Georgia election: Donald Trump’s phone call verified

US President Donald Trump has spent more than an hour on the phone with election officials in Georgia as he continues to try to overturn the result in the state.

He has brought a number of fraud charges for which he has not provided evidence.

We have verified some of his claims.

President Trump and his supporters have repeatedly claimed that thousands of votes were cast in states across the country, using the identities of those who died.

But Georgia’s top election official, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, rejected the president’s claim, saying there were only two confirmed cases of votes attributed to dead people.

The president’s attorney, Cleta Mitchell, also on the call, responded to this by suggesting they had details of the vote of the deceased.

“There is a universe of people who have the same name and the same year of birth and who are deceased,” she told Raffensperger.

however,

our previous investigation of a list of “10,000 dead voters” in Michigan found this approach to be gravely flawed.

Cross-checking the lists of deaths in the United States and voters in a given state produces thousands of matches – with the same name and the same year of birth – both dead and alive.

Our Michigan study produced a large number of matches even though month of birth was included.

And we also contacted a sample of these “dead voters” and found them very much alive.

The president is referring to a video taken at a counting center at State Farm Arena in Fulton County, Ga., Suggesting it reveals fraudulent activity by election workers.

Images show officials returning to their counting areas and a container with ballot papers removed from under a table

“When they got back,” Mr. Trump said in his phone call, “they didn’t go to their station.

“They went to the apron wrapped around the table, under which were thousands and thousands of ballots in a ballot box that was neither official nor sealed.”

Election officials have already responded to the accusation, saying the footage shows normal practice.

Gabriel Sterling, responsible for the implementation of the voting system in Georgia, tweeted state investigators who had watched the entire video found nothing untoward.

An official investigation revealed that “the entirety of the security footage revealed that no mysterious ballot papers were introduced from an unknown location and hidden under tables, as some have reported.”

Fulton County Chief Electoral Officer Richard Barron said workers “put these ballot boxes under their workspace because it’s the most convenient place to put these things.”

And state officials said there was nothing official in the ballot boxes containing the ballots.

Mr Trump is referring to a break in counting at the same location in Fulton County.

At the time, election officials issued a press release saying that a water leak affected a room where absentee ballots were being compiled.

An official investigation later clarified “what was originally reported as a water leak … was in fact an overflowing urinal”.

The report says this did not affect the counting of votes by Fulton County which resumed later in the evening.

President Trump also said that when the election officials returned, “there were no Republican observers – in fact, there were no Democratic observers.”

That’s right – but the official investigation revealed that they had neither been invited to leave nor prevented from returning.

Frances Watson, chief investigator to Georgia’s secretary of state, said: “No one gave them advice on what to do.

“And it was always possible for them or the audience to come back and see any time they wanted.”

Ryan Germany, a lawyer representing the Georgian Secretary of State’s office on the appeal, dismissed the claim.

“All of those we have been through are people who lived in Georgia, who moved to another state but then returned legitimately to Georgia,” he said.

The figures given by Mr. Trump’s team regarding these alleged out-of-state voters were “not accurate,” Germany added.

Speaking ahead of Tuesday’s second round of Senate elections in Georgia, Raffensperger said “qualified Georgians and only Georgians are allowed to vote in our elections” and out-of-state voters would not be allowed to vote. tolerated.

And he warned anyone who tried to play with the system, “We will find you and we will prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”

The president mentioned what he said was the alleged shredding of “thousands” of “corrupt” ballots, suggesting that the evidence of what he believes to be voting misconduct has been deliberately destroyed.

In November, some social media posts claimed to show shredding companies destroying what were said to be ballots.

An investigation into the shredding of documents in Cobb County, Georgia concluded that it was part of a “routine cleaning operation” and that the documents disposed of were not real votes “relevant to the election or the new count “.

They were old mailing labels and other paper with voter information, old emails and copies of mail ballots.

The president has made various allegations of widespread electronic voting fraud in several swing states.

He claims the Dominion’s voting systems, which are widely used across the United States, including Georgia, have led to millions of votes from Trump being returned to rival Joe Biden.

But there is no evidence of this in Georgia or elsewhere, and several lawsuits over the claims have been dismissed by the courts.

Dominion Voting Systems has denied that its machines were compromised in any way.

The allegations have been covered extensively by some right-wing US news networks, but Fox News and Newsmax have since had to issue corrections indicating that there was no evidence the machines manipulated votes in the election.