Georgia Sec. Of State May Be Punishing Crimes He Helped Create

In September 2020, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger held a press conference to announce that 1,000 Georgia voters in “about a hundred counties” would be investigated for double voting during the June 9 combined presidential and state primary election. He pledged to prosecute the offenders. Yet this is an issue, and a scandal, he arguably caused. 

The issues he described in that press conference first came to light in Long County, Georgia, a small South Georgia county with a little more than 12,500 voters, where Probate Judge Bobby Smith lost his 2020 primary race by only nine votes. Because of the irregularities Smith saw in the race, he retained Atlanta election lawyer Jake Evans to assist him in challenging that election. (I was brought in to serve as an expert witness in the case.)

When Evans heard a voter in the county had claimed he voted twice in the election, he called to interview him, and I was a witness to the call. Hamilton Evans (no relation to Jake Evans) candidly admitted he had voted twice “just to see if they’d let me.” He then reported his double vote to the county sheriff to warn him of the issue.

After the call, I found Evans on the “numbered list of voters,” a list of the voters in the order they entered each precinct. He and 13 other voters appeared again in the early and absentee voter data, bringing the total number to 14 matches. That was the first time in nearly 40 years of working with voter data that I had ever seen hard evidence of double voting. If such problems arose in sleepy little Long County, it’s easy to imagine the potential chaos in big counties like Fulton.

Why This All Matters

To understand what happened, we need to revisit the events that transpired during Covid lockdowns. Raffensperger announced on March 24, 2020, that he would be “mailing absentee ballot request forms to every Georgia voter,” putting the number of those ballots at 6.9 million.

Then in May 2020, anticipating a flood of ballots, the state election board, chaired by Raffensperger, unanimously passed and later renewed a temporary rule change. The change was arguably illegal, allowing absentee mail-in ballots to be opened and scanned up to three weeks before each of the remaining 2020 elections. Most of the provisions of that rule change were later codified into law with the passage of SB202 in March 2021.

More than 100 of Georgia’s largest counties then gave notice to the state that they would be opening and scanning ballots ahead of the June primary. By the general election, that number had grown to include the vast majority of Georgia’s counties.

That wound up creating problems because when an absentee ballot is removed and separated from the envelope it came in, the link between the voter and their ballot is deliberately severed in order to preserve the secrecy of the voter’s ballot. In other words, there is no longer any way to know whose ballot was whose.

So when absentee voters chose to go to the polls on Election Day and said they wished to cancel their earlier ballot and vote in person, there was no longer any practical way to accomplish that if the ballot had been separated from the envelope. For that reason, those voters are typically required to surrender their absentee ballot.

Back in 2020, I emailed an open records request to the secretary of state’s office to obtain a statewide copy of the “numbered list of electors” showing exactly who voted in person on Election Day in the 2020 primary so I could check for double voters. I was told they did not have it.

I then raised the issue to Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs, who asked me to conduct that investigation as an outside contractor, and admitted they actually did have the data, but to gain access they would require me to sign a mon-disclosure agreement (NDA). The data in question is clearly in the public domain — in fact, Cobb County routinely publishes it on their website — so I refused to sign the NDA and they brought in another analyst.

Lucia Frazier, a Fulton County election integrity activist, recently submitted a rule change to the state election board that would require the secretary of state’s office to make the “numbered list of voters” public for each election. She submitted another requiring the “qualified list of electors” also be made available. 

With those files, outside analysts can independently verify who was qualified to vote, who did vote, when they voted, how they voted, and how many times. If we’re going to continue to allow the early processing of absentee ballots, all of that is clearly a must to maintain voter confidence in the process.

In February 2022, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution reported that “an investigation by his own office has found less double voting than he had suspected” and “most of Raffensperger’s allegation couldn’t be proved.” It went on to explain:

The investigation so far indicates about 300 voters cast two ballots in the June 2020 primary and August 2020 primary runoff, almost always because of mistakes by confused voters and poll workers. The number of double voters could rise because about 100 cases remain under investigation.

Investigators confirmed 22% of 1,339 suspected cases of double voting in the primary elections. The other 78% appear to have only voted once.

Very Questionable Data

Looking back at the absentee voting data for the 2020 general election in an effort to understand those mistakes, I counted 220,806 records showing ballots that were mailed out, returned by voters, but then marked as “canceled.” The vast majority of those voters then cast ballots in person, either during early voting, or on Election Day.

A query of the “status reason” field produced 3,815 different answers for their ballot status changes, ranging from the very legitimate “Mailed Ballot Surrendered to Vote In-Person” to the very nebulous “Voter Requested,” “Ballot was undelivered,” or “Administrative Cancellation.”

I saw nothing standardized or normalized about the handling of that data, and nothing that assures us that those ballots were either found and indeed canceled or, alternatively, surrendered by the voter. So, at the end of the day, the public has no real way of independently verifying exactly how many double votes there were in 2020, or in any election since. 

I asked two other experienced analysts, Jason Frazier and Scott Ellard, to look at that data. Frazier and I still had absentee files we got in 2020, but Ellard started fresh by downloading a 2023 copy of that data currently available on the secretary of state’s website. When he found only eight different values in the “Status Reason” field, the three of us set out to find out why. 

We all agree it appears about 80,000 of those nebulous codes have since been replaced, mostly with the even more nebulous value of “other.” That gives the appearance that the handling of that data was normalized, when we can also plainly see it originally was not.

Where It Stands Now

On August 13, I emailed the Secretary of State’s Public Information Officer Mike Hassinger to inquire about the double voting cases, and Raffensperger’s pledge to prosecute the offenders. I said, “I haven’t heard much lately on that topic, and my understanding is the statute of limitations on any 2020 primary violations has now lapsed. Can I get an update from you on the disposition of those cases? Were any of them referred to the State Election Board for adjudication?”

I have not received a response, and frankly, I do not expect one. The American Civil LIberties Union has pledged to defend these voters if they are prosecuted, and would likely place the blame on the system, not the voter.

Based on my experience with the Long County case, I believe some of these double voters absolutely knew what they were doing, but most did not. That said, I also believe the secretary of state’s analysis could have resulted in false positives or false negatives, and it is likely most of these voters simply did what poll workers allowed them to do, which the ACLU would likely be quick to point out.

But this whole episode leaves election integrity advocates with some serious concerns. With more than 220,000 canceled absentee mail-in ballots in the 2020 general election, and the early opening of absentee ballots up to three weeks before the election, how can we be sure the counts are accurate? Why couldn’t we get access to the data needed to independently verify that the number of voters and the number of ballots accepted match one another? How can we be sure this problem isn’t repeated in 2024 or beyond? Can we trust people who alter data like this?

Finally, why did the major provisions of this “temporary” rule change really need to become permanent law when we aren’t experiencing an emergency?

Mark Davis is president of Data Productions, Inc., and has been working with voter data since 1986. He has been qualified and admitted to testify as an expert witness on voter data analytics and residency issues in court cases involving disputed elections five times over the last 20 years. Follow him @MarkDavisGOP.