by WorldTribune Staff, May 8, 2024
Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington said via Telegam on May 7: “Very important Georgia State Election Board meeting coming up at 9:30 a.m. The last item on the agenda involves 20,977 unsubstantiated votes in the 2020 Election recount and 20,713 votes in the first count from tabulators that ‘do not exist.’ In other words, they got caught. What will be done about it?”
Practically nothing, critics say.
The Georgia Board of Elections on Tuesday voted 2-1 to to admonish Fulton County and order a monitor for this year’s campaigns.
What critics said was a mere slap on the wrist allows Fulton County to avoid paying a fine or having the attorney general investigate the double-counting of ballots and other allegations of irregularities during the 2020 presidential recount, the Georgia Recorder reported.
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, which Joe Biden reportedly won by less than 12,000 votes.
“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,” the Georgia Recorder report said.
State Election Board member Janice Johnston, an appointee of the Georgia Republican Party, voted against the motion on Tuesday, citing the need for a more comprehensive examination of Fulton County’s election operations.
“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,” she said.
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. If the state election and Fulton officials fail to agree on who to hire as the election monitor, he said, then he would recommend in July that the board ask the state attorney general to take the case.
“My purpose here is not to let it ride but to move this matter forward so that we can have some assurance regarding the 2024 election,” said Lindsey, a Republican and former lawmaker who was appointed to the state election board by the Georgia House of Representatives in January 2022.
Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, described Tuesday’s board meeting as a forum for conflicting information provided by people with an ax to grind, officials with a reason to be defensive including the secretary of state and Fulton, as well as members of the Georgia election board.
Good Governance is a lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit contesting the security of Georgia’s electronic voting machines due to cybersecurity threats.
“The entire debate about the Rossi complaint concerning materially inaccurate Fulton 2020 audit tallies, and machine recount tallies, including thousands of double-counted votes made one thing crystal clear: the State Election Board is failing in its investigative duties by assigning the SOS office to investigate election code violations where the SOS office itself is accused of wrongdoing, as in this case,” Marks said in a statement. “The Board’s investigations must be conducted independent of interested parties, to provide objectivity and transparency.”
Marks said that the dispute over 17,000 missing ballot images could be resolved after Gov. Brian Kemp on Tuesday signed an election bill allowing the public to inspect paper ballots.
“However, thanks to the legislation Gov. Kemp signed today, the truth about the 2020 count, likely still confirming Biden’s win, will come out. Given that the public will be able to require a new scan of the ballots themselves, the SOS claims that they cannot determine whether ballots were double counted will be shown to be false, with many ballots for both candidates being double counted in the official machine recount. The ballots representing the 17,000+ final votes where the images cannot be located, can be examined now and their existence verified.”
2020 accountability? Fulton County gets off with a slap on the wrist from Georgia Board of Elections added by Editor Two on May 8, 2024
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