President Donald Trump on Wednesday called for a full forensic audit of mail-in ballots that were cast in key states during the Nov. 3 presidential election.
In a lengthy pre-recorded speech, the president said that “tens of thousands [of ballots] have fraudulent signatures” in key states.
It means “a full forensic audit is required to ensure that only legal ballots from lawfully registered voters that were properly cast are included,” Trump added.
“The reason for this is clear,” he said, “they were not verifying signatures because they know the ballots have not been filled out by the voters in whose names they were cast.”
The only way to remedy the situation, Trump said, is to carry out a full review of ballot envelopes, which contain the signatures. He did not say what states should carry out the auditing process.
Over the past three weeks, Trump’s legal team has sent several letters to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, demanding a full signature audit. Raffensberger, however, has responded by saying that it’s not possible to match the ballots and the envelope with the signature, citing privacy laws. His team and other Republicans have pushed for signature-audit procedures in Pennsylvania.
“We need a systematic analysis of the mail-in ballots to review the envelopes,” Trump said. “It’s about the signature. And if they’re on the envelopes, we can only review the envelopes. And that will tell us everything. This is the absolute minimum we should expect.”
On Election Day and beyond, poll watchers were not allowed to watch the tabulation process in several heavily Democratic areas, Trump said, arguing that it further compounded the allegedly fraudulent vote-tabulation process. In testimonies over the past week in Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, GOP poll observers said they witnessed irregularities, saw votes that were cast for Trump going to Biden, and were harassed by election workers.
Secretaries of state in these places have said there has not been sufficient evidence of voter fraud or irregularities that would overturn the election result. Going further, a spokesman for Michigan’s Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, told Epoch Times that Republican poll watchers who testified in front of the Michigan Legislature this week displayed a “lack of knowledge” about vote-counting and promoted “conspiracy theories,” without elaborating.
Trump, meanwhile, argued that his efforts to find voter fraud and irregularities are a bid to safeguard the U.S. election system.
“This is not just about my campaign, although it has a lot to do with who’s going to be your next president,” Trump remarked.
“If we don’t root out the fraud, the tremendous and horrible fraud that’s taken place in our 2020 election. We don’t have a country anymore,” he said.
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