And then Hice went on TV and made a series of false statements about the 2020 election.
But Hice’s words are especially noteworthy now that he is campaigning to be the person who oversees the elections in Georgia. Although a controversial new law signed by Gov. Brian Kemp last week removes the Secretary of State from the chairmanship of the state election board, the secretary remains in charge of voter registration, certification of voters. results, investigations into alleged electoral fraud and other important electoral matters. .
Here’s a look at some of the things Hice said during an appearance on Newsmax last Monday.
A 2020 agreement
Hice criticized Raffensperger for agreeing to a “consent decree with Stacey Abrams,” saying the deal “allowed a postal vote request to be sent to every person” on Georgia’s voter registration file.
Facts first: Stacey Abrams – a prominent voting rights advocate, former Democratic gubernatorial candidate and minority leader in the state House of Representatives – was not a party to the March 2020 settlement. agreement Hice was almost certainly talking about it. More importantly, this agreement says nothing about who should receive a request for a postal vote. On the contrary, Raffensperger decided separately from the deal, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, to send a request to every active voter in Georgia – and he only did so for the Georgia primary in June 2020, not the November general election in which Biden beat Trump.
For the general election, Georgian voters had to request a postal vote if they wanted one.
The March 2020 settlement agreement established a process for verifying voters’ signatures and said election officials should promptly contact voters whose ballots were rejected to give them a chance to ‘cure’ their mistakes. .
The democratic entities that were parties to the agreement were the Democratic Party of Georgia, the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congress Campaign Committee. Abrams was “not involved” in the deal, although she was “happy to see the decree signed so that fewer Georgian voters will have their eligible ballots rejected,” Seth Bringman, spokesperson for Fair Fight Action , the voting rights group founded by Abrams, said in an email.
“ Illegal voters ”
Hice asserted that since 10% of Georgia’s electoral roll of about 7 million people is inaccurate, “this means that in the approximate stadium of 700,000 people who are illegal voters in Georgia have received a request to receive a ballot.”
Facts first: There is no evidence to suggest that 700,000 “illegal” Georgian voters received a request for a postal vote in 2020. Hice’s campaign office and Congress office did not respond to requests for comment on this claim or on them. other inaccurate claims included in this article.
An official at Raffensperger’s office said Raffensperger said around 10% of Georgian voters move each year, which means their voters lists need to be updated with their new addresses. But it is very different from the fact that 10% of Georgian voters are “illegal voters”.
Also, as we noted above, every active Georgian voter received a request to vote only for the primary and not for the general election. In other words, Raffensperger’s massive sending of these candidacies couldn’t explain Trump’s defeat in November.
And it should also be noted that Georgian voters who requested a postal vote in the general election had their signature verified before receiving a ballot. If they voted using the postal ballot, their signature was verified a second time.
Drop boxes
Continuing to denounce Georgia’s electoral practices, Hice said, “And then you throw the voter drop-off box in there – where there are hundreds of drop-off boxes, most of them unassisted and unassisted. monitored in any way; it was just an absolute disaster.
Facts first: It is not true that Georgia drop boxes were not “checked in any way” in 2020. Under State rules, all drop boxes had to be under video surveillance. They also had to be securely attached to the ground, able to withstand damage from vandalism or inclement weather, and be designed to be tamper-proof. There is no evidence that a Georgia drop box was tampered with in 2020.
A problem in an Atlanta arena
Hice said: “And then you watch the Republican poll-watchers sent home after a fake water pipe burst, and then those who stayed remove the ballot boxes and start counting.”
Facts first:
There are three problems with this statement. First, there is no proof wrongdoing during the Fulton County count that followed a polling day water incident at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, which temporarily delayed the counting process. It is also misleading to call the incident a “false water pipe break” without further context; the delay was caused by a very real leak from an overflowing urinal, although the cause was indeed originally wrongly described as a broken pipe or broken water pipe. And Georgian Chief Election Investigator Frances Watson, an employee of the Secretary of State’s office, said under penalty of perjury in December: “Our investigation found that observers and the media were not invited to leave. They simply left alone when they saw a group of workers, whose job it was only to open the envelopes and who had completed this task, also leave. “
Collection of ballots
Hice added another vague claim about what happened in Georgia in 2020, saying there had been a “harvest of ballots.” (Collecting ballots is a derogatory term used to describe the practice of third parties collecting ballots from voters to submit them on their behalf; others call it “collecting ballots.”)
Facts first: To date, just under five months after Election Day, no one has presented evidence of illegal “ballot harvesting” in Georgia in the 2020 elections. Third Party Ballot Collection n is not allowed in Georgia. An independent analysis by the National Election Security Lab of The MITER Corporation, a non-profit organization, found “no suspicious indicators of ballot collection” in Georgia in 2020.
A 2019 law backed by Raffensperger allows Georgia to submit postal ballots either by the voter, various family members, or members of their household. It also allows people with disabilities to have their ballot paper submitted by their caregiver, and it allows people who are in prison or other detention centers to have their ballot submitted by an employee of the facility. But it does not allow third parties to collect ballots from foreigners.
