The results of the signature audit in Georgia are in — and it looks like there’s nothing there, despite the president’s insistence that this is where the massive fraud would be found (after hand and machine recounts had previously confirmed the results).
The audit, as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, focused on a statistically significant sample in Cobb County:
The audit reviewed 15,118 absentee ballot envelopes, pulled from 30 randomly selected boxes, out of over 150,431 total absentee ballots returned in Cobb County, a large enough sample to give a 99% confidence level in the results, according to the report.
And evidently it was painstaking, involving both investigators from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the secretary of state’s office:
Investigators broke into 18 two-member inspection teams to evaluate voter signatures, comparing them with voter registration forms, absentee ballot applications, passports and other government documents. [They] looked for word and letter spacing, slant, size, flourishes and alignment.
When at least one member of a team believed a signature didn’t match, the ballot envelope was submitted for further review. Two three-member investigation teams evaluated questionable signatures.
In all, investigation teams scrutinized 396 questionable signatures on ballot envelopes. All but 10 of them were accepted as valid, and then investigators contacted voters to verify those ballots.
What was concluded about those ten ballots?
There were 10 absentee ballots that had been accepted but voter signatures didn’t match or signatures were missing, according to the report. But agents from the GBI and investigators with the secretary of state’s office contacted those voters and confirmed they had submitted those ballots.
In one case, a voter’s wife signed her husband’s ballot envelope. Another voter signed the front of the envelope instead of the back. Eight voters had mismatched signatures, but the voters told investigators the signatures were legitimate.