Board Refuses To Have Fulton County Investigated For Double-Scanning 3,000 Ballots In 2020 Recount
Two 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.
The Georgia Recorder claimed that “election officials determined mistakes in 2020 by county election workers would not have changed the outcome.” President Joe Biden won the Peach State by 11,779 votes. Following the election, a law was passed requiring ballot images to be kept for two years after each vote.
The complaint over Fulton County’s handling of the election was brought by Joseph Rossi and Kevin Moncla, who alleged in filings the presence of 3,125 duplicate ballots as well as “17,852 votes … for which no physical ballot was in evidence.”
Board member Ed Lindsey acknowledged the “clear evidence that in 2020 there were numerous violations of regulations and statutes,” but nonetheless proposed a motion to give Fulton County a mere slap on the wrist. His motion, which the SEB adopted, “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,” according to the Georgia Recorder.
Republicans including the DeKalb County GOP called on Lindsey to resign in March over his voting on cases that appeared before the board involving clients he lobbied for, as The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood reported. Lindsey is a registered lobbyist for the DeKalb and Cobb County governments.
“Lindsey also previously lobbied on behalf of the National Vote at Home Coalition, a left-wing organization that pushes insecure mail-in voting policies and notably interfered in the 2020 election to boost Democrats,” Fleetwood reported.
Johnston voted against the motion in favor of more accountability for the county.
“Either the votes should be invalidated or the paper ballots should be investigated to verify their authenticity,” Johnston said, according to the AJC. “There’s no way this election or recount should have been certified.”
“With over 140 violations of election laws and rules, it would be a travesty not to refer this to the Attorney General and let this ride,” Johnston added.
Voters Organized for Trusted Election Results in Georgia condemned the board for not referring “the most important case in its history to the Attorney General for investigation and prosecution.”
The SEB previously reprimanded the county after it failed during the 2022 primary to count 1,326 votes. The county fixed the error and the election was “recertified” in June of 2022, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
In 2023 the AJC reported that during the audit of the 2020 presidential election in Fulton County, there were “several cases” in which election workers “mistyped vote totals or allocated votes to the wrong candidate” but that the State Election Board simply “ordered Fulton County to ‘cease and desist’ from violations in future audits, implement new audit procedures and adequately train elections staff.”
Last year, the board unanimously voted not to take over elections in Fulton County.
The revelations come four years after the two Republican members of the Fulton County Elections Board at the time did not vote to certify the election. Among the commissioners’ concerns, the first certification was held Nov. 13 “but the county was still finding, processing, and tabulating absentee ballots as late as November 12,” The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway wrote in her best-seller Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections..
“Later, during the runoff, the county would discover thumb drives accidentally left in voting machines, further worrying the Republican commissioners about chain-of-custody issues and inventory management,” Hemingway detailed in her book.
The commissioners further cited concerns about signature matching, “how Fulton County maintains its registered voter database,” and “the fact that there was no chain-of-custody information provided for the thirty-eight ballot drop boxes spread throughout the county,” according to Rigged.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
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