ATLANTA — President Trump retweeted a bizarre claim early Wednesday morning, which said that in Georgia, "they threw away the envelopes with the signatures that the ballots came in, then commingled the mail-in ballots with the day-of ballots so there was no way to tell them apart."
It's been retweeted 18,000 times and liked 58,000 times.
There are a number of problems with this claim, but let's start with the most obvious one: The implication that the mail-in and day-of ballots were mixed together so that they couldn't be told apart is easily proven wrong because they can still be told apart.
See for yourself: Below, you can view an Associated Press picture of an election worker handling a stack of absentee mail-in ballots. They're tall pieces of paper, to lay out the various races, and you can see where a person bubbled in their votes.
Now compare that to an election worker in the below AP photo handling an in-person ballot. These are what were printed out by the Dominion voting machines for Georgia voters to review before they submitted them.
The difference is unmistakable.
If you were to want to go through a county's ballots and sort which ones were voted in-person and which ones were voted by mail (or dropped off at a drop box), you would be able to know which was which by looking at them.
There's another noteworthy problem with the original claim: Counties are not supposed to throw away the envelopes with signatures on them, and outside of an incident in Spalding County there's been no suggestion of a mass dumping of envelopes in any county.
And, taking a step back from the claim itself, with the president tweeting frequently about signature matching in Georgia it's important to remember that the reason there's no way to tie signatures back to their actual ballots once they've been separated is because the state constitution explicitly calls for a secret ballot.
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