The Trump campaign is really grasping at straws in GA now
Posted by
Brian (aka trav007)
Nov 4 '20, 18:38
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32 minutes ago
By Richard Fausset and Stephanie Saul
As the race in Georgia tightens, the Trump campaign sues over 53 ballots in one county.
Signaling a willingness to litigate even the most minute of possible voting discrepancies, President Trump’s campaign filed suit in Georgia’s Chatham County on Wednesday, claiming that a Republican poll watcher there “witnessed 53 late absentee ballots illegally added to a stack of on-time absentee ballots.”
The lawsuit, filed in Chatham County Superior Court on behalf of the Georgia Republican Party and President Trump’s campaign, came as the race in Georgia had tightened significantly. It raised the possibility that some absentee ballots had been improperly handled and received after Tuesday’s 7 p.m. deadline. Chatham County, in coastal southeast Georgia, includes the city of Savannah.
The chairman of Georgia’s Republican Party, David Shafer, said Wednesday that his group plans to file lawsuits in as many as a dozen Georgia counties over potential irregularities in the way local election boards are handling absentee ballots.
“When an unlawful ballot is counted that suppresses the vote of a lawful voter just as thoroughly as if that voter was physically barred from the polls,” Mr. Shafer said in a telephone interview.
His remarks came as President Trump’s once-sizable lead in Georgia had been cut to about 46,000 votes by Wednesday evening, and as some predicted he was about to fall behind his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr. Fulton County — which is the state’s most populous and includes most of Atlanta, a reliable Democratic stronghold — is expected to finish counting its absentee ballots overnight, said Richard L. Barron, the elections director.
The Chatham County lawsuit contended that a poll watcher named Sean Pumphrey had said he “witnessed absentee ballots that had not been properly processed apparently mixed into a pile of absentee ballots that was already set to be tabulated,”
According to the lawsuit, Mr. Pumphrey, “observed a poll worker bring a stack of ballots from a back room and place on a table near the bins,” he said in a sworn affidavit. Of those, a stack of 53, he later learned, were ballots that had come in after the 7 p.m. deadline when polls officially closed. He then briefly left the room, he said.
“When I returned to the room the stack of ballots were no longer on the table,” he said. In his statement, Mr. Pumphrey surmised those 53 may have been improperly counted with other ballots.
A spokeswoman for the Democratic Party of Georgia did not respond to an emailed request for comment. Asked about the Chatham County lawsuit, Richard Barron, the elections director in Fulton County, said he wasn’t aware of it, but, referring to his own county’s ballots, he said: “these are all valid votes because they were all received yesterday.”
The lawsuit’s ultimate goal, Mr. Clark, the campaign counsel, said in his statement, is for “all Georgia counties to separate any and all late-arriving ballots from all legally cast ballots to ensure a free, fair election in which only legal, valid ballots count.”
Sean Keenan contributed reporting from Atlanta.
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