Rep. Hice: ‘Very Serious Problems’ in Georgia’s Election

Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) at a hearing in Washington on July 28, 2020. Bill Clark-Pool/Getty Images

Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), said Sunday that he believes there were “very serious problems in Georgia’s election,” as the state prepared to begin a second recount of votes on Tuesday morning.

In an interview with Newsmax, Hice, a member of the House Oversight Committee, said that while he supports the state’s second recount of votes, he believes attorney Sidney Powell has been making some “pretty outlandish” voter fraud allegations.

“Which is fine if you have the evidence to back it up, and if she does have the evidence she needs to start coming forth [with it],” Hice said. “Otherwise, it just kind of disincentives the base. They want to know if there’s real fraud, let’s see it and let’s deal with it.”

A day earlier, Powell said that the president’s lawyers will file a lawsuit of “biblical” proportions, alleging that some election officials were embroiled in a pay-to-play scheme with a prominent manufacturer of voting software.

“We’ve got tons of evidence; it’s so much, it’s hard to pull it all together,” Powell told Newsmax, without providing or elaborating on the evidence.

Powell said the voting system’s algorithms provided Democrats 35,000 extra votes. She said Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s votes were “weighted” at 1.25 times, while President Donald Trump’s votes were parsed at 0.75.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has said frequently there were no instances of fraud or irregularities in the state.

Dominion Voting Systems, in several statements to The Epoch Times, has categorically denied allegations of election tampering and voter fraud in recent days, saying that Trump’s team has peddled “falsehoods regarding Dominion” in recent press conferences and interviews.

“I think the majority of the country actually feels that way,” Hice continued. “They want fair and honest elections, and they’re willing to give time, right now, for the Trump team to prove those types of allegations, but when there are potentially allegations with nothing to back it up, that becomes problematic.”

“There have been very serious problems in Georgia’s election, and we do need to have a recount,” he added.

Fulton County election workers examine ballots while vote counting, at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Ga., on Nov. 5, 2020. Tami Chappell /AFP via Getty Images

Georgia’s second recount begins 9 a.m. on Nov. 24 and must be completed by midnight Dec. 2.

The Trump campaign on Saturday filed a petition for the second recount after the state finished its statewide risk-limiting audit of the razor-thin presidential race, involving a hand recount that the secretary of state’s office said “upheld and reaffirmed the original outcome produced by the machine tally of votes cast.” The Trump campaign has disputed the result, arguing that “Georgia simply recounted all of the illegal ballots that had been included in the total.”

More than a dozen witnesses of the recount signed sworn affidavits attesting to errors and potential fraud, including Trump votes which were counted for Biden and suspicious batches of pristine, uncreased, and uniformly filled absentee ballots.

The counts show Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden ahead of Trump by 12,284 votes (pdf), or 0.26 percentage points.

The risk-limiting audit turned up thousands of uncounted votes in four counties. A county-level report (pdf) showed that a total of 5,262 uncounted ballots were discovered in the course of the audit, with 2,464 in Floyd County, 1,642 in Gwinnett County, 732 in Dekalb County, 634 in Fulton County, 120 in Hall County, and 117 in Fayette County, along with a handful of others at less than 100 ballots. The additional ballots in Floyd County favored Biden by 92, those in Gwinnett favored Trump by 285, those in Dekalb favored Biden by 560, and Fulton County favored Trump by 345.

Trump and his campaign have repeatedly complained that the risk-limiting audit was meaningless without an examination of the signatures on the ballot envelopes.

Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, said during a press briefing on Monday that there is no legal process in place in the state to allow signature verification as part of the recount.

Sterling said, however, that an audit to check the signature matching of local officials wouldn’t be easy but could be feasible if there is evidence it’s needed. Signatures on envelopes could be checked by auditors against signatures on voters’ registrations.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp urged the state’s top election official during a press conference Friday to conduct an audit of the signatures on ballot envelopes.

Jack Phillips and Tom Ozimek contributed to this report.