One must wonder how seriously the Georgia secretary of state takes its fraud investigation if its staffer frames those who violate state law as merely ‘trying to exercise their right to vote.’
As the Georgia secretary of state’s office continues to investigate evidence that indicates more than 10,300 Georgians may have illegally voted in the November 2020 election, on Friday the office’s chief operating officer reportedly defended voters for violating state election law.
“The reality is these are normal, everyday Georgians who are just trying to exercise their right to vote in a very weird year,” Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling reportedly told Atlanta’s WSB-TV, when confronted with an admission from one voter that he had moved more than 30 days before the general election but cast his vote in the county in which he no longer lived.
As The Federalist reported last week, before Georgia certified its election results, President Trump challenged the state’s tally that showed Joe Biden winning the general election by 11,779 votes out of nearly five million votes cast. One of the more than 30 arguments Trump presented in his lawsuit challenging the election charged that nearly 40,000 Georgians illegally voted in a county in which they did not reside.
Trump’s challenge relied on Section 21-2-218 of the state’s election code, which unequivocally provides that residents must vote in the county in which they reside unless they had changed their residence within 30 days of the election. So clear is Georgia’s in-county voting mandate that on Friday “FactCheck” confirmed the accuracy of this reading of the law by quoting the Georgia secretary of state’s voter registration webpage:
