Three data experts are at the center of a lawsuit alleging that tens of thousands of illegal votes may have been cast in the election.
A lawsuit relies on the work of the data experts to allege that thousands of illegal votes were cast in the election, including by felons, children, dead people, and non-residents.
For two decades, Mark Alan Davis has urged Georgia’s leaders to clean the state’s voter rolls, and fix data errors that he feared could throw the state’s elections into doubt.
A voting consultant and data expert whose father was the Republican nominee for governor back in the mid 1980s, Davis described himself as kind of a “nerd” that “people may or may not find interesting.” But, he said, his concerns about the state’s election integrity have never risen to the top of most elected leaders’ to-do lists. Until now.
“For me, watching this election was like watching a very, very slow-moving train wreck,” Davis said. “When you all of a sudden switch all of these folks from in-person voting to absentee voting, and the underlying data is a mess, then you’re going to get an election that’s a mess.”
Davis was one of three data experts whose work is at the center of a Georgia lawsuit alleging that tens of thousands of illegal votes may have been cast in November’s general election, according to court documents obtained by National Review.
The experts assert in affidavits filed with the lawsuit that Georgia’s voting system has numerous “control deficiencies” and “unreliable data governance policies” that increase the risk of “invalid or fraudulent votes being counted without detection.” The findings, they say, cast doubt not only on the 2020 presidential election, but elections going back “many, many years.”
The lawsuit, filed by the Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer and the Trump campaign, relies on the work of the data experts to allege that thousands of illegal votes were cast in the election, including by felons, children, and non-residents, and even in the name of people who are dead, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit argues that because a “sufficient number of illegal votes” were allowed to be counted in the vote totals, “the declaration of the presidential election in favor of Mr. (Joe) Biden must be enjoined, vacated and nullified.”
The Georgia lawsuit is the latest in a string of Republican legal challenges to the election that have failed to gain traction in states across the country.
Shafer said on Twitter that, unlike other lawsuits challenging the election results, this most recent lawsuit in Georgia doesn’t rely on theories about hacked voting machines.
“Instead,” he wrote, “we painstakingly show thousands of examples of ‘low tech’ voting irregularities and fraud sufficient in scale to place the election result in doubt.”
In an email, Walter Jones, a spokesman for Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, was dismissive of the claims laid out in the 1,500 pages of documents filed with the lawsuit.
“Respected and impartial election experts give no credence to the shoddy ‘analysis’ that this lawsuit is based on,” he wrote. “And ‘analysis’ is not evidence. It is supposition and conjecture built on subjective assumptions. As the saying goes, ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.’”
In addition to Davis, the other data experts whose work is central to the lawsuit are Matt Braynard, a GOP operative and former Trump campaign consultant and data specialist who is behind the crowd-funded Voter Integrity Project, and Bryan Geels, a data analytics risk-assessment expert based in Seattle, Wash.
Davis, Braynard, and Geels worked independently, but each utilized a variety of state and national databases for their analyses, including: Georgia voter-registration files, absentee and early voter files, voter-history files, and a national address-change database.
In an affidavit, Davis said that he identified 14,980 people who voted after moving out of state. He also found 40,279 people who moved across county lines more than 30 days before the election, but then cast a ballot in their former county.
Some may be students and people serving in the military, he said. “But I think the vast majority of these probably were permanent moves.”
In his affidavit, Davis said “it appears to me we probably had tens of thousands of illegal votes cast in our last election. Worse, that has probably been happening for many, many years.”
Braynard said he has been running his Voter Integrity Project out of his two-bed, two-bath apartment in the Washington, D.C., area. He’s had a team of up to 20 people helping him.
“Everything we’re putting together here at [the Voter Integrity Project] should be very accessible, completely understandable,” Braynard said in a video discussing his findings. He said he is doing similar work in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Braynard raised more than $674,000 for his efforts on the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. He was booted off of the GoFundMe crowdfunding site because the site determined his effort “attempts to spread misleading information about the election.” He’s also being paid $40,000 to serve as an expert witness, according to court documents.
Braynard found there were at least 20,312 cases of voters who illegally cast ballots in Georgia, “due to their loss of residency status,” according to his affidavit. He also said he found at least 395 people who voted in multiple states, including in Georgia, and 1,043 voters who illegally registered using a post-office box disguised as a residential address. Biden won the state by roughly 12,000 votes, according to state officials who certified his victory ahead of the Tuesday safe harbor deadline.
“We were able to identify quite a few anomalies,” Braynard said in an interview.
Braynard said his analysis was limited by his access to data. There are some databases, like driver’s license databases, that he couldn’t access, he said. And the government redacted some fields from the databases he does have access to.
“I’m only trying to bring this up to get the states to do the proper investigation with the tools that only they have,” Braynard said. “I’ve used every tool I have as a private citizen. Only the government can take the next step.”
The court documents include pages upon pages of names that Braynard’s team identified as being likely illegal voters. His team hasn’t reached out to any of them, he said.
“What am I going to do,” he asked, “trick them into confessing to a federal crime, or at least a state crime?”
In his affidavit, Geels, the data-analytics and risk-assessment expert in Seattle, said he identified 4,502 people who voted in Georgia despite not being registered. He also said he found as many as 2,560 inmates who cast ballots, 66,247 people who cast ballots who registered to vote before their 17th birthday, and as many as 10,315 people who cast ballots who were dead before Election Day.
Geels is being paid $15,000 to serve as an expert witness, according to court documents.
In his affidavit, Geels said he found several significant record keeping and data integrity issues with the state’s voter data. Georgia’s voting system, he said, “has numerous control deficiencies including unreliable data governance policies to help ensure that votes cast and counted are valid,” and without proper controls “there is an increased risk of invalid or fraudulent votes being counted without detection.”
“It is my opinion that the data relied upon by the Georgia secretary of state and county election officials is either not trustworthy and cannot have been relied upon to conduct an election without serious risk of fraud,” he said in his affidavit, “or, alternatively, if it is good data, indicates a significant number of fraudulent or invalid votes of a magnitude which calls into question the outcome of the presidential election.”
Geels declined to comment on his findings when reached on the phone. Davis and Braynard have said they found little evidence of large numbers of ballots cast in the names of the dead. “It looks to me like for the most part the Secretary of State is getting that right,” Davis said.
The lawsuit does contain allegations by two Georgia residents about questionable voting histories for their dead relatives.
In an affidavit, a woman named Lisa Holst said that her father-in-law, who died 10 years ago, received three absentee ballots in the mail this year. A review of his voting record showed someone cast a ballot in his name in 2017 and 2020, according to the court documents.
Holst declined to comment when reached on the phone, saying she doesn’t trust the media.
Another woman, Sandy Rumph, said in an affidavit that she checked the voter records for her father-in-law, who died a year ago, and found that his voter registration changed from “Deceased” to “Active” eight days after his death. And his address was changed to an apartment in a county where he never lived.
She said somebody requested a copy of his driver’s license be delivered to the bogus address.
Rumph said she doesn’t believe that anyone actually cast a vote in her father-in-law’s name in the general election, but she’s worried someone still could.
“There is still the potential in this runoff election, because he’s still in active status that someone could go vote” Rumph said. “My concern was how easy this was, and there’s no telling how widespread it is.”