You're right. It was interesting to learn that Obama won his first election in Chicago by getting his opponents disqualified due to signature issues:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_Senate_elections_of_B...

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-04-04-070403...

Is there any evidence that signature matching is an accurate way to ensure correctness? As a useless anecdote, my current signature looks _nothing_ like the one on my state issued ID from 10 years ago.

Something that someone else said is quite important here: the time to fix these things is before an election, not afterwards. It doesn't take much imagination to see how invalidating large quantities of ballots after-the-fact is a dangerous road for a democracy. Put the rules and methods in place prior, in a bipartisan way.

> the time to fix these things is before an election, not afterwards.

Mail-in ballots were not approved by state legislature which what what the constitution defines.

> Is there any evidence that signature matching is an accurate way to ensure correctness?

In these cases, I don't think that matters as much as the fact that the laws were not followed.

"Is there any evidence that me abiding by the speed limit would have been any safer?" is not a good defence to accusations of "you broke the speed limit".

> "Is there any evidence that me abiding by the speed limit would have been any safer?" is not a good defence [sic] to accusations of "you broke the speed limit".

Yet another comfortable sounding yet simplistically false untruth. Depending on the jurisdiction, of course.

If you'd indulge me, which part of the supposed untruth was blatantly false?

Although I am not sure how fruitful an engagement this will be, given the pedantry[1] you've displayed against users of British English.

[1] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/defence-defense/

There are states where the posted number isn't actually a hard limit but rather a recommendation of what's considered safe. And so arguing that you were still driving safely despite exceeding the posted limit can be a worthwhile defense. For example: https://malegislature.gov/laws/generallaws/parti/titlexiv/ch...

(I added sic because I don't like propagating misspellings. But I didn't know "defence" was British spelling! Sorry, TIL)

I am sure there are places like that, but I don't think you'd be charged with "exceeding the speed limit" in those places, correct? You would be charged with unsafe driving or something similar, in which case you could make the argument that driving slower would not necessarily have been safer. I believe that is splitting hairs and I am sure you understand the basis of my argument when it comes to election workers following the laws set in place by the legislature.

> Sorry, TIL

Apology accepted and apologies for assuming you were being pedantic about it.

Well charges would simply be the legal citation numbers, and if you look at that link it's indeed titled "speed limits".

I get your abstract argument, but you don't see to be applying it to a specific situation. Is there an actual case that's raising this argument? I've yet to see any cases with arguments that make me worry, so it would be something new.

In general I can't see a signature "verification" law as anything but an attempt at disenfranchisement. Many people have repeatable signatures, and many do not. A signature is not a method of technical verification, but rather legal authorization with a possibility to argue authenticity based on stroke angles etc. If I usually make a half-attempt at writing my name, but sign my ballot with an X, that's legit. The best way to prevent a person from filling out multiple ballots is to make sure everyone votes so there are few unused ballots to steal in the first place.

> Is there an actual case that's raising this argument?

There are several cases, but off the top of my head I can give you Trump v. Raffensperger [1] filed in the superior court of Fulton County, state of Georgia. Beginning around paragraph 139 of the petition, you can see arguments that the Trump legal team have brought which talk about various violations of state mandates regarding signatures.

> I can't see a signature "verification" law as anything but an attempt at disenfranchisement

You may argue that these laws or mandates could disenfranchise some voters, but I think it's unfair to suggest that it's their sole (or even primary) purpose.

> make sure everyone votes

Even in countries where voting is mandatory you do not get full voter turnout. There would certainly be enough left over to turn the tide of many elections.

[1] https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/...

If I'm reading it correctly, the actual argument put forth there seems to be that three people were checking each signature, rather than a single one (due to a previous consent decree over disenfranchisement). State law certainly doesn't mandate that each registrar has to personally review every ballot themselves. And so just as a registrar can deputize a single employee to do the job, I would think they have the power to deputize multiple people to do the job collaboratively.

I think you may have read from where I linked and then into the following complaint. The complaint supported by paragraphs 139 - 141 is "RESPONDENTS FAILED TO COMPLY WITH GEORGIA LAW PROVISIONS FOR MATCHING SIGNATURES AND CONFIRMING VOTER IDENTITY FOR ELECTORS SEEKING TO VOTE ABSENTEE".

The following paragraphs talk about a different issue (which also happens to relate to signature verification).

By my reading, 139-141 just factually cite Georgia law. I don't see where it is alleged how the law was specifically not followed, apart from continuing to read into the next complaint.

I'm not a legal expert. The petition alleges that "RESPONDENTS FAILED TO COMPLY WITH GEORGIA LAW PROVISIONS MATCHING SIGNATURES" but I believe the arguments to support this would need to be presented in the courts.

You asked me if there was an actual case which raises the arguments that state laws were not followed and I believe that I have provided you with one.

You can also probably look at the recent motion filed by AG Paxton in Texas[1], which similarly makes claims that election officials were processing ballots in an unlawful way.

Whether or not the arguments make you worry doesn't change the fact that both of these cases allege that election laws were broken.

[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...

I'm not a legal expert either. My understanding is that the heading of each complaint is a summary, and the sections form a progression of supporting allegations.

For example if you read into the next complaint, 142 is strictly factual (which can still be rebutted, but probably won't be), while 145/149 argue why those (factual) actions were unlawful, in support of the complaint's title (the rest are somewhere in the middle, or more handwavey). If you read 142-149, you come away seeing a coherent argument backing up the claim.

But for the previous complaint - it's a claim the law was violated, a citation of the law, and then no supporting argument or evidence detailing how or why the law has been violated. I'm guessing it can be amended or argued verbally, but as it stands it's an unsupported claim.

Also, for the record, I have not downvoted any of your comments. I think it's totally fair for people to discuss the merits of these cases.

The Trump team did take this to court before the election, but they were denied on the basis of the "injury" only being hypothetical at that time...

So they couldn't successfully sued before, and now they are told that its too late. Something very dishonest from the courts about that.

Your own personal anecdote confirms that people's signatures change overtime. Hence more should have been rejected.

Relying on—and rejecting votes using—a poor method of voter identification is voter suppression.

A signature shouldn't be used for identification matching but rather as akin to the signing of an affidavit.

Accepting votes that do not have matching signatures, is diluting the votes that do have matching signatures. Why should a person that voted in person, in a more secure way, have their votes diluted by a mailed in ballot that does not meet a minimum standard of security, and consequently are much more likely to be fraudulent.

1. Signature match is the minimum filter to prevent outright fake ballots.

2. I believe there was a procedure for rectifying a rejected mail-in ballot. The person still could have voted, if they sent in their ballot on time, and rectified any mistakes.

3. Mail-in ballots are really an assault on the right to a "secret ballot". There really is no guarantee that the mail-in ballot was filled out in secret. An abusive husband could for example coarse his wife to vote a certain way. A union boss, could coarse his workers to vote a certain way...and so on. This has happened in the past.

As others have noted, the statistics you listed are recklessly inaccurate.

That said: even if they were accurate, we'd still need to examine how may signature match failures result in detecting actual fraudulent voting, and how many signature match failures don't (ie they are false positives that serve to disenfranchise voters).

It turns out that the vast majority (97%) of ballots rejected due to signature match issues are likely valid. IOW: we'd disenfranchise 32 people for every case of fraud occurring. I have personal doubts that the rate for fraud was even that high (3% of the % of ballots rejected for sig mismatch), as you'd expect some type of criminal charges resulting from it.

Even assuming the 3% of sig rejects number, because that's already a % of sig rejects, it comes out to 3% of 0.2% (the actual number of sig mismatch rejections). This is 0.006% of the total vote.

Additionally, signature match checking disproportionately rejects votes from specific groups, while accepting votes from other groups. In other words, having a signature check (or making it "stricter") allows tuning which demographics you accept votes from. Allowing this type of targeted disenfranchisement is not good

Banks not accepting monopoly money also disenfranchises poor people. If banks did start accepting monopoly money, real money would become worth less. Having even a basic standard of verifiability and security is where the worth of money comes from.

Also rights come with responsibilities. If you can't sing your signature in a consistent way, than maybe you should not vote by mail in ballot. Vote in person.

Most up to date stats on the rejection rates that I found. 0.6% vs 6.4% in Georgia.

https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_...

Others have previously responded to you reposting this link with this commentary, noting that the numbers included there are the result of a tabulating error.

Continuing to attempt to use it to push misinformation after being informed is not acceptable.

Ballot tabulation website has an update date of today. Fact check article is from November 20th.

The election results have been finalized/certified. Therefore its reasonable to assume that the number of rejected ballots is now known. (How could it be otherwise. ) So I'm going to go with the Tabulation website over a fact check article from last month.

As others have already told you, the article [1] specifically addresses the distinction here. The "6%" is total rejections, including those that are from, for example, ballots arriving late. Nothing is out of date about it.

The total number of rejected ballots is not known because it isn't necessary to count rejected ballots to determine the election result (ie: they are simply not included in the count).

Again, stop spreading misinformation. Continuing to do so would be malicious.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-georgia-rejecte...

Fact check article is BS.

In the Supreme Court of the United States STATE OF TEXAS, COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA, STATE OF STATE OF GEORGIA, STATE OF MICHIGAN, AND STATE OF WISCONSIN

Page 5 aND 6.

"Georgia argues that the “[r]ejection rates for signatures on absentee ballots remained largely unchanged” as between the 2018 and 2020 elections, referring the Court to Wood v. Raffensperger, No. 1:20- cv-04651-SDG, 2020 WL 6817513, at *10 (N.D. Ga. Nov. 20, 2020) (“Wood”). Georgia Br. 4. Georgia’s reliance on Wood is misplaced because the analysis therein related to rejection rates for absentee ballots—as opposed to the mail-in ballots analyzed by Dr. Cicchetti"

"Indeed, in 2018, the rejection rate for mail-in ballots was actually 3.32% or more than twenty times higher than the rejection rate for the absentee ballots that Georgia incorrectly compares to dispute"

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163493/2020...

No, it isn't. It states the issue at hand and gives the facts available to us.

The item you've linked (the filing by the Texas AG against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin) is weird.

It seems to think there's some serious difference between mail-in and absentee voting in GA. In GA, the term absentee voting encompasses both early voting and mail in voting. The only absentee voting that has signature verification is the mail-in component (IDs are checked instead for early voting).

And it appears to make the same "error" you've continued to make: it conflates rejection for signature mismatch and rejection for all reasons, when the signature mismatch rejections are a subset of all reasons.

> If we don't have a meaningful signature match, than we don't have a meaningful way to prevent fraud with mail in ballots. Period.

This isn't true at all.

We've had mail-in voting in Australia for decades, and there is no signature matching.

Some US states do use it at all.

Signature verification is error prone and becoming more-so as less people use their signatures regularly.

> Bad ballot Rejection rate of 6% in previous election to now 0.02%, with mail in ballots.

Wikipedia says in the 2016 election 1% of mail ballots were rejected[1]. I'd expect that to be a lot less this year because of the increased emphasis on it and the much higher numbers, but I haven't verified your 0.02% number. But going from 1% to 0.02% shouldn't be surprising based on the completely different voting behavior this year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting_in_the_United_St...

Can you expend on how the process works in Australia. Genuinely curious.

The 0.02% or the more recent 0.06% rejection rate is very low. Think of it this way. Out of 1000 people taking a test that needed two signatures, that matched. Only 2-6 did not not match. Thats an extremely low number.

This is why teachers are always reminding students not to forget to sign their test, in a class of 30, and that only requires one signature.

If you worked with the general public, and you asked them to tie their shoes, I honestly believe you would have a higher failure rate than 0.02%

> Out of 1000 people taking a test that needed two signatures, that matched. Only 2-6 did not not match. Thats an extremely low number.

No that's not what it means. It means 2-6 were rejected.

"Signature matching" is a junk process and should be ignored.

In the AZ random sampling that the Judge asked for, 6/100 signatures were inconclusive, and this was on verified voters.

> Can you expend on how the process works in Australia. Genuinely curious.

https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/postal-voting.htm

You control the voting envelopes and ballot papers which is actually how fraud is controlled in the US too. The signature verification thing is nothing but ineffective security theatre.

> If we don't have a meaningful signature match, than we don't have a meaningful way to prevent fraud with mail in ballots. Period.

We can check for duplicate votes. Submitting fraudulent ballots in quantities necessary to change the results while avoiding submitting duplicate ballots (which would be caught, as we saw with the Jill Stokke) would require either:

1. Extremely good data about who had voted and who had not.

OR

2. Some faction in the ballot-processing chain with the ability to secretly discard the legitimate ballots.

Is there evidence that either of these things happened?

You can vote on election day even though you sent a mail in ballot earlier right? They just destroy the mailed in one.

That is correct, and is precisely what happened with Stokke. Stokke came to the polling place was told that her mail-in ballot had already been received. She was given the choice to sign an affadavit claiming that she had not voted by mail, which would allow her to vote in person. She refused to sign the affadavit and then began to peddle her story as evidence of fraud. Really makes you think...

I think in most cases, your in-person vote in that situation is provisional -- meaning it will only count if your mail-in vote doesn't arrive

Jill Stokke was explicitly given the option to have her mail-in vote invalidated so she could vote in person. That was in Nevada; Procedures elsewhere may be different.

This is state dependent. In some states, voting in person after sending a mail in ballot is a felony.

>Some faction in the ballot-processing chain with the >ability to secretly discard the legitimate ballots.

This video does not instil confidence that 2 did not happen.

Dominion Voting Machine Flaws -- 2020 Election Coffee County, Georgia Video 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46CAKyyObls&feature=emb_titl...

After watching the video more closely, I have no idea what the point is. Overvoting causes the ballot to go to adjudication. At that point the person adjudicating gets to choose which results are submitted and tabulated.

Is that supposed to be evidence of fraud? That's exactly what I expect from adjudication: A human has to read the ballot and choose whether to disambiguate it or remove it from the tabulation.

Not to mention the physical ballots are not changed. Unless the same person adjudicates the same ballots the same way, this kind of tampering is incredibly easy to catch.

Didn't Georgia do a hand recount? The video seems to show the process of scanning the ballots, not a way that massive numbers of physical ballots could be discarded.

I don't think it's that hard if you harvest ballots from places unlikely to vote, e.g., nursing homes.

My understanding is the following two facts are true

- Georgia has a historically low mail-in ballot rejection rate

- Georgia is not allowing an independent review of the signatures on the envelopes

That alone in my mind is an extremely strong reason to be suspicious of the results.

Not to even mention the very-strange goings-on in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta...

There were 22,894 nursing facility residents in Georgia in 2019. [1]

How many of them do you think had their ballots harvested?

I think it's far harder to harvest ballots without getting caught than you seem to think it is.

[1] : https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-nursing-...

Sure, you might be right. I wouldn't say I'm confident it would be easy or confident it would be hard.

Let's say that you brought in signature experts to look for fraudulent ballots, based on detecting forged signatures. What do you think their false positive / false negative rates would look like?

Beats me; given the historically low rate & the allegations of fraud, it seems to be you should do the review so that everyone can be confident in the results (in the event there was not significant fraud) or so that the fraud can be exposed (in the event there was).

One data point is in Arizona where the judge allowed 100 randomly-sampled envelopes to be reviewed for a signature, the democratic expert witness said 16 of them were inconclusive. However, the Judge ruled that that was not evidence of fraud. I'm not really sure how exactly you can conclude that, and the fact that we are apprently counting votes in AZ with signatures that don't match certainly doesn't make me particularly confident in the results.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020...

The whole point is that signature verification isn't a reliable indicator of fraud or anything.

It never has been, and should never have been relied on. The ballots and the envelopes and the protection of them is the key.

In that case, what protects against fraud? Anything?

I personally know of two ballots, not mine, that I could have filled and out returned, if I'd been so inclined. (People in apartment buildings I have access to who have moved out of state, but still got sent ballots, which were just setting in the foyer; I'm sure there are gazillions of other ways to get ballots.)

If you're not even going to require the signatures to match, it seems like committing vote fraud would be ridiculously easy.

(Of course, if you really want to have a secure election, make people vote in person and have a continuous chain of custody of those votes; use the ink-on-your-finger trick to prevent double-voting.)

> In that case, what protects against fraud?

Yes, controlled ballot papers and envelopes.

> I'm sure there are gazillions of other ways to get ballots.

You need gazillions of ballots going to someone who is the dedicated to committing fraud. There is no evidence that occurred, and it's easy to detect. Ballots are numbered, so if a bunch of sequential ones all are the same you can see it.

The process for this was all decided before the election. There's zero evidence that fraud occurred, and all people are pointing to is parts of the process they don't like.

> Ballots are numbered, so if a bunch of sequential ones all are the same you can see it.

Who could see it, specifically?

> The process for this was all decided before the election.

The Texas lawsuit is about exactly this; they allege that the process (including things like signature verification) was not in fact followed.

(Or at least that's my understanding. I claim no expertise!)

The fact that it's quite obvious if someone votes multiple times. To sway an election, you would need to submit a significant number of fraudulent ballots. This is likely to result in an extremely high number of detected duplicates. It is also extremely hard to pull off without involving a large number of people, any of whom could blow the entire conspiracy wide open.

OK. Why not allow an audit of the envelope signatures?

Because signatures can't be verified. In AZ the Judge asked them to sample 100, and 6/100 were "inconclusive"

It seems crazy to me to count ballots with signatures that don't (reasonably) match.

If I had believed one or the other of the candidates were a threat on the level Hitler, I would certainly have taken the opportunities given to me to fill out and return ballots that were not mine.

You don't need any conspiracy for this; you just have to have one side that is extremely motivated to defeat the other side combined w/ a lack of signature standards.

You would have gotten caught then. Signature matching doesn't appreciably increase the security of the election; It simply disenfranchises people based on a shoddy test.

Besides, the ballots have long been separated from their signatures. Suppose we take your numbers seriously: The solution is to re-run the election or to let Pelosi become President and run it next year. Letting legislatures choose the president because of FUD is incredibly dangerous.

I think you're underestimating how exceedingly difficult it would be to correctly identify the people that you could steal their vote, and not get caught.

Picture it, if you try to vote for someone, and they also vote - in person, or requesting another ballot - that's trivially detectable.

That didn't happen.

Is it really that hard though? Just in nursing homes alone there are way more than enough votes to cover the small margin of victory.

And also, how confident can we be that the double-voting would actually be detected?

E.g., https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-14/u-s-elect...

I am not very sympathetic to the argument that we shouldn't care about signature matches.

You linked to a news story about double-voting being detected yourself. Said news story also identifies the causes behind double-voting:

1. Delays in inputting data about who had voted in real-time.

2. Poll workers overriding machines to submit ballots.

Is there any evidence that these things happened at scale during the general? I would expect that poll workers would be better-trained and that the election would be generally smoother than the primary.

In addition, that article makes no mention of nursing homes as a particular source of double votes.

For me the take away was there's no failsafe automated way to detect double-voting.

Since the ballots themselves become anonymous once removed from the envelopes, I'm not really sure at all how'd you notice double-voting, unless you're doing something to look for duplicate envelopes. I don't there's any automated invalidation of the previous ballot if you request multiple ballots (e.g., if some1 took your first one).

Maybe there are more rigerous systems in place than I realize, but I haven't read about it, if so.

Re nursing homes, the point there is you can be pretty sure if you take those ballots, you won't risk a double-vote.

Of course there's no failsafe automated way to detect double-voting. There's no failsafe automated way to detect anything. In fact, there's no failsafe way to detect anything.

But checking for duplicate envelopes is part of the process. That's how duplicate votes are found and thrown out of elections (see the Stokke case). Checking for voter eligibility is part of the process. That's how votes are invalidated (see the report I linked elsewhere in this thread).

There is no evidence that ballot fraud exists at a scale which affects elections in the United States. The fact that it exists at all is not a good enough reason to disenfranchise millions of people.

Taking tens of thousands of ballots (the number needed to swing the election) from nursing homes will absolutely cause detected double-votes. Not to mention that collecting those tens of thousands of ballots necessarily involves a large number of people. And when a conspiracy includes a large number of people, the chances that someone talks skyrockets.

That's not concrete enough for me to have any confidence duplicate ballots would reliably be rejected. Perhaps there is a robust process, but I haven't heard it.

We're a bit in the weeds though. To summarize top-level findings, for GA at least:

- The 2016 mail-in ballot rejection rate was 6.42% †

- The 2020 mail-in ballot rejection rate was 0.37%

That's a huge, surprising difference that deserves an explanation. The GA secretary of state has refused to audit those signatures.

One of the arguments against the need to do an audit is that observers from both parties had a chance to challenge the signatures when the ballots were opened. But, per reports (I believe in sworn affidavits), republican observers were often unable to do so. So why not allow an audit of the signatures?

One could argue, as you and several other commentators have, that signature verification does not matter.

But that is not following (for GA) at least the written law; it also, I would say, remains unconvincing.

Finally, I don't see what's unreasonable about asking a signature to match. That does not seem like an unfair burden to place on legitmate voters.

If GA wanted to build confidence in these results, I would recommend at least uploading a copy of all accepted ballot envelope signatures along with the on-file registration signature. I think it would then become obvious one way or the other if it was reasonable to accept the ballots.

† These are taken from the state of TX lawsuit, which I assume are correct

The numbers are comparing apples and oranges:

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-georgia-rejecte...

> If GA wanted to build confidence in these results, I would recommend at least uploading a copy of all accepted ballot envelope signatures along with the on-file registration signature.

...wouldn't that make it far easier for some malicious to steal the signature of thousands of people? Perhaps in the 2022 midterms or 2024 general election?

It's total rejection rate to total rejection, so that's apples-to-apples, right?

It is interesting that the GA SoS claims rejections in 2016 due to signatures was really low.

If that's true and 2020 is comparable, then we would not expect to see a significant number bogus signatures in an audit, which would provide reassurance to all observers.

Hence, in that case, I don't understand the reluctance to perform an audit.

They check the voter registration while they're opening the envelopes. If there's a double-vote detected, they pull that envelope to the side to investigate more, before they open it and count the vote.

Also, I really think you don't get the point of my first question to you.

How many false positives and false negatives do you think signature analysis would result in?

Because if you're trying to detect a fraudulent signature, and you have false positives, and you then don't count that vote, you have disenfranchised someone.

Perhaps you just mean that those envelopes should be pulled aside, and the state should go and track down the person and ask them if its really their signature?

> Perhaps you just mean that those envelopes should be pulled aside, and the state should go and track down the person and ask them if its really their signature?

Yes, in Georgia at least, that's the process that's supposed to be followed -- if the signature doesn't match, you mail the person, and then they have a chance to mail it back corrected.

This actually happened to me the first time I voted, in Oregon. Sort of stupidly, I signed my ballot with a nicer signature than my usual scribble. The sent the ballot back saying the signatures didn't match; I sent it back w/ my scribble. I'm not sure if the vote ended up counted or not...

Because handwriting verification is deeply silly.

> who have moved out of state

The governments of both states know they moved. The voter registrations were adjusted accordingly.

If you had tried to send in their ballots, your attempt to vote unregistered voters would have been detected.

You describe it as "ridiculously easy," but you seem to be unaware of the protections that are in place.

Is that true? I've never heard of any such system; I don't think states in general communicate with each other and do automatic unregistrations like this.

Googling, I found this:

> Since the U.S. has a very mobile population and voters rarely inform election officials when they move, voters can often be on the voter rolls in two (or more) different states at one time. Unless states have an efficient way of communicating with one another, it’s possible that they may not be able to identify an individual who is on the rolls in two different states.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/double...

> You describe it as "ridiculously easy," but you seem to be unaware of the protections that are in place.

It is true I have never actually tried it, so I should say it seems like it would be ridicuously easy. I've still not seen any convincing arguments that protections beyond signature matches would prevent this.

Well, as that link discusses, states are in charge of managing why and how voters are removed from their rolls. In 2016, upwards of 4.5m names were removed due to cross-jurisdiction change of address (p. 48). https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/eac_assets/1/6/2016_...

> How is that even possible.

It's not true.

This is a myth that's been spreading online about Georgia absentee ballots. Long story short:

* The 6% number from 2016 comes from taking into account ballots that arrived late.

* The 0.02% number from 2020 is actually 0.2%, and only takes into account ballots that arrived on time.

The signature rejection rate in 2020 was actually very similar to the rates in 2018 and 2016.

So as usual, these claims are simply bogus. But even if there were problems with the signature matching system, the time to raise objections would have been before the election. Attempting to throw out millions of ballots after the election over these issues is absurd and anti-democratic.

1. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-georgia-rejecte...

How does the claim that thins are very similar to 2016 work together with the claim that the 2020 was the most secure election in history?

An election is either more secure, less secure or equally secure. It can't be all three at the same time.

Personally I suspect this elect was very similar to 2016, and unless it too was the most secure election in history then we got a small problem.

I have no idea what the claim about "most secure election in history" is based on.

I'm responding to the false claim made by Trump and others about numbers of absentee ballots rejected in Georgia. The rate of rejections is similar this year as in previous years.

What's the 2020 number if we take into account ballots that arrived late? Is it near to 6 percent?

>The time to raise objections would have been before the

>election.

Trump lawyers did try to prevent these election changes, by taking them to court. The lawsuits were rejected at the time, on the basis on not being able to prove injury/damage, because no damage has occurred yet, only hypothetically.

Now that the damage has occurred, they are told that they should have sued before.

Thats a very sneaky/dishonest way of being treated by the courts.

The fact check does not prove a lie. At most it proves that Trump is not making the statement based on publicly available data. Since the final rejection rate for 2020 have not yet been released.

From the fact check:

"Georgia rejected 6.42% of mail-in ballots in total in the 2016 general election "

"The higher percentage he mentions for past years is likely based off the total rejected ballots (here) which can not be compared with 2020, as this information is not available."

The fact check shows that Trump is conflating two different numbers: the number of ballots that arrive late and the number that are rejected due to signature mismatch. If Trump has any idea what he's talking about, I'm comfortable calling that level of dishonesty a "lie." My view is that he just doesn't care what's true or not, and he probably knows that much of what he's saying is false.

> Trump lawyers did try to prevent these election changes, by taking them to court.

Which changes?

State election laws are set by the state legislature. In Georgia, the Republicans control both houses, plus the governorship. It's hard to believe that the Republican party would have set the rules to disadvantage their own Presidential candidate.

I believe the state of Texas lawsuit currently before the supreme court, (joined by 16 other states) contradicts this. I believe some of the rule changes were made by state election officials, without legislature. Also some counties had different rules than other counties. Which is not legal.

One of his court cases about state election changes made it to the supreme court on appeal before the election..it was turned dow.

But I won't be able to find an article about it now, because when I google things now, it just returns news about the recent court cases.

Stats: https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_...

can you link me a source that proves that the rejection rate of 6% went down to 0.02%? thank you!

These seem to be the most upto date numbers. "Rejected absentee/mail-in ballots as a percentage of total absentee/mail-in ballots returned, 2016-2020"

Georgia 2016 6.42%

Georgia 2020 .60%

Source https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_...

Which cites the official Georgia election website as source of the raw data.

6.42% was the total rejection rate for all causes. Most ballots are rejected because they arrive late. Those are not yet included in the 2020 reject numbers.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/trump-misinformation-on-ge...

The factcheck article is from November 20th. The Ballot tabulation website page says it has been updated December 9th (today)

Its been weeks since the election, We don't even know how many votes have been cast still? This seems ridiculous. Most countries have final results on election night.