One day after audio leaked of Donald Trump begging Georgia’s secretary of state to somehow “find” enough votes to overturn the state’s election results, a top Georgia election official systematically debunked each “easily, provably false” claim of voter fraud the outgoing president made.
Standing in front of a poster board titled “CLAIM VS FACT” in the Georgia State Capitol on Monday, voting system implementation manager Gabriel Sterling explained that no dead people voted, no people under age 18 on Election Day voted, no stacks of ballots were scanned twice, and no voting machines erroneously flipped votes. In short, the Georgia ballots, which have been counted three times, definitively favor Joe Biden.
“We have seen nothing in our investigations of any of these data claims that shows there’s nearly enough ballots to change the outcome,” Sterling said.
"The president wanted us to do a hand recount," said Gabriel Sterling, a voting systems implementation manager. And they did.
The ballots still favored President-elect Joe Biden. pic.twitter.com/GzDbShfveR
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) January 4, 2021
In an hourlong call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Saturday, Trump repeated his claims of election fraud, demanded that Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes,” and insisted that it was impossible for him to have lost the state—all this after attempting to reach Raffensperger 18 different times.
“This is all easily, provably false,” Sterling said of Trump’s fraud claims. “Yet the president persists, and by doing so undermines Georgians’ faith in the election system—especially Republican Georgians in this case—which is important because we have a big election coming up tomorrow, and everybody deserves to have their vote counted if they want it to be, Republican and Democrat alike.”
Watch Sterling’s exasperated explanation below:
Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia election official, just debunked all of the president’s claims of voter fraud. And he sounds tired. pic.twitter.com/WGUmUmzw1t
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) January 4, 2021