Thousands in Georgia Registered at Postal, Commercial Addresses, Portraying Them as Residences, Researcher Says
BY PETR SVAB
November 24, 2020 Updated: November 24, 2020
Thousands of people registered and voted in Georgia using addresses of postal facilities or businesses, but making it look like they were residential addresses, according to a former Trump campaign official whose team analyzed the states’ voter data.
The addresses listed on the voter rolls included information that didn’t make sense for the actual locations, but on paper made the addresses look like residential ones, according to information published by Matt Braynard, former data and strategy director for President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
“Georgia: We have identified over a thousand early/abs votes cast by individuals whose registered addresses are in fact at post offices, UPS, and FedEx locations, wilfully disguising the box numbers as ‘Apt,’ ‘Unit,’ etc.,” he said in a Nov. 22 tweet.
He published a sample of 15 such address entries in a Nov. 24 tweet.
“With just a partial review of the state,” he said, the team also discovered “a thousand votes cast by those registered in non-residential, purely commercial addresses also disguised with ‘Apt,’ etc.”
He added that these were “the residential addresses, not mailing addresses” that the voters have listed.
Nearly all those “who disguised a postal facility as their residential address” used an absentee ballot to vote, he said.
Georgia election law says that “the residence of any person shall be held to be in that place in which such person’s habitation is fixed, without any present intention of removing therefrom.”
Anyone who “knowingly gives false information when registering as an elector” can be charged with a felony and put in prison for up to 10 years or fined up to $100,000, the law says.
The office of Georgia Secretary of State didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump trails his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, by less than 13,000 votes in Georgia.
Other Findings
Braynard’s team also found some 1,400 voters in Pennsylvania listing postal facility addresses as residential, he said.
Braynard previously reported that large percentages of registered Republicans in several battleground states said they returned their absentee ballots, even though the states’ data indicated they didn’t.
Of the 1,137 Pennsylvania GOP voters reached on the phone who did request a ballot, nearly 42 percent said they mailed the ballots back, but the state data shows the ballots weren’t received or counted, he said.
The office of the Pennsylvania Secretary of State didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In Arizona, 50 percent of Republican voters reached over the phone had the same story, as well as 44 percent in Georgia, nearly 33 percent in Michigan, and 20 percent in Wisconsin.
In Pennsylvania, over 160,000 uncounted mail-in ballots were requested by or in the name of registered Republicans.
If the voters the team reached in the state reflect the broader population of voters, it would mean nearly 40,000 of them returned their ballots, or at least believe they did, according to the sworn affidavit of Steven Miller, mathematics professor at Williams College (pdf).
Braynard said he’ll soon publish a white paper on his findings.