Among the potential 2020 election fraud issues raised by former President Donald Trump in his now-infamous Jan. 2021 call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger were concerns about voters who may have illegally voted in their old county of residence after moving to a new county within the state.

Evidence has since emerged that seems to validate the concern that thousands of Georgia voters -- more than the reported margin of victory in that state -- may have voted illegally in one county after moving to another, according to The Federalist.

That assertion comes from voter data expert Mark Davis, who further alleged that Raffensperger's office has acted to cover up and downplay that information.

Evidence suggests enough illegal votes to alter election results

In the wake of the disputed 2020 election, then-President Trump and others called Sec. Raffensperger and his people to urge them to investigate a variety of allegations of election fraud, potentially numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and "find" a sufficient number of fraudulent votes to disqualify that would alter the state's final tally in favor of Trump.

One possible avenue that would have nearly sufficed in and of itself was an analysis from Davis that found nearly 35,000 Georgia voters had filed to change their address more than 30 days before the election but still cast a ballot in their old county of residence.

Per Georgia law -- and previously explained on the secretary of state's website before mysteriously disappearing -- "If you move outside the county in which you are registered to vote in excess of 30 days prior to an election, you have lost your eligibility to vote in the county of your old residence. You must register to vote in your new county of residence. You will be assigned a new voting precinct and polling location. Remember, if you don't register to vote by the deadline, you cannot vote in that particular election."

To be sure, not all of the nearly 35,000 voters who moved between counties more than a month before the election but voted in their old county did so illegally, as some of them may have been college students or military service members who were still eligible to vote in their old counties.

However, subsequent checks of the National Change of Address database and Georgia voter rolls indicate that more than 12,000 of those voters later confirmed their new address, strongly suggesting that their 2020 vote in their old county had been cast illegally and shouldn't have been counted -- more than the 11,779 vote difference in the state.

Raffensperger's office not being fully forthcoming

As for the alleged cover-up, The Federalist noted that Sec. Raffensperger's office disputed Davis' findings and almost immediately set about trying to discredit them, including in that now-infamous phone call with then-President Trump.

In July 2021, the debunking effort included the office providing select information and quotes to FactCheck.org for an article that was intended to challenge Trump's "election distortions" and included multiple excuses for why the nearly 35,000 questionable ballots cast by voters who'd switched counties more than a month before the election were of no concern.

Interestingly enough, a recent separate election integrity lawsuit revealed an internal email from Raffensperger's office, dubbed Exhibit 61, from just days before that FactCheck article that contained almost verbatim what appeared in the report and in which it was specifically made clear that discrediting Davis' findings was the primary purpose of the fact-checking.

As Davis noted in The Federalist, however, the email and the subsequent FactCheck article left out some particularly pertinent wording from the relevant statutes and office guidance that bolstered the argument that, at the very least, some of those roughly 35,000 votes were cast illegally and a thorough investigation was warranted.

Raffensperger is part of the problem

"If Raffensperger had wanted to, he could have finally done the investigation our president asked him for, and he could have disabused the entire nation of the nonsense allegations Trump has been facing ever since," Davis wrote for The Federalist, though he suspected that the secretary, who is rumored to be seeking higher office, will continue to refuse to do so.

Davis added, "Understand, I am not arguing for felony prosecutions of thousands of Georgia voters, but we cannot fix a problem unless we admit we have a problem."