As secretary of state, i have worked to secure the vote for all georgians. On day one, we outlawed ballot harvesting. We strengthened signature match through the g. B. I. Train and moved toward an audible paper ballot system. I am the first secretary of state to implement a drivers license requirement for online absentee ballot applications, which strengthen the security of our absentee ballot process. Whether it is the president of the United States or a failed gubernatorial candidate, disinformation regarding election administrations should be condemned and rejected. Integrity matters, truth matters. Today the secretary of States Office will be recertifying our States Election results. Then the states harbor under the United States code to name electors is tomorrow and then they will meet on december 14 to officially elect the next president. While we will continue our investigations to their conclusions, and where prosecution is necessary, we will work with the state election board to refer them to the proper prosecutors. We are working with the counties to assure a fair, safe and secure election for january 5. We will continue to take steps to assure that only legal registered georgians will be casting ballots. So lets discuss where we are and where we are heading in georgia. All this talk of a stolen election, whether its Stacey Abrams or the president of the United States, is hurting our state. Georgia is the number one state in the nation to do business for nearly a decade. Continuing to make debunked claims of a stolen election is hurting our state. I started my business and built it from the grondgrond ground up. Ive employed hundreds and hundreds of georgians, men and women in those years. I know what it takes to build teams that work to strengthen buildings, restore and strengthen old landmarks. And i have also built a team that knows how to win an election. I also have built a team that knows how to run and oversee elections. And i understand we need to focus on the future of growing businesses here in georgia. Getting through the covid pandemic and bringing more goodpaying georgians to our state. The vast majority of georgians, republicans and democrats, want us, all of us, as elected officials to focus on protecting and growing georgia jobs. Getting the vaccine out as efficiently as possible and getting back to normal. The focus on november 3 is drawing is energy away from those goals. The president has his Due Process Rights and those are available to him. Its time we all focus on the future and growth. I know there are people that are convinced the election was fraught with problems. But the evidence, the actual evidence, the facts, tell us a different story. Business owners across georgia know its time to focus on the future. Georgians have serious issues that need to be addressed. I am looking forward to a great christmas time and then a good legislative session. We will have our elections bill brought forward. It will be a major reform of the election processes where i will work with the legislature, the governor, the Lieutenant Governor duncan, and we can all Work Together to help all of our businesses and make georgia an even better place to do business. So that each and every georgian can get a good job. Or those brave entrepreneurs can start their next small business. It is now time to direct our energies towards the january 5 Runoff Election and making georgia an even better place to grow your businesses, raise your families, and enjoy prosperity here in georgia. Thank you. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] good morning. Didnt bring my computer today because we vonal a few numbers to go through. First, as the secretary pointed out, we will be recertifying today we are waiting on the county elections Board Meeting in Coffee County. They knocked off work on friday. We tried to talk to them again this morning, they werent quite in the office yet. So we dont know the exact time of that meeting. But we are working to figure that out. As he pointed out, the safe harbor is tomorrow so we still have time to have the bills of ascertainment sent to d. C. So the electors can be set properly. Moving on to the january 5 election. 037 ive e 1, talked top of the last week, guys. 1,037,172 absentee ballot applications that were put into the Voter Registration system. 39,259 on the dashboard for the online request process. A total of 1,076,431. So far, 43,289 voters have already had their ballots accepted at the county level. And this is a new number to talk about, ballot for access system, which is the system we put in place to allow for proactive notifications to go out, we have 240,912 voters signed up for that right now. And of those, 12,547 have already got their ballots in to us. Now ill move on to what im going to call disinformation monday. Out of the gate, many of you all saw the videotape from state farm arena. Spent hours with our investigators. Spent hours going over this video to explain to people that what you saw, the secret suitcases with magic ballots, were actually ballots that had been patched into those absentee ballot carriers by the workers in plain view of the monitors and the press. The reason they were packed away is because they were under the misbegotten impression they were getting to go home. If you notice, when you go back to the scene of the video on this, they were packing these things up, 10 00, 10 30 at night. You see the same people there at 7 00 and 7 30 and 8 00 in the morning setting up those tables. They had been there all day long. They were tired and wanted to go home and they thought they could. What happened around that time for many of you who were with us on election night, saw the secretary leaving around a similar time, we had heard that they were knocking off for the day and he was understandably not happy with that and made that clear on the way out the door. So, our elections director for the state called the Fulton County elections director who was at the English Avenue warehouse doing election day activities, not a state farm arena, and said, why are yall knocking off . And he basically said, what do you mean, were not knocking off. He goes, well from what we understand, at state farm they are. So rick ette got off the phone call. Then you see ralph jones at state farm arena getting a phone call around that time, as hes literally, with blue seals in his hand, to seal up these containers, and you can see his shoulders kind of slump for a second. Then he goes over and does more work on the side. I think ginning up the courage to tell these workers who had been there all day, hey, guys, we have to stay here longer to scan the batches we have. You can watch all this happen. You can see it from the beginning to the end. We watched the beginning of that thing and lets be clear. There was no water main break. There was a urinal that they turned off during the down time at state farm because theres no events going on there and it had a little slow leak that came over the side. We have a videotape, weesh working to get that online, but its 80 gigabytes and we didnt have a tool to let yall run through it. Were trying to figure that out right now. Manageable bytes of the most important parts of the day. Youll see when they walk in and they see the obvious water leak on the floor. You will see they move all the stuff out of the way. You will see the zamboni carpet drier thing driving around. You can see all these things happening. You can see the table get put in place. Whats really frustrating is the president s attorneys had this same videotape. They saw the exact same thing the rest of us could see and they chose to mislead state senators and the public about what was on that video. Im quite sure that they will not characterize the video if they try to enter it into evidence because that could lead to sanctions. Because its obviously untrue. They knew it was untrue and they continued to do things like this. Thats one. Ware county. There are no seized machines in ware county. Not true. Did not happen. There was a written report from an activist who said the hand count was 37 off. It was. He said the only reason it could be off is because of an algorithm in the machines which is ridiculous. What have we been saying since the beginning . The most obvious fault point in any of the system is the human beings who are counting them. Again, it was. 26 . Thats pretty close, especially when all the studies show you expect a 1 to 2 differential on handcounted ballots. If you take that math and that biggest part of the hand counted ballots that you could have problems on is the mailin absentee. If you look at 25 of 1 to 2 ,. 26 . Ts you about thats within the range. I believe some people are trying to conflate this with some of the machines in michigan but thats not the case. Then specifically, a United States congressman sent this disinformation out on his twitter. He wrote it himself. Again, its irresponsible. I was the Campaign Manager years ago in 1994 for the first republican to get that 10th district seat. He would never have acted that irresponsibly and im frustrated that we continue to see people who are put in positions of responsibility sending out disinformation and undermining the electoral system. Another one. People did not get on plane to count votes in pennsylvania. They basically said, heres a picture of a blond woman in a mask. Heres another picture of a blond wo woman in a mask. Obviously theres a conspiracy where Democratic State senators are counting ballots in pennsylvania. Its ridiculous. I cant believe i have to keep standing here and saying these things. But i do. So, there is no algorithm, the five million ballot hand count proves theres no algorithm switching votes. Is there any other disinformation i missed over the weekend . Im not sure. Reporter the one i hear over and over, a woman scanning ballots over and over and over again. Can you explain whether the machines can count a ballot three times . It if it counted it five times, it would have shown up in the hand count. Because if you do the same batch, i dont even know how many there were, 100, 200, youll see them do it three times, they would have been 600 off on the hand count. They werent. Its just as ive said and yall have heard me say before, its a ridiculous game of whack had anmole whackamole. Theyve recycled them, theyre going back to the algorithm thing. Theyve been debunked before. What other questions do we got . Porter [indiscernible] ok. Theres two different types of theres four different buckets two of different types of ballots. Lets go through those. You have the traditional hand marked paper ballots which were used to. Like the old sheets when we took our s. A. T. s where you bubble something in. In this state those cover the provisionals, occasionally the emergency ballots, if you dont have the regular ballots going, and then the absentee by mail. Thats one. Thats about probably 25 of our overall votes. About 75 of our votes come from the ballot marking device which was the new tool that the legislature adopted in 2019 for e have a state insurer under. There was no challenge to the bid process, meaning it was a very clean bid process. And we began the deployment of those that summer, and we made the initial delivery deadline of valentines day of 2020. That machine, you take a screen, you check in on a device that has nothing to do with the voting machines, this is just to identify you and give you a card to give you your ballot on the ballot marking device. You insert that card, it brings up your ballot on the screen. You then make your selections on that screen and when you are done, youll say, print ballot. You print the ballot, comes off an h. P. Printer, you can look at that ballot, assure that your choices are the choices you intended to make. Then you take that to a completely different machine, its a scanner thats in the polling location, you can have one or two, occasionally three scanners in there. You drop it into that, you can watch the counter go up to one extra as your ballot goes through. At that time, it tabulates it on there and it takes an image of your ballot. So we have two things its capturing on that. From there, the memory cards from those are taken to the Central Location where they have their central election Management System to tabulate all the ballots together. So there is an artifact of where the voter made a choice that exists and by law has to be held for another two years under georgia law, its 22 months under federal law. Thats what we use for the hand retaly. Those are the same ballots we used for the recount that we are recertifying today. Does that cover your question . Reporter yes. I have one more. Theres a lot of question about signature audit [indiscernible] theres a lot of misinformation going around about [indiscernible] the ballot envelope under the same law as keeping the ballots alive have you have those for two more years and there will be, Governor Kemp and the secretary are going to be working together, well bring in the g. B. I. As hand writing experts to go over those specific counties where there are specific allegations about any issues around the signature match with the absentee ballots. That does that is not a statewide, you know, signature audit. Because one of the remedies asked for in the law suit is if theres a certain percentage, they dont really say what, that dont match, in a subjective measure, as we all know, herb everybodys signatures can change. Its a subjective measure. If youre arguing over that, then if we get to a certain percentage, throw out all the absentee ballots which is an over the top hammer that no federal court is going allow. So again, it was not a necessary thing. But we always investigate when we have specific allegations. When theres specific allegations to investigate, well do it. But a generalized, we dont like the outcome, we think this is a faulty part of the system, were not going to do that. But the place in the system that is the most likely to have an issue is going to be in the absentee by mail program because in person we always present an i. D. So we absolutely knee the person who is vote something that person who is supposed to be voting legally. One second. Let me go over there. Reporter in the recount esults [indiscernible] its about two votes per precinct, its a big county. Its a little worrisome. My best guess is they have [indiscernible] and weve been asking about. The problem is the clock is running. The clock ran out. Its a big, big county. Theyve had managerial issues, we know that. Of those ballots, because they were so heavily for Vice President biden, that means his total in the statewide count is about 900 lower. But again, not enough to make up the difference of 12,000. Its frustrating because, again, we see these managerial issues coming out of Fulton County. I know theyre tired. I know theyre put upon to a degree. But to consistently have these we had the press conference where we put up all the headlines from 1995 on, knob of none of this is new with them. So it is frustrating. A little irritating. Another anomaly we saw was Appling County where they had 49 ballots that had been stuck in adjudication, not stuck, they got left in. We did a phone call turnover county. We know theres a problem, make sure you get your ballots off adjudication. They didnt until this final time. So, everybodys learning this new system. Its a highstress environment because the president ial election was so close. Those kind of things are going to happen and thats when youve handled these ballots three times. Theyre always going to be different because human beings are involved in the process. Reporter how many new voters have registered for the runoff [indiscernible] i dont have the answer to that question. Well try to get it. Part of the reason we dont is because only as of last tuesday or wednesday really could fulton and clayton put any new registrations in because they were involved in the large runoffs. Reporter in the suit that the Trump Campaign filed do you know ] what theyre talking about and whats your response to that [indiscernible] no, i have no idea what theyre talking about but they need to present their evidence if theyre making that kind of claim. Reporter you mentioned the role of the g. B. I. What will their role be in helping secretary of state investigators [indiscernible] the main role they would have is they have expertise in the hand writing so they would be a big part of the 250, i think it was 18 and i could be wrong, i think it was 18 cases having to do with absentee ballot handling. So that would be the main thing. I dont know the man power that theyre going to be throwing at the whole thing for all the other cases. The 250 cases is all of 2020 that are still open from november on its a lower number, a subset. Ill try to get that number to you all. I know people are saying they came out of the general election. Thats not exactly true. 250 for all of 2020. Probably my fault because i put the excel spread sheet and grabbed everything from 2020 and did a count. Ill go back and do that again o get the subset proper. Reporter [indiscernible] the one for me is the gap we keep hearing about. You say its about an hour before, you started counting before [indiscernible] got back. Can you explain what happens to the votes counted in that gap . Thats why we have a recount, right . The secondary thing about. This under our state law, observers are allowed to be there. They are not required to be there. Thats the main thing. So this is not illegal counting as it says. Now, i understand the frustration, especially on the republican side, because as i said before, everybody in that room thought they were getting to go home. The workers were leaving, the press was like, we may as well leave. Theres no reason the election workers i mean, the observers couldnt think the same thing. They were boxing things up and putting seals on. The doors were not locked. Nobody was kept out. Its frustrating because i know somebody might have said, because theres no audio to this is the problem. Its always going to be a he saidshe said from now on. Is somebody said, were done for the night. Nobody said, all of you people have to leave. There was nobody directing people to leave. While people were in the room still work, the observers could have stayed for that. Because things can happen then too as theyre boxing things up. Im not saying its the observers fault or the press fault. It was a long day for these people. Lets doe use some commonsense which i know is a rare thing to say. They were tired and wanted to go home. They were frustrated that they didnt get to go home. So i think everybodys kind of under the impression, theyre leaving, its 10 30 at night, lets let it go then they start working against once we call fulton tonight say keep on working, they keep on working, now theres a giant conspiracy that they worked when nobody was there because we were frustrated they werent working long enough. Its a circular thing where were trying to keep counties working to meet the goal of getting these Election Results out quickly. Because there was a miscommunication from the manager at Fulton County, the manager of state farm who thought they could finish, that caused all of this. Reporter second question. Who is from . Reporter [indiscernible] ok, thats fine. Reporter [indiscernible] what happens when a voter dies . Some states have laws on the books that if you voted before the election day, cast an early ballot, it doesnt count. What happens the voter who dies before the election and whats the process [indiscernible] lets start with the easy part. The main process of getting a dead voter off the roll is handled at the county level. They get records. Secondarily, as we have made very clear, when the ballot envelope is separated from the secrecy sleeve, there is no way to go claw that vote back. It is in the system. Same thing, if somebody goes and early votes in person and gets hit by a car, you cant go back and get that ballot back out. Its physicaly impossible given the privacy rules in our state. Does that answer your question . All right. One more. Today is the final day for georgians to register to vote in the january 5 Runoff Election. If you go to its usually when their doors close. At the registrar. You can go to the online portal, if you have a drivers license attached to your you have a drivers license. We can find your information from that. That goes to 11 59 tonight. Porter [indiscernible] were waiting for Coffee County to do their certification and they took the weekend off. We talked i talked to somebody who talked to the county Commission Chairman who hasnt been told when theyre having the elections board get together to do that certification. It has to be today it. Will have to be today. Reporter how will we know . [indiscernible] yeah, probably will. Anything else . All right. Thank you all. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National able satellite corp. 2020] watch cspans washington journal live at 7 00 eastern Tuesday Morning and be sure to join the discussion with your phone calls, facebook comments, exts and tweets. Tuesday, a Senate Committee hears testimony on the medical response to the covid19 pandemic and the development of outpatient treatments. Watch live at 10 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan3, online at cspan. Org, or listen live on the free cspan radio app. Use your mobile devices and go to cspan. Org for the latest video, live and ondemand, to follow the transition of power. President trump, president elect biden, news conferences and event coverage at cspan. Org. Remarks next from mark lowcock, the u. N. Undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs andmental relief on covid19 response efforts. He spoke at the Brookings Institution for about an hour. Welcome, everybody. And thank you for joining us. Im delighted to be able to welcome to brookings, albeit virtually, sir mark lowcock, the undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and the emergency r