simonton's nomination to be a member of the federal communications commission and stephen sydney schwartz to be a judge on the u.s. court of federal claims. on c-span3 at 10:00 a.m., the senate homeland security committee considers therapeutic treatments for covid-19 patients who do not require hospitalization. at 1:40 p.m., joe biden announces his nominees for health-related positions in his administration, including health and human services secretary, surgeon general, and the head of the centers for disease control and prevention. at 2:30 p.m., the senate commerce subcommittee on security hears from admiral charles ray, vice commandant of the u.s. coast guard, on readiness in the arctic. statergia's secretary of announced the state's third election recount showing joe biden won. he emphasized that

disinformation regarding election administration should be condemned and rejected. he was joined by the georgia voting system implementation manager. >> ok. get rid of that thing. ok. good morning. i'm glad you're here bright and early. i'm sure you have a place to be probably around 10:00. it's been a long 34 days since the election on november 3. we have now counted legally cast ballots three times. and the results remain unchanged. 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 driver's

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 state's office will be recertifying our state's election results. then the state's 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 let's discuss where we are and where we are heading in georgia. all this talk of a stolen election, whether it's 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. i've 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 good-paying 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. it's 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 it's 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. didn't 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 weren't quite in the office yet. so we don't 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 -- i've 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 i'll move on to what i'm 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 y'all knocking off? and he basically said, what do you mean, we're 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 he's 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 let's be clear. there was no water main break. there was a urinal that they turned off during the down time at state farm because there's 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 it's 80 gigabytes and we didn't have a tool to let y'all run through it. we're trying to figure that out right now. manageable bytes of the most important parts of the day. you'll 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. what's 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. i'm quite sure that they will not characterize the video if they try to enter it into evidence because that could lead to sanctions. because it's obviously untrue. they knew it was untrue and they continued to do things like this. that's 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%. that's pretty close, especially when all the studies show you expect a 1% to 2% differential on hand-counted ballots. if you take that math and that

biggest part of the hand counted ballots that you could have problems on is the mail-in absentee. if you look at 25% of 1% to 2%, .26%. ts you about that's within the range. i believe some people are trying to conflate this with some of the machines in michigan but that's not the case. then specifically, a united states congressman sent this disinformation out on his twitter. he wrote it himself. again, it's 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 i'm 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, here's a

picture of a blond woman in a mask. here's another picture of a blond wo woman in a mask. obviously there's a conspiracy where democratic state senators are counting ballots in pennsylvania. it's ridiculous. i can't 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 there's no algorithm switching votes. is there any other disinformation i missed over the weekend? i'm 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 don't even know how many there were, 100, 200, you'll see them do it three times, they would have been 600 off on the hand count. they weren't. it's just -- as i've said and

y'all have heard me say before, it's a ridiculous game of whack had an-mole -- whack-a-mole. they've recycled them, they're going back to the algorithm thing. they've been debunked before. what other questions do we got? porter: [indiscernible] -- >> ok. there's two different types of -- there's four different buckets two of different types of ballots. let's go through those. you have the traditional hand marked paper ballots which we're 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 don't have the regular ballots going, and then the absentee by mail. that's one. that's 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 valentine's 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, you'll 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, it's a scanner that's 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 it's 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, it's 22 months under federal law. that's 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. there's a lot of question about signature audit -- [indiscernible] -- there's 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, we'll 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 state-wide, you know, signature audit. because one of the remedies asked for in the law suit is if there's a certain percentage, they don't really say what, that don't match, in a subjective measure, as we all know, herb everybody's signatures can change. it's a subjective measure. if you're 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 there's specific allegations to investigate, we'll do it. but a generalized, we don't like the outcome, we think this

is a faulty part of the system, we're 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] -- >> it's about two votes per precinct, it's a big county. it's a little worrisome. my best guess is they have -- [indiscernible] -- and we've been asking about. the problem is the clock is running. the clock ran out. it's a big, big county. they've 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. it's frustrating because, again, we see these managerial issues coming out of fulton

county. i know they're tired. i know they're 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 there's a problem, make sure you get your ballots off adjudication. they didn't until this final time. so, everybody's learning this new system. it's a high-stress environment because the presidential election was so close. those kind of things are going to happen and that's when you've handled these ballots three times. they're 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 don't have the answer to that question. we'll try to get it. part of the reason we don't 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 they're talking about and what's your response to that -- [indiscernible] -- >> no, i have no idea what they're talking about but they need to present their evidence if they're 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 don't know the man power that they're 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 it's a lower number, a subset. i'll try to get that number to you all. i know people are saying they came out of the general election. that's 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. i'll 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 it's about an hour before, you started counting before -- [indiscernible] -- got back. can you explain what happens to the votes counted in that gap? that's 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. that's 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. there's no reason the election workers -- i mean, the observers couldn't think the same thing. they were boxing things up and putting seals on. the doors were not locked. nobody was kept out. it's frustrating because i know somebody might have said, because there's no audio to this is the problem. it's always going to be a he said-she said from now on. is somebody said, we're 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 they're boxing things up. i'm not saying it's the observers' fault or the press' fault. it was a long day for these people. let's 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 didn't get to go home. so i think everybody's kind of under the impression, they're

leaving, it's 10:30 at night, let's let it go then they start working against once we call fulton tonight say keep on working, they keep on working, now there's a giant conspiracy that they worked when nobody was there because we were frustrated they weren't working long enough. it's a circular thing where we're 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, that's 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 doesn't count. what happens -- the voter who dies before the election and what's the process -- [indiscernible] -- >> let's 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 can't go back and get that ballot back out. it's 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 -- it's usually when their doors close. at the registrar. you can go to the online portal, if you have a driver's license attached to your -- you have a driver's license. we can find your information from that. that goes to 11:59 tonight.

porter: [indiscernible] -- >> we're 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 hasn't been told when they're 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 >> live on tuesday, the house returns at 10:00 a.m. for general speeches, legislative business at noon when members debate the final version of the 2021 national defense authorization act. the bill faces a veto threat from the white house over a provision to rename military

bases and after confederate military leaders and social media liability protections. several suspension bills also on the agenda. on c-span two, the senate is back at 10:00 a.m. the nominationon to the federal trade commission and sidney swarts to be a judge on the court of claims. the homeland security committee considers therapeutic treatments for covid-19 patients who don't require hospitalization. at one: 40 p.m., joe biden announces his nominees for health related positions in his administration, including health and human services secretary surgeon general and the centers of disease control and prevention. subcommittee the hears from the vice commandant of the u.s. coast guard on readiness in the arctic. >>