Trump has claimed 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia. He was off by 4,996.
- Trump groundlessly claimed that 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia.
- Just four dead people voted. Relatives sent in absentee ballots for them, officials said.
Former President Donald Trump once baselessly claimed that 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia, but he was off by 4,996. There were just four cases of dead people voting in the 2020 election in Georgia, according to state officials who said relatives filed these fraudulent ballots.
"The State Election Board sent a total of 4 cases of dead voters in November 2020 to the Attorney General," Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a tweet on Monday. "There has yet to be proof of enough fraud to overturn the 2020 elections. We need to look forward, not waste time relitigating the past."
All four instances involved absentee ballots sent in by relatives, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. One case involved a widow who sent in an absentee ballot for her husband after he died in September 2020, the outlet said.
"He was going to vote Republican, and she said, 'Well, I'm going to cancel your ballot because I'm voting Democrat.' It was kind of a joke between them," Barry Bishop, an attorney for the woman, told the State Election Board, according to The Journal-Constitution. "She received the absentee ballot and carried out his wishes. ... She now realizes that was not the thing to do."
The State Election Board can impose fines between $100 and $5,000 for improper use of absentee ballots.
Trump has made a number of outlandish assertions regarding the 2020 election. He engaged in an unprecedented effort to overturn the results, baselessly claiming the election was "stolen" from him. This included pressuring Raffensperger to "find" votes to overturn President Joe Biden's historic win in the state and peppering him with outrageous claims in the process. Biden carried the state by only 11,779 votes.
"Dead people. So dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries," Trump said during a notorious January 2 phone call with Raffensperger. "They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number, and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters."
Raffensperger refused to give into Trump's demands and has been the target of the former president's ire.
"President Trump did come up short in the state of Georgia. And I understand that my party's grieving over that," Raffensperger recently told Insider's Grace Panetta. "But we have to face the brutal truth: As Republicans, we have not won the popular vote nationwide since 2004."
Trump's baseless claims about the 2020 election helped catalyze the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6. He was impeached a second time for inciting the fatal riot. Nearly a year since that day and well over a year since Election Day, Trump has still not publicly acknowledged that he was fairly defeated by Biden.