result. So it kind of works from both sides, if you will, to build confidence that the official result, whatever it happens to be, is an accurate one. Well, there's been a lot of outside

attention on Georgia in recent years with the media speculating that the state could turn blue, and former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has also begun a voting rights organization fair fight. What are the big players, Jason, in the state's politics and elections? Well, you hit the nail on the head in terms of the big players on the political left. Stacey Abrams and her group have raised tens of millions of dollars to try to shift Georgia's politics. They've engaged in all sorts of activities from voter registration drives to turnout drives. Stacey Abrams, of course, is famous for having lost her gubernatorial race in 2018 to the current governor, Brian Kemp, and still refusing to concede that race.

And in fact, has largely built her career on this argument that essentially the race was stolen from her through voter suppression and other sort of unsavory tactics, which there is no evidence to back up that assertion. But nevertheless, it still sort of lingers there. And so that's really the big push. And I think that you certainly see on the left that the Politico's on the left think that Georgia is poised to turn blue. There's demographic shifts. There's lots of people moving into the state. Ironically enough, often from the higher tax, higher regulation, blue states into Georgia where it's a little bit of a friendlier climate. But then the state's politics sort of shift to.

But nevertheless, I think that what you also saw, if you look at the results in the Senate race, is that there is still a fairly sizable and significant conservative voter population in the state of Georgia right now. Well, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Ruffinsberger has addressed President Trump's claims that election officials weren't letting the Trump. campaign observers into counting rooms. And Raffensberger said on a Facebook post, the state of Georgia placed the responsibility of recruitment of monitors solely on both parties. Don't have credentials. Call your state party and demand monitor credentials. Jason, what's your perspective on Raffensberger's response?

Well, I think that Secretary Raffensberger has been a real leader in the state in terms of ensuring the integrity of Georgia's elections. I don't doubt his commitment to that. He has led a number of excellent reforms, including banning ballot harvesting and other provisions that are absolute no-brainers to anyone who works in this space and takes the issue of ballot integrity seriously. I also think that it was a wise move on his part to order the recount and retallee that we were talking about earlier because that process will help again to build confidence that

the results that were reported and that will eventually be certified in the state are the accurate results for the for the election and that they actually show the the will of voters in the state of georgia so i think that um i think that that is is is all a good thing and i think that now the the focus really ought to be at this point you know resolving these outstanding challenges um making sure that we're fully investigating any accusations or allegations of election fraud or misconduct that are credible you know doing a full investigation to get to the bottom of what did or did not happen there. And then looking to the runoff elections,

where I think that you're going to have folks who are obviously keen to see one side or the other prevail. And you got folks like myself, our group is a nonpartisan C3 entity, that want to make sure that the process has integrity. Well, given that Georgia has a Republican Secretary of State and Governor, both of whom have spoken out against voter fraud, does it seem unlikely to you

that voter fraud could slip through here in Georgia? Well, I think that Georgia has better safeguards than many states. I'll say that at the outset. That being said, you know, there's always the possibility that fraud can impact an election. And in fact, in pretty much every election cycle, there is some degree of fraud. I think that's something that we have to take as a given. The question is how much fraud actually could have occurred and what are you doing to try to detect it, to try to deter it. And that's where to circle back to what I said at the outset here, the fact that Georgia has signature verification, voter identification, engages in voter role maintenance

to make sure that their voter registration records are accurate and reliable. And that they take these issues seriously. All of that puts Georgia a leg up over a number of other states that drag their feet on these issues, that pretend that voter fraud is not a serious concern, and really don't take the integrity of elections to heart. but instead are always painting the sorts of protections and safeguards as voter suppression. I think that's entirely the wrong way to go about it. So in that sense, I think Georgia is much better positions. Well, what is your perspective, Jason, on the recount itself?

And are you hearing anything from Georgians about what they're thinking about what's been happening in their state? Well, I think that the final results for the recount will be reported when the recount is completed. So I haven't seen anything yet in terms of hard figures. I have, however, heard and seen in several media reports that the number of vote flips is not significant enough to affect the outcome in any major way. So that does not lead me to believe that President Trump is going to be able to claw back a lead based on the recount to the retallying alone. And that certainly seems to indicate, at least at this initial stage, that that initial count was probably an accurate one. But as I said, there are still ongoing challenges. There are still ongoing concerns. We need to run that to ground. In terms of what Georgians themselves are thinking about,

what I've heard certainly seems to indicate that Georgians across the political spectrum want an election that has integrity, that they can have confidence in, that they can trust. And I think that we all want to let this process play out so we know what happened, what didn't happen, and then we can move forward accordingly. What are you hearing, Jason, about poll watchers having access to this recount? Are enough pull watchers being able to be part of this? Or has there been some dissension or differences of opinion on how fairly people think that this is being handled? Well, I'm not sure if poll watchers are, you know, and basically like involved in all of the recount process that's going on,

if they're deployed everywhere or not. That's really going to be up to the respective political parties to determine that and to come up with that sort of strategy and plan. What I will say is that when we're doing these sorts of election administration type procedures, whether it's counting ballots in the early voting period, whether it is working on election day, whether it is doing this sort of recount, the way that this typically works is you have bipartisan teams. So even if you have a situation where there is is only a Democrat or only a Republican poll watcher, there are generally supposed to be teams of people from both

parties actually working in the process. So that's an extra layer of safeguard that sometimes kind of gets lost in the way that this is covered because we're very focused right now. And a lot of this is because of the litigation on the poll watchers and they play in a very important role in the transparency of the process. But there are other safeguards in place as well, and I think that's something that is a good thing for the election system. Well, something that's been discussed to sentence verifications in this whole situation of the recount. And what's at stake with those? How would you say that situation should be addressed? So signature verification is an important part of the absentee ballot process. And the signature verification is something that is done at the

outset. So what we're talking about right now with the retallies primarily to make sure that the votes that were ultimately officially voted, which means that they passed all of the requirements, including signature verification under state law, and then were allowed to be cast to make sure that those were tallied appropriately. So this isn't, so far as I understand, at least going back and actually double-checking all of the signatures, but those signatures were required to be verified under Georgia law. And again, that's something that not every state does, which I think it's lawable that Georgia does that and takes that issue seriously, because one of the most difficult aspects of absentee ballots is the fact that you don't know for sure who has handled

that ballot, who has cast that ballot. That's why you have to have some sort of a voter identification component. Some states do signature matching. Some states have a witness signature requirement, so you have to have your ballot witness. Both of these are not only acceptable, but I think desirable safeguards to ensure that only vote the correct law for voters are casting ballot. And lastly, Jason, there's still a lot of ongoing litigation in Georgia that's going on in the midst of this recount.

What is the, I guess, the update on the state of play on that and where do you foresee it going? Well, in terms of litigation in Georgia, I think that there are still a couple of cases and there may still be some more. I would suspect that right now folks are waiting to see the results of this retalling. And then once the state's official results are certified, then the Trump folks could request a recount under state law that it's not an automatic trigger. But if it's within 1%, the losing party can request a recount.

So I guess that the question will be then do they request a formal full recount? after the state certifies the election results, that would really be the next, I think, direction for this to be going. And then of course, the other question is, what other allegations are going to be surfaced in Georgia in terms of potential either impropriety or mismanagement? And we really need to be investigating those as well

to make sure that we can tell voters of certainty. Again, either something did happen here and we're gonna bring the people responsible to justice or something did not, and we're going to be able to tell the voters exactly what we did to prove that this was, in fact, just a rumor. Well, Jason, thank you so much for joining us again on the Daily Signal podcast. It's always great to have you.

Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. Please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening. we'll be back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation.

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