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Georgia reports 1k cases of 'potential double voting' in June primary days after Trump asks people to vote twice

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said his office investigators will hand over the findings of the probe to state's attorney general and local district attorneys for possible prosecution

Months after holding a controversial pandemic-time primary that was delayed twice, Georgia has hit the headlines for the wrong reasons once again. The Peach State’s top election official said on Tuesday, September 8, that his office has found about 1,000 cases of “potential double voting” in the June primary and is determined to prosecute the felony, according to an Associated Press report.

The report stated that voters not only submitted absentee ballots but also voted in person, a problem that has happened across 100 counties of the state, but election officials didn’t track them in time to prevent the second voting from being tallies, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said. “No one gets to vote twice. Everyone gets one vote,” he was quoted as saying. 

Trump recently asked supporters to vote twice

The revelation came just days after President Donald Trump urged people to also cast ballots physically on Election Day after voting by mail early if their ballots were not counted. Last Thursday, September 3, he said in a series of tweets that voters who submitted absentee ballots should also verify at the polling site whether or not their mail-in vote has been counted.

On Wednesday, September 2, he suggested the same to his supporters on the tarmac of the airport in Wilmington, fuelling a controversy. Trump has always been critical of the idea of mail-in voting which is being promoted in the times of the coronavirus pandemic that has affected more than six million people in the US and claimed more than 189,000 lives.
 
State election officials in North Carolina were outraged by Trump's call for double voting. "The State Board office strongly discourages people from showing up at the polls on Election Day to check whether their absentee ballot was counted. That is not necessary and it would lead to longer lines and the possibility of spreading Covid-19," Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said in a statement. NC doesn’t allow double voting under its law. 

Trump's controversial remarks on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook were flagged by them. While Twitter flagged the president's tweets saying they "violated the Twitter Rules about civic and election integrity", Facebook attached a statement to his post on the platform that said: "Voting by mail has a long history of trustworthiness in the US and the same is predicted this year."

Election officials have warned that such a practice would further hamper the election which is already being predicted to be a complicated affair, thanks to the pandemic.

Raffensperger said his office investigators will hand over the findings of the probe to the state's attorney general and local district attorneys for possible prosecution, the AP report added. He said double voting is a felony which is punishable by one to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. "A double voter knows exactly what they are doing, diluting the votes of each and every voter that follows the law," he said. 

'Voters intentionally cast two ballots'

Raffensperger also stressed repeatedly during a news conference that the 1,000 voters under scanner intentionally cast two ballots — showed up to vote even after submitting an absentee ballot. He did not give details on the matter, however, besides mentioning about one voter in Long County who he claimed bragged about voting twice.

The Georgia secretary of state encouraged the voters to use absentee ballots in the June election to evade a potential exposure to the coronavirus. The officials received 1.6 million absentee ballot requests, putting some county election offices under pressure and causing delays in sending out some ballots. 

According to Raffensperger, about 150,000 of the state's voters who requested absentee ballots for the primary also showed up to vote in person and 1,000 of them succeeded in doing so. He said his office is now working with county officials to see that no double voting happens in the November election.

Instances of double voting

Instances of double voting in US elections are not unseen though they are rare. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, statistics show that double voting is not a common practice. To cite examples of such occurrences, a woman in Iowa pleaded guilty to election misconduct in 2017 after attempting to vote twice in the 2016 election.

In her defense, she told police later that she believed in Trump’s assertion at the time that the poll was rigged and feared her first ballot would be tampered to suit Hillary Clinton. Last week, a man was arrested in New Hampshire after being accused of voting twice in the same election using two different names — his own and a woman's, local reports said. 

A professor from Loyola Law School found in a study that 31 cases of alleged voter impersonation (out of 1 billion votes cast) were reported in elections that have been held in the US between 2000 and 2014.