Governor Kemp Should Demand an Audit of Every Single Georgia Ballot

Election integrity is the most important issue facing America. In 2020, our nation’s leaders failed the people they were supposed to represent. Tens of millions of Americans felt that their votes were invalidated and didn’t matter. Cases of potential voter fraud materialized in almost every swing state. Unfortunately, Georgia was ground zero as our state’s elected leaders failed to stand their ground and allowed Democrats to win three of the most important races of our lifetime.

In fact, that is exactly why I launched my campaign to represent Georgia as the next governor of the state. President Donald Trump was a great leader and should have never lost the state with his unmatched record. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler did their best to advance President Trump’s America First agenda and should have never lost their seats. But they did. We have no one else to blame other than the incompetence of our state’s elected officials. We should never have to go through this again. If I am elected, I will continue to work with President Trump to help put America First and Georgia First.

Democrats used the COVID-19 pandemic as a tool to implement voting practices that were not secure. Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger were complicit in allowing this to happen. Mr. Raffensperger’s own website bragged, “Almost 1.5 million Georgians have submitted a request for absentee ballots for the upcoming election with over 1 million absentee ballots already sent out to Georgia voters.” That is absurd.

Voters who returned their absentee ballots were not required to provide any form of ID verification other than a signature. And Mr. Kemp was apparently fine with allowing it to happen. He could have resisted but simply chose to remain silent.

To make matters worse, Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp entered a disastrous and disgraceful consent decree with Democrats just eight months before the 2020 election. This made it practically impossible for election workers to verify signatures on absentee mail-in ballots if they suspected problems. Coincidentally, that was the same time frame the Democrats and their liberal allies in the mainstream media insisted on mail-in voting.

And to demonstrate the severity of the consent decree, we can take a look at how Ballotpedia compared the absentee/mail-in ballots for the past few elections. Ballotpedia listed the absentee/mail-in rejection rates for Georgia as 6.4 percent in 2016, 3.1 percent in 2018, and 0.4 percent in 2020. These percentages reflected the total rejection rate, which included issues like signature matching and missed deadlines.

Mr. Kemp could have backed legislation before the presidential election to better secure the process and to avoid this controversy. He could have even backed new legislation to secure our elections before the January 5 runoffs of the Senate seats but refused to even consider the idea. And through it all, he refused to call a simple special session for the legislature to investigate all the documented fraud allegations.

In a joint statement with Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan and Georgia House Speaker David Ralston, Mr. Kemp said that new legislation to better secure Georgia’s elections before the January 5 runoffs “would only result in endless litigation.” Rather than fight to secure our elections, our governor chose to do nothing. He refused to listen to his constituents, to President Trump, and to sound reasoning.

If Mr. Kemp was so worried about “endless litigation,” why did he later try to play the hero and pass a new election integrity law in late March? He waited more than two months after Republicans lost both Senate seats before he decided to finally take action. He claimed to worry about “endless litigation” before the elections and then reversed course after Republicans lost both seats. It almost appears as if our governor wanted Republicans to lose and only passed legislation at a later date in an obvious attempt to save face.

This new election integrity law requires absentee ballots to include ID verification. That same ID verification could have prevented Democrats from sweeping three major races in our state’s recent elections. I would like to know why Mr. Kemp waited so long before acting. Was he afraid of possible impending action from now-President Joe Biden, Democrats, or Stacey Abrams? Or was he colluding with Democrats to sabotage his own party? His constituents deserve to know.

And it should be noted that the new election law honestly didn’t go far enough. It never touched the voting software used by Dominion Voting Systems. Several swing states, including Georgia, utilized Dominion’s hardware and software in its recent elections, but the liberal mainstream media and Democrats have ignored one key fact. The Clinton Foundation’s website still has a public page discussing the organization’s working relationship with Dominion Voting Systems in the past.

I can promise the people of Georgia that I will advocate for even greater election integrity laws, and I will make it my mission, as governor, to replace Dominion voting machines with a safe and secure alternative, as quickly as possible. It’s an embarrassment to our state and the nation to continue using voting machines with potential ties to former President Bill Clinton and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. We cannot trust voting machines operated by a company that worked with a blatant partisan organization, and we cannot trust voting software that is susceptible to potential fraud, data manipulation, and hacking, as many cybersecurity experts have espoused.

The people of Georgia deserve better than what they have right now. If Mr. Kemp genuinely wants to represent the voters who elected him to office, he would insist on greater election integrity legislation, and he would call for a statewide audit to ensure the integrity of every ballot. That is actually happening in Arizona as we speak. In Arizona, elected officials took matters into their own hands and began an audit of votes from the 2020 election in Maricopa County – a county that holds more than half of the state’s population.

The Arizona audit has provided damning results so far. In a letter to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Arizona Senate President Karen Fann said that the audit revealed there are “a significant number of instances in which there is a disparity between the actual number of ballots contained in [batches] and the total denoted on the pink report slip accompanying [batches].” She added that in most cases, “the total on the pink report slip is greater than the number of ballots in the batch.”

In a breaking update, the Arizona audit’s official Twitter account also stated, “Maricopa County deleted a directory full of election databases from the 2020 election cycle days before the election equipment was delivered to the audit.” The Arizona audit has appeared to provide evidence that election fraud did take place in the Grand Canyon State, and I believe we need a very similar audit in Georgia.

In early April, The Georgia Star News reporter Tiffany Morgan exposed damning news for our own state. “Five months after the November 3, 2020 presidential election, officials at the state and county level in Georgia have failed to produce chain of custody records for more than 355,000 absentee vote by mail ballots deposited in drop boxes located around the state for that election,” she said. To put that into perspective, President Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia was less than 12,000 votes.

The Georgia Star News also reported that as of April 7, “only 59 of Georgia’s 159 counties have provided ballot transfer form data.” As of now, we have no idea where 355,000 ballots came from, and most of Georgia’s counties have not shared the origins of their ballots. But rather than eliminate the drop boxes that threatened the security of our elections, Mr. Kemp codified them into law when he signed the most recent election integrity legislation. Drop boxes never existed in Georgia prior to the 2020 election.

Voters in Georgia have a right to know the truth. I am calling on Mr. Kemp to carry out a full forensic audit in the state. We should follow in Arizona’s footsteps and ensure the security of our elections. And if Mr. Kemp refuses to demand an audit, then I will when I am elected to replace him.

The people of Georgia deserve elected officials who represent them, and they deserve a governor who will listen to their concerns. Where has Mr. Kemp been in this time of crisis? He had an opportunity to provide the Peach State with real leadership but failed miserably when it was time to step up. If I am elected as Georgia’s next governor, I will not listen to the Washington elites who control Mr. Kemp like a puppet. I will listen to the constituents who elected me to office. And as I said before, I will work with President Trump to put America First and Georgia First!

Vernon Jones