The Georgia Attorney General's Office said on Tuesday that state election investigators were unable to confirm Donald Trump's claims about thousands of dead voters taking part in the 2020 election.
However, state election officials found several votes from dead people, revealing that four ballots appeared to have indeed been cast on behalf of those who had passed away. According to the findings, these ballots were submitted by the relatives of the deceased.
One such case involved a 74-year-old widow who submitted a ballot on behalf of her husband who died in September 2020 in an apparent urge to "carry out his wishes".
"He was going to vote Republican, and she said, 'well, I’m going to cancel your ballot because I'm voting Democrat'. It was kind of a joke between them", Barry Bishop, an attorney for Sharon Nelson of Canton, told the State Election Board, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "She received the absentee ballot and carried out his wishes. [...] She now realises that was not the thing to do".
The State Election Board said there have to be consequences for such mistakes because "the law is what it is".
Another ballot was cast in the name of deceased Augusta voter Leon Rowe, with investigators finding that the signature on his absentee ballot envelope matched the handwriting of his mother who died in October 2020, per the outlet.
Earlier in the year, Georgia election investigators discovered another case of a widow casting a ballot on behalf of her husband Donald Cook, who died several months before the election. The woman claimed that Cook signed the ballot before he passed away, but the investigators argued that was impossible because the ballot had not been issued at that time.
The fourth case involved the widow of Herman Robert Jackson of Covington, Glynda Jackson, who told investigators she returned her dead husband's ballot because she knew how he would want to vote.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger slammed the claims by former President Trump as "untrue", denying there were large numbers of dead voters in the 2020 election.
"What I tell people is what really happened in Georgia, because we proved that none of that was what happened", he said.
Raffensperger is one of the most vocal opponents of Trump's "election fraud" claims, with the former president lambasting him as an "obstructionist" who refused to admit his team's "BIG" win in Georgia.
After finding several votes from dead people, Georgia officials levy fines of between $100 and $5,000 per violation. Yet, despite the miniscule number of votes from dead people, it is another irregularity discovered in the 2020 election in Georgia, as earlier there were reports about reduntantly reported ballots and ballots shredded before being processed.
Trump, who, according to the state's official results, lost Georgia to Joe Biden by about 12,000 votes, has vehemently refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The former president claimed that Biden's victory is a result of massive "voter fraud" engineered by the Democratic Party.