While Trump’s legal team argued illegal votes in some 30-plus categories were improperly included in the final election tally, violations of Section 21-2-218 of the Georgia election code alone closed the gap between the two presidential candidates. That section provides that state “residents must vote in the county in which they reside, unless they changed their residence within 30 days of the election” and “outside of the 30-day grace period, if people vote in a county in which they no longer reside, ‘their vote in that county would be illegal.’”

Shortly after the November general election, Mark Davis, the president of Data Productions Inc. and an expert in voter data analytics and residency issues, compared voting records obtained from the Georgia secretary of state’s office with the National Change of Address (NCOA) database. After excluding individuals who moved within 30 days of the general election, Davis “identified nearly 35,000 Georgia voters who indicated they had moved from one Georgia county to another, but then voted in the 2020 general election in the county from which they had moved.”

Trump highlighted this evidence during a telephone conversation with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. His election lawyers, he said, noted from that data they “have actually hard numbers” of tens of thousands of votes that were counted illegally, and that with the margin of victory less than 12,000, “that in and of itself is sufficient to change the results or place the outcome in doubt.”

The lawyers explained that they “would like to sit down with your office . . . if you are able to establish that our numbers are not accurate, then fine.” While the secretary of state’s representative indicated he was “happy to get with our lawyers and we’ll set that up,” Cleta Mitchell, one of Trump’s election lawyers, told The Federalist that meeting never happened.

“We had tried for weeks to get the secretary of state to sit down with us to review the data,” Mitchell said, noting that Raffensperger just kept saying the Trump campaign’s data was wrong and, “We said, ‘Show us, then, where it is wrong.’”

But instead of meeting, according to Mitchell, the day after their call with the secretary of state’s office, lawyers sent Trump’s legal team “a very nasty letter saying they wouldn’t give us any data until we dismissed all pending litigation.” Then, after Trump’s team dismissed the lawsuit following Senate candidate Kelly Loeffler’s withdrawal of her objections to the Georgia electors and asked for the promised meeting to review the data, the secretary of state’s office withdrew the offer.