GOP Elections Chief Mum as Democrats Defend Nevada Vote

Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske

While President Donald Trump has escalated his legal battle over the election in Nevada and sought to contest its results, the Republican official in charge of supervising the state's vote has stayed quiet.

Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, who has kept a low profile since Trump launched a series of legal challenges in Nevada, has not issued any statements since the president's campaign contested the results of the state's vote Tuesday.

Her office said Wednesday that she was unavailable for an interview and declined to respond to emailed questions about Trump asking a judge to overturn or throw out the Nevada results, along with claims from his lawyers that the results “lacked integrity.”

Cegavske spokeswoman Jennifer Russell said the secretary of state would not comment because of the lawsuit.

Other elected officials, all Democrats, defended the election process.

State Attorney General Aaron Ford said evidence shows Nevada held fair, safe, secure elections and that there was no widespread voter fraud. Ford said in a statement that his office would prosecute “any isolated and substantiated incidents of voter fraud."

Ford said Trump’s team never filed an official complaint and supporting evidence with his office, despite being explicitly invited to do so.

The Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits in Nevada to try to stop the widespread mailing of ballots and then the counting of mailed ballots, but none have succeeded.

The battle escalated Tuesday, when campaign lawyers filed a lawsuit and declared to reporters that Trump had won Nevada despite results showing he lost to Joe Biden by 33,596 votes.

“We’re quite confident in the fact that when the law and the facts are clearly adjudicated in this matter, that it will be very clear that once all the voting happened, once everything occurred, the results were unreliable because of the irregularities and the fraud,” campaign attorney Jesse Binnall said.

Trump’s campaign and his allies, looking to establish widespread fraud in multiple states, have pointed to issues typical of most every election: problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots miscast or lost.

With Biden leading Trump by wide margins in key battleground states, it remains a question mark whether those issues would have any impact on the outcome of the election.

U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Nevada Democrat, pushed back on the Trump campaign's claims.

“The results from the election are clear: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris came out ahead in Nevada, and President Trump will not be able to overturn the will of Nevada’s voters with unfounded lawsuits like this one,” Rosen said in a statement. “Our democratic elections are safe, fair, and secure, with no credible evidence of voter fraud."

The lawsuit claims that votes were cast on behalf of dead people, that election observers weren’t allowed to witness “key points” of processing and that people on American Indian reservations were illegally given incentives to vote.

Binnall said he can prove votes were tainted by the use of an optical scanning machine to process ballots in the Las Vegas area and by voting machine malfunctions and that illegal ballots were cast by people living out of state or not registered voters. He didn't immediately offer any evidence.

Trump's campaign previously claimed it had identified more than 3,000 people who “improperly” cast ballots in Nevada because they live elsewhere, but voting rights activists say hundreds of people on the list appear to be linked to the U.S. military.

A hearing on the new lawsuit was not immediately set by a judge in Carson City. Time is short, with the state Supreme Court scheduled Tuesday to certify the Nevada election.

Meanwhile, all 17 Nevada counties certified canvasses of their votes by a Wednesday deadline set by state law, according to Cegavske's office.

Before the lawsuit was announced, Cegavske said in a news release that her role certifying election returns is ministerial and that after the state high court certifies the count as complete, Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak will certify the election.

In a separate legal challenge, a hearing was scheduled for Friday in Las Vegas in a lawsuit from conservative former state lawmaker Sharron Angle and her Election Integrity Project seeking to block statewide certification of the election.

 

Rep. Rick Allen to Newsmax TV: Georgia's Recount 'Outlandish'

Rep. Rick Allen

Georgia has a constitutional issue to resolve with its discrepencies in voter identification in person versus absentee ballots, according to Rep. Rick Allen, R-Ga., on Newsmax TV.

"If you go and vote in person, there's a different standard, and you have equal protection under the law, so why wouldn't the standard for absentee ballots be the same as if you showed up and went to vote in person?" Allen, who won reelection in Georgia's 12th district with over 58% of the vote, told Wednesday's "Stinchfield."

"That's outlandish."

The ballot recount is failing to address the difference in Georgia's rules with in-person voter I.D. and sketchy signature verfication on absentee ballots, Allen told host Grant Stinchfield.

"I don't believe it's legitimate, no," Allen said, noting his Georgia delegation has sent a letter to the Justice Department to investigate Georgia's vote counting, ballot recounting and signature verification process on absentee ballots.

Allen added Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is suspect, too.

"He's been defending his position, and he has been defending the equipment, which is questionable; he's defending how the votes were counted," Allen said.

 

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Sidney Powell to Newsmax TV: Dominion Designed to 'Rig Elections'

In building its case for multi-state audits of those relying on Dominion Voting Systems, the Trump legal team has a former Venezuelan official saying it was designed to rig elections, according to former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell on Newsmax TV.

"The math just doesn't add up for anything and we know Dominion has a long history of rigging elections, because that's what it was created to do to begin with," Powell told Tuesday's "Greg Kelly Reports," noting even the "founder of the company admits he can change a million votes, no problem at all."

Powell told host Greg Kelly the team has an affidavit of a former high-ranking Venezuelan military officer who now lives in America, saying he saw the rigging of Venezuelan elections for Hugo Chavez.

"So don't tell me there's no evidence of fraud," she continued. "We've got increasingly mounting evidence of significant fraud across multiple states that casts into question the validity of elections in every swing state."

It is not just limited to Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia either, she said. adding "it went beyond that, too."

Powell said the ease of changing vote tallies and manipulating results was a "feature" of the devices, according to the military officer's affidavit.

"It was created so Hugo Chavez would never lose another election, and he did not after that software was created," Powell said. "He won every single election and then they exported it to Argentina and other countries in South America, and then they brought it here."

Powell also argued, as a foreign company, the use of that election system already violated President Donald Trump's order against foreign interference in our election.

"Our votes were eventually counted in Barcelona, Spain, or Frankfurt, Germany, on foreign servers," Powell claimed. "It's absolutely stunning."

And that includes the Democrat and mainstream media's efforts to ignore the corruption.

"What's really stunning is the efforts against getting the stuff out on this," she concluded. "But you have to realize every tech company, every media company, every social media company, scads of globalist corporations have been doing business in countries with these dictators that have been installed through this rigged election system for decades."

Guilfoyle to Newsmax TV: Trump Team Will 'Honor the Process'

President Donald Trump and his reelection campaign team are fighting to honor the voting process and ensure every American's legal vote is counted, Kimberly Guilfoyle, National Chair of the Trump Victory Finance Committee and senior adviser to the Trump reelection campaign tells Newsmax TV.

"It's a good day for the American people, for the forgotten men and women who are left behind in war, because President Trump stood for them, and he has stood for every legal valid vote to be counted in this country," Guilfoyle said Tuesday on "Greg Kelly Reports."

"America's always been the shining example, and we're not going to fail in that regard," she said. "We're gonna make sure that everyone understands that we have transparency and honesty and integrity quite frankly in our political process and in our elections for the most important office in this country."

 The campaign is contesting the results in multiple states, alleging irregularities they believe should prevent certification of results. Such a move could, should enough states actually follow through, throw the vote to the House of Representatives, which would favor a Trump victory.

Wayne County, Michigan, on Tuesday deadlocked on certifying it's votes after they were found to be "out of balance."

"Today we have taken our case, which is our constitutional right and the president's right to be able to say let the votes be counted that are legal and valid and let's toss out the votes that are illegal and invalid, Guilfoyle said. "That should be on everybody's playlist."

© 2020 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

 

Second Georgia County Finds Previously Uncounted Votes

 

A second Georgia county has uncovered a trove of votes not previously included in election results, but the additional votes won't change the overall outcome of the presidential race, the secretary of state's office said Tuesday.

A memory card that hadn't been uploaded in Fayette County, just south of Atlanta, was discovered during a hand tally of the votes in the presidential race that stems from part of a legally mandated audit to ensure the new election machines counted the votes accurately, said Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the secretary of state’s office.

The memory card's 2,755 votes are not enough to flip the lead in the state from Democrat Joe Biden to Republican President Donald Trump. The breakdown of the uncounted ballots was 1,577 for Trump, 1,128 for Biden, 43 for Libertarian Jo Jorgensen and seven write-ins, Sterling said.

Election officials on Monday said Floyd County, in north Georgia, had found more than 2,500 ballots that hadn't been previously scanned.

Both counties will have to recertify their results, and the margin between Trump and Biden will be about 13,000 votes when those previously uncounted votes are accounted for, Sterling said.

County elections workers have been working on the hand tally since Friday. State law leaves it up to the secretary of state to choose which race to audit. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger selected the presidential race and said the tight margin meant the audit would require a full hand recount.

The counties have until 11:59 p.m. Wednesday to complete the hand count. The secretary of state’s office originally said the results of the hand tally would be certified. But Sterling said Tuesday that the state would instead certify the results certified by the counties.

Once the results are certified, if the margin between the candidates remains within 0.5%, the losing campaign can request a recount. That would be done using scanners that read and tally the votes and would be paid for by the state, Raffensperger has said.

State election officials have consistently defended the integrity of Georgia's vote count and have said the audit is expected to affirm the results. They have conceded that there may be wrongdoing — people who vote twice or people who vote despite not being eligible — and have pledged to investigate any cases.

“We have not seen widespread voter fraud," Sterling said. "We do know there's going to be illegal voting, but it's going to be down in the low hundreds, not in the 12,929 range.”

The Associated Press has not declared a winner in Georgia, where Biden leads Trump by 0.3 percentage points. There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law provides that option to a trailing candidate if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points. It is AP’s practice not to call a race that is – or is likely to become – subject to a recount.

Also on Tuesday, Raffensperger announced that a random audit of a sample of Georgia’s new voting machines found no evidence of hacking or tampering.

Raffensperger last week asked Pro V&V, an Alabama-based testing laboratory, to do the audit, his office said in a news release. The company “found no evidence of the machines being tampered.”

“We are glad but not surprised that the audit of the state’s voting machines was an unqualified success,” Raffensperger said in the release.

The new election system the state bought last year from Dominion Voting Systems for more than $100 million includes touchscreen voting machines that print paper ballots that are read and tabulated by scanners.

The audit was done on a random sample of voting machines from Cobb, Douglas, Floyd, Morgan, Paulding and Spalding counties. The equipment tested included the touchscreen voting machines, precinct scanners and absentee ballot scanners.

The company took the software and firmware out of the equipment to check that the only software and firmware present was that certified for use by the secretary of state's office, the release says.

Pro V&V is a voting system test laboratory that is certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which sets voluntary guidelines for election management and certification.

© Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Wayne County Reverses, Certifies Detroit Votes

Hours after deadlocking 2-2, the the Wayne County Board of Canvassers voted unanimously to certify the votes in the state's largest county, which happens to include Detroit.

Republicans on the panel changed their votes following an outcry from state officials and Detroit voters charging partisanship, The New York Times reported.

Michigan Secretary of State Joycelyn Benson told MSNBC that there were bookkeeping errors that are "par for the course" and "quite common" in all elections, including in 2016, when all counties certified their elections.

In the original vote, a number of absentee ballot poll books were found to be "out of balance" in Detroit, so the board failed to vote to certify the election results, The Detroit News reported.

"Based on what I saw and went through in poll books in this canvass, I believe that we do not have complete and accurate information in those poll books," Chairwoman Monica Palmer, a Republican, told the News.

The vote was 2-2, deadlocked on party lines as at least four state and federal lawsuits seek to stop the certification of the Nov. 3 election results, according to the report.

"Reckless and irresponsible," Democrat Board Vice Chairman Jonathan Kinloch told the News.

"Out of balance" poll books were also found in the August primary and the 2016 general election results, but the Wayne County board still had voted to certify the election, per the News.

With a failure to certify, the county sends all documentation to the secretary of state's officer and Board of State Canvassers. 

The examination of vote tallies in Wayne County began Nov. 5. The Michigan Board of State Canvassers are going to meet Wednesday on the process and is expected to consider certifying the election Monday, per the News.

Detroit's poll books were found to be 72% out of balance in the August primary. Also, in 2016, vote totals for 59% of the Detroit precincts could not be reconciled, mostly because of finding too many had voted, per the News.

The vote in Michigan is important as President Donald Trump challenges the election outcome, charging voter fraud on a massive scale. He is hoping to have votes discounted in several battleground states that, on their face, appeared to have favored Democrat Joe Biden, who several news organizations declared president-elect. Michigan is one such state in which Biden was the apparent winner, with 16 Electoral College votes.

© 2020 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

 

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