Fact check: Evidence undermines Trump campaign’s claims of dead people voting in Georgia
With CNN and other media outlets including Fox News having called the election for former Vice President Joe Biden, President Donald Trump and his allies continue to argue the results were somehow fraudulent.
On Wednesday, the Trump campaign claimed that the identities of four deceased people were used to vote in Georgia.
The campaign tweeted out the names of the four deceased former residents of Georgia, claiming that a ballot was cast in each one’s name in the 2020 election. The campaign also put out a news release that day with the same allegations, which were repeated later that evening on Fox News by host Tucker Carlson.
Facts First: County officials debunked two of these allegations, telling CNN that ballots for two of the named individuals were not cast in 2020. Officials are aware of the two other allegations and are looking into those names.
One of the people listed by the Trump campaign was from Nicholson, Georgia. The county’s elections director, Jennifer Logan, told CNN that the claim this person’s identity had been used to vote in last week’s presidential election was “not true.”
Logan said the person “was removed from (voter) rolls in 2003” when they passed away. Logan noted that someone with the same name but spelled slightly differently did legally vote in the county this year.
Another of the four people listed was from Newton County, Georgia, where the Board of Elections told CNN the individual had been removed from voter rolls when they died and did not vote in 2020.
Phil Johnson, the chairman of the board, explained that the widow of the deceased man had cast her ballot using her husband’s name, with “Mrs.” as the prefix, causing the confusion. “I am very disappointed that anyone would make an allegation like that … without checking it out,” Johnson said.
Officials are looking into the two other names listed by the Trump campaign.
In a news conference this week, Gabriel Sterling, the voting system implementation manager for the Georgia secretary of state, said the secretary of state’s office is committed to investigating all allegations of voter fraud.
“Every single one that comes in, we’re going to investigate. We’re going to track it down,” Sterling told reporters.
He noted that while every election is imperfect, it’s unlikely any confirmed cases of improperly cast votes are enough to tarnish the overall results.
Illegal voting is “a minor part of this thing,” Sterling said.
On Wednesday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced there would be a full hand recount in the state due to the tight vote margin between Trump and Biden. CNN has not called a winner for Georgia. Biden currently holds more than a 14,000-vote lead in the state.
