The following is the complete text of a presentation given by Mark Davis, an expert in voter data analytics and residency issues, at our August Tea Party meeting. Mark has been working to clean up Georgia’s voter roles for two decades, and he has graciously agreed to allow us to post his remarks online.
Good evening everyone. I’d like to thank the United Tea Party of Georgia for the opportunity to talk with you about one of my favorite subjects, election integrity.
As some of you may know, I have been working with voter data since my father Guy Davis was our Republican nominee for Governor back in 1986, and I began building enhanced voter databases for Republican candidates following that campaign. Then in 1996, after Motor Voter rolled out, I no longer had to file Open Records Requests with the individual counties to obtain voter data. I could finally get the whole state straight from the Secretary of State’s office.
As convenient as that was, I became so concerned about the issues and errors I was seeing in that data that I finally went before the State Board of Elections to complain about them in 2002. Later that same year, I was asked by the State Republican Party to testify as an expert witness in a disputed election in House District 1 up in Northwest Georgia, where very serious redistricting errors had occurred. The judge in that case ordered the election redone, but redistricting errors remained, and the next thing I knew I was back in court again, and once again, the election was tossed out, and the voters returned to the polls to vote for a third time. The next three cases I wound up involved in were in 2018 through the 2020 primary election. Two were over another disputed election up in house district 28, which was also tossed twice, and the last was down in Long county, which I’ll get to in a few minutes.
What I have learned from the election cases I’ve been involved in has made me realize something important: People really will focus on election integrity issues when they can plainly see they directly affected the outcome of an election. So, I have continued to be an advocate for Election Integrity ever since I first became involved all those years ago, and when I see residency and redistricting issues affect elections, and I know I can prove them in court with hard cold data, I will continue to get involved when I can.
So with all that in mind, let’s talk about the 2020 general election. Following that election, I ran National Change of Address (NCOA) processing on a copy of the Georgia voter database obtained in November of 2020 which indicated there were approximately 580,000 total address changes filed by the voters in the database in the four years prior to November 25th, the day I ran the NCOA processing.
Of those 580,000 voters, about 267,000 showed changes of address to a new address outside the state of Georgia, and about 313,000 showed changes of address to a new address within the state of Georgia.
Out of the approximately 313,000 in state movers, my analysis shows about 110,000 of those voters old the post office they were moving from one Georgia county to another Georgia county more than 30 days before the election, but failed to update their registrations before the deadline to register for the general election. Under Georgia’s residency laws, which you can find in OCGA 21-2-216, 217, and 218, if those were permanent changes of address, that means those voters had lost their residency in their old counties and were also not registered in their new county. In other words, they became unqualified voters. In fact, the SOS’s website used to say they were not able to cast a ballot, but that page has since been taken down.
The vast majority of those voters did not attempt to cast unlawful ballots in their old counties, but the data indicates as many as 35,000 of those voters did just that. That means people who obeyed the law did not get to vote, and people who broke the law did. That is absolutely unconscionable!
Some folks have argued, “Well, why does this stuff even MATTER? It was a statewide election!”
Well, it absolutely DOES matter, for a number of VERY important reasons:
First, the reason state law requires us to vote in the county and municipalities we actually live in is to make sure we are voting for the candidates who actually represent us. That is a bedrock principle of our Constitutional Republic.
The data I saw indicates over 94% of the folks who apparently voted in their old counties would have been given the opportunity to vote in a house district they no longer lived in, over 86% in a senate district they no longer lived in, and almost 64% in a congressional district they no longer lived in. They could have, and probably did, cast votes for County Sheriffs, District Attorneys, county commissioners, or school board members who don’t serve them, or for tax increases they will never have to pay.
Those issues happened in every county in the state, and affected virtually every major election in the state. So, if those issues don’t meet the Georgia Supreme Court’s legal definition of “Systemic Irregularities”, which would have meant the Presidential election in Georgia could have been tossed out, then somebody please tell me, what does?
All that is exactly what the laws I’ve cited were intended to prevent, but wait, there’s more! Lying about where you live so you can cast a ballot in an election with a federal contest on it is also a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act, and a felony under our own state laws found in OCGA 21-2-561 and/or OCGA 21-2-571, and illegally cast votes are grounds for an election challenge as recognized in OCGA 21-2-522.
So following that discovery, I made contact with President Trump’s attorneys, read them in on what I had found, turned over the data to them, and it wound up being included in two companion lawsuits filed here in Georgia. I am told there were two to insure proper standing. As I’m sure you all know though, neither of them were ever heard in a courtroom.
That said though, I have not, and will not, let this go. Since that election, I have continued to monitor those voters, and so far over 12,000 of them have officially updated their own registrations to the exact same addresses they told the post office they were moving to well before the election. As far as I am concerned, that is pretty solid corroborating evidence!
Getting back to President Trump though, I’m sure you all recall that infamous phone call between President Trump and his attorneys. I want you to know they were all very well aware of these pre-existing issues long before that call took place just ahead of our US Senate run off in January of 2021. I even got a call from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who I personally briefed as well. So, this silly narrative the left likes to spew about President Trump asking Raffensperger to essentially manufacture unlawful votes is 100% pure unadulterated USDA certified BS!
Speaking of the Senate runoff – after seeing what happened in the general election, many of us were very concerned about seeing the same thing happen again in the US Senate runoff. True the Vote and their volunteers decided to take action and file challenges in an attempt to prevent illegal votes, and separately Derek Summerville and I independently created challenges that were more tailored towards voters who appeared to have already cast votes in the general election with residency issues, or appeared to be likely to do so in the runoff.
Here’s where this stuff gets really maddening. As you all know, we as citizens of the United States of America have a first amendment right to petition our government for redress of grievances. When it comes to challenging the kinds of voter registrations I’ve been talking with you about, our state has codified that right into state law which sets forth the procedure for us to challenge the qualifications of another voter in our county, via OCGA 21-2-229 & 230.
Yet when we did just that, the Democrats, acting through Stacey Abram’s Fair Fight, had Marc Elias at Perkins Coie respond with a clear message: “How DARE you exercise your rights under the 1st Amendment, and under Georgia law, and if you do, we will spend huge sums of money waging ‘Lawfare’ on you.” They literally served us with a federal lawsuit claiming we violated the Voting Rights Act, and had us served on Christmas Eve of 2020. Nice, huh?
They sought injunctive relief to stop the challenges, which they failed to get, but they have kept coming after us ever since. They want to force us to spend huge amounts of money defending ourselves; they want to take us all off the playing field, and they want to intimidate anyone else who might dare to file challenges in the future. They even filed lawsuits against county governments who dared to accept the challenges that were filed. In other words, they want to intimidate Georgia voters AND the county governments who represent them!
The great irony is in the same section of the Voting Rights Act they sued us under, “Prohibited Acts”, directly underneath “Voter intimidation”, it also says this:
“Whoever knowingly or willfully gives false information as to his name, address or period of residence in the voting district for the purpose of establishing his eligibility to register or vote, or conspires with another individual for the purpose of encouraging his false registration to vote or illegal voting, or pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both…”
Obviously, that kind of fraud is exactly what the challenges were intended to prevent! Yet here we are, over a year and a half later, and that case still drags on. It is Democrat “Lawfare”, plain and simple, and as the old saying goes, “The process IS the punishment.” They want to wear us down and try to take us off the playing field. All I can say is Thank GOD True the Vote is providing us all with top notch legal representation, because the legal bill for all that is not cheap!
So back to the voting right act, guess what else is right there in the “Prohibited Acts” section? Double voting! It says:
“Whoever votes more than once in an election”… “Shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both”
We have two different kinds of double voters that I am aware of here in Georgia. If you’ll indulge me, I’d take to take a moment and tell you the story about how the first kind was discovered.
Following the primary election of 2020, I wound up involved in another elections case I mentioned earlier. This time it was a probate judge’s race down in Long County, where the incumbent had lost by only 9 votes. So, I agreed to take a look at the data, and began running the usual queries to see if the election had been conducted fairly.
One afternoon while I was working on that, the phone rang, and it was Jake Evans, who I’m sure many of you know. We’ve done 3 elections cases together, and he was the plaintiff’s attorney on that one.
Anyway, Jake told me there was a guy down there telling people all over town that he had voted twice in the election, and then he asked me what I thought about that. I said he sounded like he might be a nut, because at the time I didn’t think the system would even allow double voting, but Jake wanted to call and talk with him anyway, so we did.
When he answered the phone, Jake introduced himself, and asked if he could ask him some questions, and the man said “Sure.” Now, I am paraphrasing here, but I recall the conversation went something like this:
Jake said something along the lines of “I don’t mean to insult you sir, but we have heard from people down there who have said you have claimed you voted twice in the election”, and to our surprise the man said, “Yea, I did.” So, after picking his jaw up off the floor, Jake replied, “Can you tell me more about that?”
The man said, “Well here’s what happened: My wife is disabled, but I’m not, so I went and voted early, but then come election day, she still hadn’t voted absentee, so I carried her down there to where we go to vote.”
“Well, after we got her checked in, the lady behind the counter turned to me and said, “Do you want to vote too?”
“I thought, ‘Well damn, I wonder if she’ll let me?’, so I said, ‘Yea I’ll vote’ and she checked me in, gave me one of those little yellow cards, and I went and voted again. After that I went and found the Sheriff, and I walked up to him and said “Sheriff, I got something I need to tell you”, and he said, “What’s that?”
“I said ‘I done voted twice’, and the Sherriff said, ‘Why’d you do that?’, and I said, “I just wanted to see if they’d let me!”
After we got off the phone, we were obviously both completely floored. Then Jake asked again what I thought about all that, and I said “Well I still think he might be a nut. We obviously need to be able to prove this happened in the data.”
Fortunately, when the county responded to Jake’s subpoena, we got their enumerated list of voters from election day, which can be nearly impossible to get from some counties, and when we compared it to the absentee and early voting data, sure enough, there he was along with 13 other voters. Half of those absentee ballots were marked “Cancelled”, and half weren’t.
Following that discovery, I was so shaken up over the whole situation I contacted the Secretary of State’s office, and they launched their own statewide inquiry into double voting, and found over 1,000 double votes in that primary, and later found a few hundred more that happened in the general election too.
Here’s my concern though – over 100 of our counties, especially the larger ones, filed with the Secretary of State’s office, and started scanning absentee ballots early, some a week or more ahead of election day. The issue there is once those ballots come out of the envelopes and are scanned, I am unaware of any way to connect those ballots back to the voters who cast them, and then “un-count” a particular voter’s ballot, even if someone wanted to. So those numbers from the Secretary of State’s office could literally be the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
I am now told the Secretary of State is claiming some of the double voters actually did not double vote. They now say there were false positives in the data caused by clerical errors. Well, if the system permitted false positives, isn’t it sort of obvious that it may have also permitted false negatives?
Unfortunately, I can’t give you an answer to that question. I have been blocked from accessing the data I need to do my own statewide analysis of that issue. I couldn’t obtain that data from the Secretary of State’s Office under the Open Records Request I filed. They told me I’d have to get it from each of our 159 counties separately, so I started by requesting it from our top 5 largest.
Of those counties, the only one to comply was Cobb County, who has their enumerated list of voters posted right on their website for the entire world to see. The others ignored the plain language of our open records law, which clearly REQUIRES them to provide it. If they store the data electronically, and can spit it out, then they must do so when requested. I even reached out to the Open Records compliance people in the Attorney General’s Office for help, but sadly I couldn’t even get a return phone call from them, or my old friend Chris Carr.
While we’re still on this topic, since then, another kind of double voter has come to my attention. This is the double or even triple registered double voter. I don’t want to say TOO much about this issue, because I don’t want to teach people how to exploit the system, but I will say a friend of mine up in Cherokee County told me he had found some folks up there that were registered more than once, and he was absolutely right.
So following that revelation, I ran a very conservative query statewide, and found over 12,000 of them who were registered two or even three times. Fortunately, only a few hundred actually voted more than once, but realistically there are probably WAY more than the ones I found, and anyone who knows how the system works could easily exploit those kinds of registrations. There is supposed to be an algorithm in the E-Net (Election Net) system to help identify and prevent those, but it obviously either didn’t work properly, or was often ignored when it did.
Now let me get back on track here and let you know where all this stands now. In May of last year, I handed data from the same analysis I gave the Trump attorneys over to the Secretary of State’s Office for a full investigation, but based on the way they keep trying to dismiss or explain away those issues, I frankly doubt we’ll be getting results from an honest, ethical, and transparent investigation anytime soon. It doesn’t fit their campaign narrative, and all we get is self-serving SPIN.
In fact I recently became aware of a “legal analysis” the Secretary of State’s attorney Ryan Germany did last year for a “Fact checker” which was obviously concocted in an effort to discredit me and my work. In that “analysis” he seemed to be suggesting that once someone is on the qualified list of electors, the 1993 National Voter Registration Act prohibits the State of Georgia from preventing them from casting a ballot, even if they lie about where they live in order to do so, which is a violation of both state and federal law. Not only that, but when a poll worker knowingly permits an unqualified voter to cast such a ballot, that poll worker may commit a felony themselves under OCGA 21-2-590.
Know how I became aware of that “legal analysis?” Fair Fight recently entered it as exhibit 61 in the Fair Fight v. True the Vote case. In other words, when it comes to election integrity, at least on these issues, Fair Fight and our Secretary of State’s office are literally singing from the same choir book! Seriously?
Before I wrap up here though, there are a few other issues I want to make sure everyone is aware of.
When I go through the voter file, I see thousands of voter records where the words ”Missing Address” appear in their registration address. I don’t understand why those registrations were even accepted.
I also still see hundreds of voters registered at Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies, such as a UPS store, and the Secretary of State’s office has been aware of that problem for quite some time now. Often these voters will attempt to disguise the box number they are assigned by calling it an “Apartment” or “Unit Number” when they register at those addresses. Well, no one actually lives in an 8 inch box in a UPS store, and when people register at one, we have no way of knowing if they are even registered and voting in the correct districts.
We have the same issue when I see thousands of what appear to be homeless people registered at the same address, which is often a charity or a church of some sort. I have no issue with them getting mail there, but if that isn’t where they are actually living, we have no way to know if they’re voting in the right districts either.
There was one address in downtown Atlanta with over 2,000 voters registered there, but that facility isn’t anywhere near large enough to house that many people. I’ve also seen people who are registered at hotels and motels, campgrounds, or other business addresses.
That stuff is EASY to catch with common garden variety USPS approved CASS certification software. All we need do is look!
So other than just getting angry, what do we actually DO about all of this?
Well first, we need to find a way to protect Georgia voters and their county governments from Democrat “Lawfare” and intimidation. None of us should have to face that threat in order to exercise our 1st Amendment rights!
Second, it is clear to me that the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, also known as “Motor Voter”, which is now nearly 30 years old, is in desperate need of reform. It is an impediment to any honest Secretary of State who is attempting, in good faith, to use modern technology to help keep their state’s voter rolls clean and up to date.
We can do better. We should update that act by requiring every state to participate in a voter data clearinghouse like ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center. It allows member states to compare their voter rolls with those of other states, and identify voters who are registered, or even voting, in more than one state. The problem is only about half our states are members.
Remember President Trump’s Vote Fraud commission? Well, if you recall, it failed because so many states, even some red states, refused to turn over copies of their voter databases to the commission. Well, why is that?
The answer there is simple: They knew EXACTLY what the commission would find, and it would have embarrassed them, BADLY! The reality is that the 1993 National Voter Registration Act causes our nation’s Secretaries of State to collectively keep MILLIONS of bogus registrations on their voter rolls, often for years, and years, and years!
While I do understand that the 1993 NVRA prevents “List maintenance” within 90 days of a federal election, when a Secretary of State does do their routine list maintenance, and sees evidence suggesting a voter has changed jurisdictions, which in our case is a county or municipality, he is also REQUIRED under the act to notify that voter about how they can update their registration so they can continue to vote, vote lawfully, and vote for the candidates who actually represent them.
So why not get proactive about that? I see nothing in the law that would prohibit the Secretary of State from running the same analysis I ran, and then why not mail those voters AHEAD of the election, and encourage them to take 5 minutes to jump online and make sure their registrations are current before the deadline? That isn’t “list maintenance” on the part of the Secretary of State. So why not help voters make sure they CAN legally vote, instead of having to tell them they CAN’T legally vote because they forgot to reregister in time?
Fourth, we also need meaningful enforcement. What good is it to have election integrity laws on the books if they are rarely, if ever, actually enforced? I can’t even tell you how many times Jake and I have seen voters, and even election officials, take the stand, under oath, and straight up admit to violations of the law, or to their own negligence. Would any of you care to guess how many we’ve seen prosecuted or held accountable in any meaningful way for those violations?
Finally, we need to update OCGA 40-5-33 to allow the Department of Motor Vehicles to use NCOA to identify driver’s license holders who moved, but failed to comply with the law and update their driver’s licenses within 60 days. Since roughly 97% of Georgia voters hold driver’s license, and an update to your driver’s license also triggers an update to your registration, that would go a long way towards helping to solve this problem. That issue also has some major tax implications, so even some Democrats might even get on board with that.
In closing, I want to again thank the United Tea Party of Georgia for the opportunity to speak with you today, and I’d also like to thank each of you for your interest, and for your valuable time.
I hope I haven’t gotten too far off into the weeds here, and I apologize if I have, but time permitting, I’ll be happy to take some questions…