Early Voting Begins in Georgia Senate Races—Concerns About Voter Fraud Continue

Early voting in the Georgia run-off races for two spots in the U.S. Senate began this week, as concerns over “double voting” and potentially illegal new voter registrations continue to plague officials in the Peach State.

In the January 5 special election for the U.S. Senate, incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a Republican, faces Democrat challenger Raphael Warnock, a Baptist minister, while the other incumbent, Republican Sen. David Perdue, squares off against Democrat Jon Ossoff, a media executive.

Loeffler and Perdue have raised concerns over the possibility that people may have illegally registered to vote in Georgia after being encouraged on social media to move temporarily to the state in order to vote in the January 5 special election. That would be a felony under state law.

“It’s been one week since the voter registration deadline passed and the secretary of state has failed to compile and release a final list of newly registered voters,” Loeffler and Perdue said in a joint statement on Monday. “This is totally unacceptable – the deadline for new voter registration was Dec. 7, 2020. In-person early voting starts today, and the public remains without a full accounting of who is registered and who may attempt to cast a ballot in the runoff.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has already launched investigations into groups that sent ballot applications out of state.

But out-of-state voters are not the only election issue in these races.

RealClearInvestigations.com (RCI) has taken an in-depth look at the issue of intentional double-voting in Georgia this year. That’s also illegal, and it appears to be a problem that no one is investigating.

“An investigation by Raffensperger’s office revealed that at least 1,042 people knowingly voted twice in the June primary, with 60% of them using Democratic Party ballots,” RCI reports. “Another 294 voted twice in the August runoff election. Two-thirds of the combined 1,366 double votes were votes by absentee.

“Hundreds more broke the law again on Nov. 3. Results are preliminary, but investigators so far have found at least 400 cases of double voting in the presidential race. These fraudulent votes were not canceled.”

And so far, RCI notes, no one at the Georgia Secretary of State’s office has reported these cases of illegal voting to the state attorney general’s office. But Raffensperger promised that his office “has put safeguards in place to ensure everyone’s vote is counted just once in the January 5 election.” He did not specify what those safeguards might be.

Also of concern, according to Republicans in Fulton County – one of the largest Democrat strongholds in the state and already the subject of scrutiny for voting irregularities – is that Democrat election officials there have hired the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to “train” poll workers who are supposed to screen out people who attempt to vote twice. The ACLU, a liberal organization, has also advertised that it is willing to defend anyone accused of voting twice in the election, so its impartiality as a trainer of poll workers is in question.

The Georgia run-off races could potentially flip control of the U.S. Senate to the Democrats if both Warnock and Ossof win. That would leave the Senate with a 50-50 split party-wise, and in case of a tie, the Vice President, who serves as the president of the Senate, would cast the tie-breaking vote. It’s looking more and more likely that the new vice president will be Democrat Kamala Harris.

If you live in Georgia and need more information concerning the January 5 election, such as how to request an absentee ballot or where to cast your vote, please go here.

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