Georgia oversight panel ruminates on 2020 election hiccups as 2024 showdowns loom:
The Georgia Election Board voted Tuesday to reprimand Fulton County and appoint an independent monitor for the 2024 election for violating state law while conducting a recount of the 2020 presidential election.
In a 2-1 vote on the panel that oversees how counties conduct elections, members agreed to admonish Fulton County and order a monitor for this year’s campaigns. That allows the county to avoid paying a fine or having the attorney general investigate the double-counting of 3,075 ballots and other allegations of irregularities during the 2020 presidential recount. Georgia election officials determined mistakes in 2020 by county election workers would not have changed the outcome.
Georgia Secretary of State investigators said they are unable to determine how many of the invalid ballots were included in the results used to certify the 2020 election. Democrat Joe Biden narrowly defeated GOP nominee Donald Trump by nearly 12,000 votes.
State officials reported that there were 3,075 duplicate ballot images, but they were unable to determine how many of the ones cast were tabulated in the recount. The court case revolves around apparent discrepancies between the initial recount totals in November 2020 and the corrected totals released a day later by Fulton County.
According to Fulton’s initial results, Trump received 137,240 votes out of 524,659, while Biden received 381,144. Following a recount requested by Trump’s lawyers, the final results led to the former president gaining seven additional votes and Biden losing 932.
In January 2021, Fulton officials acknowledged failures to properly back up data to servers during the recount. A Fulton election official told the state election officials that the discrepancy likely resulted from the mishandling of ballot batches and that changes have since been made to separate ballots once they’re scanned.
Election board member Ed Lindsey Jr. offered a motion Tuesday to reprimand Fulton and appoint an independent monitor who could be in place prior to the November general election. --->READ MORE HERE
Board Refuses To Have Fulton County Investigated For Double-Scanning 3,000 Ballots In 2020 Recount:
wo Republican members of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections voted not to certify the 2020 presidential election citing a litany of concerns with the county’s election administration. Now — four years later — the State Election Board (SEB) chided the county for violating the law during the 2020 election but stopped short of referring the case for further investigation by the attorney general.
The SEB ruled 2-1 Tuesday that Fulton County must have an independent election monitor to oversee its elections after it found more than 3,000 ballots were scanned twice during the 2020 presidential recount.
The Georgia secretary of state’s office could not confirm how many of the ballots that were scanned twice were also counted, according to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution (AJC). General counsel for the secretary of state’s office Charlene McGowan said their investigation found “there are some duplicative ballot images in the ballot images that Fulton County provided, but what cannot be confirmed conclusively is if those ballots were included in the count.”
“Fulton County used improper procedures during the recount of the presidential contest in 2020,” McGowan concluded.
There are also 380,761 ballot images from the 2020 Election Day machine count that are “not available,” state board member Janice Johnston said during Tuesday’s meeting.
McGowan told the SEB that the subpoena for Fulton County was for recount data rather than Election Day data. Johnston then asked Fulton County about the 380,761 missing ballot images, to which Ann Brumbaugh, who is legal counsel for the Fulton County Board of Elections, said it was the “first time” she was hearing of these allegations.
Harrison Floyd, one of the co-defendants in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ lawfare case against former President Donald Trump, claimed in a post on X that the county was lying.
“This is NOT the first time Fulton County has heard this allegation because we made it in COURT and my attorneys subpoenaed them for the images,” Floyd wrote. “Fulton County is refusing the comply with our subpoena.”
Floyd subpoenaed the county’s election board seeking copies of the voting system “of each original unique native ballots cast for all mail-in, absentee, and Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act” for the 2020 election. The Board then filed a “Motion to Quash Subpoena” in 2023. --->READ MORE HERE
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