Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA) called for an audit of votes cast in Georgia to include signature verification of absentee ballots, offering his remarks on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

A recount of ballots in Georgia must remove ineligible votes to be legitimate, Hice stated.

“There’s still some hope,” Hice said. “The Trump campaign is filing a lawsuit in Georgia today, so that will begin another round of investigation. We all knew this recount was a charade. We knew it was a joke from the very beginning. They were not examining and really looking into two key areas, one being the signature verifications, and number two, the legal versus illegal ballots.”

Hice said the Trump campaign’s lawsuit in Georgia seeks to audit the ballots to remove fraudulent cases and ineligible votes from the total count.

“All they did basically was recount, and so there was not much change in the outcome, but because they didn’t get into the real issue, which is potential fraud,” Hice remarked, “So the Trump campaign is coming out to sue for the purpose of getting hold of the actual ballots and whatever else is involved for the purpose of actually determining what was the true count when it deals with legal ballots versus illegal ballots.”

Signature verification of absentee ballots can make an “enormous” difference in Georgia, explained Hice. He estimated that signature verification could remove 40,000 votes from the state’s total vote count given the percentage of discarded absentee ballots from 2018’s congressional election in the Peach State.

According to Ballotpedia, Joe Biden received 12,284 more votes than Donald Trump in Georgia. The first vote count had Biden receiving 2,475,141 votes against the president’s 2,462,857.

“The immediate process that can make an enormous difference is to just look at the signature verifications,” Hice explained. “The national average — and the average in the past in Georgia — for ballots that are thrown out because the signatures are invalid is between three and five percent. Two years ago, Georgia threw out three and a half percent of ballots that were absentee ballots because the signatures were not accurate. This year we had 1.3 million absentee ballots, but the percentage that was thrown out due to insufficient signatures was 0.3 percent.”

Hice continued, “Now that differ... (Read more)