By Cleta Mitchell, MFE Guest Contributor | August 20, 2024
Election math should be simple: 1 Voter = 1 Ballot = 1 Valid Vote. Those 3 numbers should always match. That’s the basic goal of a commonsense election rule up for final approval by the State Board of Elections in Georgia on Aug. 19.
The rule aligns exactly with Georgia’s election statutes on tabulating election results and ensures that election officials reconcile the number of ballots cast to the number of voters who are shown as having cast a ballot.
If 200 voters cast ballots in a precinct, but election officials tally 220 ballots, election officials must investigate and find out why the count of voters to ballots cast is off.
This is how election officials catch errors, so that we don’t have a repeat of more than 3,000 duplicate ballots that were scanned, counted, and certified in Fulton County during the 2020 election recount in Georgia.
What’s not to love? Apparently, the left’s argument is that the “certification” of the election results does not mean that the results are accurate.
Huh?
Actually, it does. The rule is built on basic kindergarten math. Count the ballots, categorize them by ballot type, and confirm that the numbers align with the number of people who voted.
The updated rule considered for final approval says this: “Each precinct is required to compile a list of voters who voted in the election by category, such as voters who voted in person on Election Day, Advance (Early) Voting, Absentee, and Provisionally.”
It continues: “The list shall be examined for duplicates. The list shall then be sorted by precinct. The total number of unique voter IDs from each precinct shall be counted. The total number of unique voters who voted by each vote method shall be reported for each precinct.”
If errors are determined to be fraud, the board shall determine a method to compute the votes justly and report the facts of the investigation to the district attorney. Again, this is a rule right out of Georgia’s own code (§21-2-493[i]).
Often these types of discrepancies are a result of human error, which can and should be identified and remedied by the Electoral Board after review of the relevant records and prior to certification.
But partisans always look for weaknesses to exploit in the election system. Maybe that’s why Marc Elias and the ACLU are angry about requiring board members to actually do their jobs to ensure accurate elections. That they won’t be able to fix the election in their favor.
After all, they know what the rest of us know: that so goes Georgia, so may go the rest of the 2024 presidential election. And they’re willing to do whatever it takes, including lying, to win.
Once upon a time, people across the political spectrum agreed on these basics of trusted election results. It’s not calculus; it’s not even algebraic equations. This is basic math: add up all the ballots cast and compare to the number of people who have cast a ballot — whether in person, absentee, early voting, or provisionally. Then the number of votes should match both of those matching numbers. This rule is a commonsense approach to ensuring trusted election results. It would be elementary for the State Board of Elections to approve it.
Cleta Mitchell is the founder of the Election Integrity Network and co-founded the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations that unite American citizens and leaders to protect the votes of all citizen voters.
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