Continuing the bogus claim — live on CNN — that there were “election irregularities” CPAC head Matt Schlapp argues with Chris Cuomo over what is truth and what is not.
At about 2:43 Mark Schlapp opens his salvo by claiming that in Nevada and Georgia they didn’t check the signatures on the mail-in ballots. “These are facts, and they are indisputable,” he claims. “You can't say I’m wrong. [...] I have all the proof you need.”
Sadly, Cuomo doesn’t have the data to refute this claim at the time instead, he argues — correctly -- that this is a lack of proof for fraud. If there were lots of signatures found that were incorrect which were then ignored and those ballots were then counted he would have a case. He doesn't.
That is not what happened, not according to Forbes.
Over the last week, Trump has inaccurately claimed Georgia weakened its standards this year for verifying voters’ signatures on mail-in ballots, a process used to catch illegal votes, alleging the state let an untold number of fraudulent votes slip through the cracks.
This is false, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office says: In both 2018 and 2020, about 0.15% of absentee ballots were rejected due to missing signatures or signatures that couldn’t be verified in the state’s records, meaning the rejection rate has not changed.
[...]
2,011. That’s the number of mail-in ballots that were rejected due to signature issues this year, according to the Secretary of State’s office.
Trump claims Georgia is legally prohibited from checking mail-in ballot signatures. In reality, the opposite is true. The state actually requires local officials to verify all signatures, and although the state signed a legal settlement this year to make it easier for voters to cure rejected ballots, this “consent decree” did not halt verification. Trump’s campaign now wants the state to re-verify every ballot a second time, but this is impossible because — per state law — all ballots have already been separated from the envelopes containing voters’ signatures.
In Georgia, President-elect Joe Biden leads Trump by more than 12,000 votes. The state is conducting a hand recount and audit set to wrap up on Thursday, but state officials expect Biden to remain the winner after this process is over. Still, Trump and his allies have used the recount as an opportunity to rehash wild — and false — allegations about vote-rigging, part of a nationwide legal effort to challenge Trump’s loss to Biden. So far, Trump’s campaign has not presented credible proof of widespread voter fraud in Georgia or any other state, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) and his staff have consistently told voters they do not see any evidence of systemic fraud.
Georgia found 2,011 ballots with missing or invalid signatures. If they hadn't even checked the signatures as Schlapp claims — they wouldn't even have that number of rejections.
And his claims about Nevada were about equally as untrue.
The info on Nevada comes from Politifact.
"In Nevada, they want to have a thing where you don’t have to have any verification of the signature. It is so terrible," Trump said a New Hampshire rally Oct. 25.
[...]
In August, a day after Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak signed legislation known as AB 4 into law, the Trump campaign sued Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske seeking to block it. The pandemic era elections bill provided, among other things, that active voters would automatically receive ballots in the mail. At Cegavske’s urging, a federal judge dismissed the Trump campaign’s lawsuit.
But Trump continued to attack Nevada’s voting by mail system with false attacks about signature requirements.
The website of Cegavske’s office says that "signature verification is performed on every ballot received. If the signature is missing or if the signature on the ballot return envelope does not match the signature on file for the voter, the ballot will not be counted until the voter verifies their signature." The state has procedures in place for voters to "cure" or fix their ballot if the signature was missing or didn’t match.
This is common for checking signatures across states.
On Oct. 23, the Trump campaign filed another lawsuit, this time against Cegavske and the registrar of voters for Clark County related to ballot signatures. That’s what the president was talking about in New Hampshire, his campaign said, when he again alleged the state doesn’t "want" any signature verification on ballots.
[...]
Clark County is using the Agilis ballot sorting machine as a first step to match voters’ signatures on their ballot envelopes. If the machine finds that the signature doesn’t match the voter’s signature on record, then it is reviewed by elections officials in person. Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, is the only Nevada county to use the machine to verify signatures. The Trump campaign lawsuit alleges that "it is more likely that fraudulent and improper ballots are being tabulated by Clark County" but includes no proof that any fraudulent ballots were accepted.
So the answer is "Yes," Nevada also checked the signatures on their mail-in ballots.
But then again there are those people who don’t trust Politifact, so perhaps we should turn to another source such as the Murdock-owned Wall Street Journal.
The Nevada Supreme Court rejected a bid by state Republicans and the Trump campaign to immediately halt the use of a machine to match mail-in ballot voter signatures in Clark County, the state's largest population center.
The Tuesday night ruling came after the GOP challenged Clark County's methods for counting the flood of mail-in ballots received in this election cycle.
The lawsuit alleged observers were being blocked from some areas where ballots were being handled and that a machine was improperly being used to verify about 30% of the signatures on ballots.
A state-court judge ruled against the lawsuit Monday, saying the counting procedures were legal and that the plaintiffs didn't show how they were injured.
Republicans appealed, and the Nevada Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to hear the case on an expedited basis but denied immediately intervening to change how ballots are being counted. "It is unclear from the motion how appellants are being prevented from observing the process or that the use of Agilis machine is prohibited," the court wrote.
If they have a specific machine designed to check for matching signatures — one would think that they did try to match the signatures.
It took me literally 2 seconds to look this up on google, in fact. I found it while Schlapp was still speaking on CNN before the segment was over. I tweeted it.
Note how argumentative and haughty Schlapp gets while asserting his lies, he attacks Cuomo’s integrity, he talks over him while Cuomo tries to ask a question, he whines that he "doesn't get to talk" when he's really just repeating himself, he argues that “You've never been canceled” — uh, how would he know? [Also people have recently come after Chris for giving his brother advice on his sexual harassment cases, so yeah — he’s been on this short end of the stick] -- and Schlapp repeatedly says “This is the Truth.”
It’s not the truth, it's yet another God Damned Lie and the GOP is drowning in lies. They’re so far down they can’t tell which way is up anymore.