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Georgia Secretary of State’s office said Friday they are investigating the early departure of poll observers in Atlanta following the release of a video that shows black containers being wheeled out from under a table, as the Trump team alleged that no ballot monitors were present during that time.
Walter Jones, a spokesman for the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, told The Epoch Times via email that the agency “was aware that Fulton County scanning had continued during the period captured in the video presented at the Senate hearing.”
“This office dispatched an investigator and notified the independent monitor appointed by the State Election Board who both observed scanning until it was halted for the night around midnight. The independent monitor has overseen elections all over the world,” he added.
“We have launched an investigation into why the monitors from the political parties left before scanning ended. While it was their right to leave early, we want to make certain they were not misled into thinking scanning had stopped for the night when it had not. Nothing we have learned from the independent monitor or our investigation have suggested any improper ballots were scanned.”
Over the past month, there have been conflicting statements from election officials about what happened at the State Farm Arena on the night of November 3. GOP officials said that poll observers left the tabulation area after 10 pm before workers started counting ballots again until the early morning hours.
On the night of Nov. 3, Fulton County spokeswoman Regina Waller told ABC News that ballot counters were sent home for the night at around 10.30 pm, which appears to dispute claims made in a fact-checking article, citing state election officials on Thursday, saying “there was never an announcement made to the media” about observers being told counting was over for the night.
Waller confirmed to The Epoch Times in an email that she told ABC that some workers left but four remained.
While one Georgia election official, Frances Watson, claimed nobody told poll observers to stay or go, GOP officials in the state have disputed the claim.
Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer on Friday wrote of the new official narrative: “They were told to leave.”
State officials on Thursday, in response to the video, said that only a certain type of worker—a “cutter”—was sent home while vote counters stuck around. One of them, Gabriel Sterling, told media outlets on Friday the video shows nothing unusual although he did not explain why the election workers pulled out the suitcase-looking containers from under a table after other workers—and allegedly the poll observers—left the area.
He did not elaborate on where the black container boxes came from or who placed them beneath the table.
“The 90-second video of election workers at State Farm arena, purporting to show fraud was watched in its entirety (hours) by @GaSecofState investigators,” Sterling wrote on Twitter, adding it was “normal ballot harvesting.”
A Fulton County spokeswoman told The Epoch Times via email that the video “is not a credible report of voter fraud,” adding, “The matter has already been investigated and it has been confirmed that there is no fraud.”
Also unclear is why Fulton County officials said a pipe burst caused a two-hour delay to vote counting in a room where absentee ballots were tabulated at the State Farm Arena.
A local attorney who filed a records request about the burst pipe only received a brief text message exchange about the incident describing it as “highly exaggerated … a slow leak that caused about an hour-and-a-half delay” and that “we contained it quickly—it did not spread,” according to the text conversation that the attorney, Paul Dzikowski, shared with The Epoch Times.
“As it turns out, there never was a burst pipe or water main, which some news outlets reported,” Dzikowski told The Epoch Times in an email.
During the Thursday Georgia Legislature hearing where the video was shown, Jacki Pick, a lawyer volunteering for Trump’s legal efforts, noted, “Everyone clears out, including the Republican observers and the press, but four people stay behind and continue counting and tabulating well into the night.” It occurred at around 10 p.m., while the workers stayed until after 1 a.m., according to Pick and the video footage.
Pick said that at 11 p.m., once everyone was gone, workers are seen pulling out the suitcase-looking containers and asked rhetorically whether it’s normal to “store suitcases of ballots under a table cloth.” She added that it doesn’t appear to be a normal procedure after the Trump team reviewed hours of footage.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp told Fox News on Thursday that the video is “concerning” to him and asked Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to offer an explanation.
“I think it would be good for [Raffensberger] to come out and say exactly what was going on. But I think this also gives him an opportunity to really look at specifically at the Fulton County recount that’s still going on to make sure that that recount has been done in the right way and that we know if these were ballots, were they counted correctly and if there were signatures on that,” Kemp said.
Reporter : Ivan Pentchoukov / Publisher : The Epoch Times PREMIUM
President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign filed an election contest in Georgia on Dec. 4, alleging violations of the Constitution and state laws.
The contest petition (pdf), filed in the Superior Court of Fulton County, states that several Georgia election officials committed “repeated violations of the election code” which “constituted an abandonment of the legislature’s duly enacted framework for conducting the election and for choosing presidential electors, contrary to Georgia law and the United States Constitution.”
The campaign is asking the court to declare that ineligible voters cast votes during the Nov. 3 election, void the results of the election, and order a new presidential election in the state, among other remedies.
“What was filed today clearly documents that there are literally tens of thousands of illegal votes that were cast, counted, and included in the tabulations the Secretary of State is preparing to certify,” Ray Smith, the lead counsel for the Trump campaign, said. “The massive irregularities, mistakes, and potential fraud violate the Georgia Election Code, making it impossible to know with certainty the actual outcome of the presidential race in Georgia.”
The complaint is accompanied by sworn affidavits from Georgia residents who allege that election officials failed to verify signatures on ballots and prevented Republican poll monitors from adequately observing the voted count. Some of the affidavits describe the appearance of oddly “pristine” absentee and mail-in ballots which missed the creases created when the ballots are folded to fit into a privacy envelope.
The petitioners also cite data experts who identified several groups of people who voted illegally, including “2,560 felons; 66,247 underage voters, 2,423 votes from people not registered; 1,043 individuals registered at post office boxes; 4,926 individuals who voted in Georgia after registering in another state; 395 individuals who voted in two states; 15,700 votes from people who moved out of state before the election; 40,279 votes of people who moved without re-registering in their new county; and another 30,000 to 40,000 absentee ballots lacking proper signature matching and verification.”
“The Secretary of State has orchestrated the worst excuse for an election in Georgia history,” Smith said. “We are asking the Court to vacate the certification of the presidential election and to order a new statewide election for president.”
In the week leading up to the filing of the contest, Georgia conducted a machine recount of the presidential election which is expected to show former Vice President Joe Biden in the lead.
Reporter : Zachiary Stieber / Publisher : The Epoch Times PREMIUM
Several poll observers in Georgia said under penalty of perjury that they were effectively told to go home on election night before ballot counting resumed for several hours with no observers present.
Republican poll observers Mitchell Harrison and Michelle Branton said in affidavits that at approximately 10:30 p.m. on Nov. 3 inside an absentee ballot counting room State Farm Arena, a woman shouted to everyone to stop working and return the following morning at 8:30 a.m.
“This lady had appeared through the night and Mitchell and I believed her to be the supervisor,” Branton wrote in an affidavit.
Following the instruction, nearly all workers left, except a handful of people. All ballot counting stopped.
The poll observers were the only outsiders left, along with a Fox News crew. Harrison spent time seeking answers from Regina Waller, the Fulton County’s public affairs manager for elections, but she refused to answer the questions, he said in an affidavit.
A few minutes later, Branton, Harrison, and the crew left. Only four people remained in the room including Waller, when they had departed.
The group later heard that ballot counting had resumed at the arena, despite the public being told that it had ceased for the night. Observers rushed back at around 1 a.m. on Nov. 4 and found that to be the case.
David Shafer, the head of Georgia’s Republican Party, said Thursday in a statement: “Our Republican observers and members of the news media departed State Farm when they announced they were shutting down for the night and would resume counting at 8:30 a.m. the next day.”
Citing surveillance video footage that showed everyone leave but a handful of workers, he said the workers “continued counting ballots in secret until 1 a.m.”
The footage was presented by President Donald Trump’s campaign during a state legislature hearing this week. It appears to show a few workers pulling out boxes filled with ballots from underneath tables and counting them after the room cleared.
Officials insist the video does not show fraud. They said Friday they are probing why poll observers left on election night.
“We have launched an investigation into why the monitors from the political parties left before scanning ended. While it was their right to leave early, we want to make certain they were not misled into thinking scanning had stopped for the night when it had not,” Walter Jones, a spokesman for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, told The Epoch Times via email.
The issue appears to center around semantics. While observers weren’t explicitly told to leave, they believed counting was stopping because officials made it seem that way.
Waller told ABC on election night that the county’s election department sent the ballot counters at the arena home at 10:30 p.m. Waller told The Epoch Times in an email, “For clarification, I informed ABC News that some workers left but four remained.”
Raffensperger and his team “are busily ‘investigating’ whether or not Fulton County elections officials sent our monitors home on election night, as if that question is actually in dispute,” Shafer wrote in a tweet on Friday. Gabriel Sterling, an official in Raffensperger’s office, “has accepted Fulton County’s explanation that the Republican monitors and news media are to blame for believing the election officials who told them that they were shutting down, packed up the voting equipment, and started cleaning,” Shafer added in another post.
Sterling said in a statement that the video “shows normal ballot processing.” He said investigators with his office watched the surveillance footage. Sterling and other state officials have said Fulton County “cut corners” and showed “managerial sloppiness” in handling the election and subsequent recounts.
A county spokeswoman told The Epoch Times on the day after the election Registration & Elections Director Richard Barron told the Board of Commissioners that when he learned that staff were dismissed at 10:30 p.m., he advised that some workers needed to continue.
“Based on that directive, a smaller crew continued to work through the night. It may be possible that observers left at the time the majority of the staff left, but from the information we have, the processing area was never closed to observers,” she wrote.
Other people in Georgia said they were inexplicably told to go home.
Poll manager Susan Voyles, who was helping audit ballots at Georgia World Congress Centers, said she was told to go home on Nov. 15 after counting just 60 ballots, even though workers at nearby tables had thousands to process.
“We offered to help on some larger piles that were still evident, and the officials present were adamant that they did not need any help,” she said in an affidavit.
That same day, county officials told most of the counters to go home around 9:10 a.m., Maria Diedrich, a monitor for Trump’s campaign, said in an affidavit.
Still other observers claimed they directly witnessed fraud.
Carlos Silva, a trial lawyer from Florida, said in an affidavit that he saw two vote counters in Dekalb County pull out a pile of ballots that had two distinct characteristics.
“One, I noticed that they all had a perfect black bubble and were all Biden select. I was able to observe the perfect bubble for a few minutes before they made me move away from the table. At no time did I speak to the poll workers or obstruct them in any way. I heard them go through the stack and call out Biden’s name over 500 times in a row,” he said.
He also said he witnessed something similar in Cobb County.
Nicholas Zeher, another observer, said he saw vote counters or anyone else verifying signatures as ballots were counted. He also said he saw ballots on a review table with markings only for Biden and no other candidate. And he saw a batch of ballots where the bubble for Biden appeared to be a perfect black mark.
The affidavits were entered in Pearson v. Kemp.
News (10) Updated 6/12/20
Reporter : Allen Zhong / Publisher : The Epoch Times PREMIUM
President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he will win Georgia if a signature verification is ordered in The Peach State.
“I will easily & quickly win Georgia if Governor @BrianKempGA or the Secretary of State permits a simple signature verification. Has not been done and will show large scale discrepancies. Why are these two “Republicans” saying no? If we win Georgia, everything else falls in place!” he wrote on Twitter.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, said he spoke with the president on Saturday morning and has called for a signature three times.
“I’ve publicly called for a signature audit three times (November 20, 24, December 3) to restore confidence in our election process and to ensure the only legal votes are counted in Georgia,” he wrote in a Twitter post.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment from The Epoch Times.
The Peach State has certified the election results with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leading Trump by around 12,000 votes, 0.25 percent. The Trump campaign has launched legal challenges over the results because widespread irregularities and fraud were reported.
The Biden campaign did not respond immediately to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.
The final results of the general election in Georgia will likely be decided by the state legislature branch or judges.
Kemp doubled down on a signature audit after Trump’s legal team presented surveillance footage during a Georgia state legislature hearing. The video shows election workers continuing to count what appeared to be four boxes filled with ballots after poll observers left State Farm Arena in Fulton County.
“I called early on for a signature audit,” Kemp said on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” on Dec. 3. “Obviously, the Secretary of State, per the laws and the [state] constitution would have to order that and he has not done that. I think it should be done.”
Several poll observers said in sworn affidavits that they were effectively told to go home on Election Night before the event.
Georgia Secretary of State’s office said on Friday that they’re investigating the early departure of poll observers.
“We have launched an investigation into why the monitors from the political parties left before scanning ended. While it was their right to leave early, we want to make certain they were not misled into thinking scanning had stopped for the night when it had not. Nothing we have learned from the independent monitor or our investigation have suggested any improper ballots were scanned,” Walter Jones, a spokesman for the Georgia Secretary of State’s office told The Epoch Times.
Zachary Stieber and Katabella Roberts contributed to the report.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp called on Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to order a signature audit of votes after the release of video footage appears to show poll workers in Fulton County processing ballots in the middle of the night with no observers.
Speaking to Fox News, Governor Brian Kemp said, “I think it should be done. I think especially with what we saw today, it raises more questions. There needs to be transparency on that.”
The video he refers to was presented by the Trump campaign during a hearing this Thursday. The surveillance footage was filmed on Election Day, inside Georgia’s largest vote-counting center.
A lawyer who volunteered for the Trump campaign testified in the hearing.
“According to the witnesses, the Republican observers, there is the lady who has blonde braids, who comes out to announce ‘we’re going to stop counting, everyone go home,'” said Jackie Pick.
After the Republican observers left, four poll workers stayed behind.
“And they will continue counting unobserved, unsupervised, not in public view, as your statute requires, until about one in the morning,” said Pick.
At around 11 p.m., the workers pulled out boxes of ballots from a table covered with cloth.
“So what are these ballots doing there separate from all the other ballots? And why are they only counting them whenever the place is cleared out with no witnesses?” asked Pick.
Pick added that according to the footage, ballots are usually stored in the corner or come through the front door, it’s an unusual practice for them to be put under a covered table.
She said each machine can process about 3,000 ballots an hour, and there are multiple machines in the room, which raises another question.
“So you do the math, how many ballots went through those machines in those two hours when there was no one there to supervise to be present consistent with your statutes and rules, to supervise the tabulation? We believe that could easily be and probably is certainly beyond the margin of victory in this race. Because if only three scanners working for two hours, right? That’s 18,000 ballots that went through,” said Pick.
Currently, Biden leads Trump by less than 12,000 votes in Georgia.
It is unclear if the votes tabulated without supervision were for Trump or Biden.
Two election officials in Georgia disputed some claims from the Trump campaign. They alleged no one asked the poll watchers to leave or stay, but did not clarify why the ballots were pulled out from the covered table after the poll watchers were cleared.
Ref: https://www.theepochtimes.com/georgia-governor-calls-for-signature-audit_3605981.html
Reporter : Melanie Sun / Publisher : The Epoch Times PREMIUM
President Donald Trump told thousands of supporters gathered at a rally in Georgia on Saturday night that the election was stolen from them, pointing to “overwhelming” evidence of fraud in the results of the presidential election.
“If I lost, I’d be a very gracious loser,” Trump told a large crowd gathered at Valdosta Regional Airport. “But you can’t ever accept when they steal and rig and rob.”
Trump was attending the rally in support of the two incumbent Georgia senators—businesswoman Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and former business executive Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.).
“We’re here to ensure that David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler win the most important congressional runoff in congressional history, I really believe that,” Trump said.
The two face a runoff race against Democrat challengers filmmaker Jon Ossoff and pastor Raphael Warnock on Jan. 5 next year. Ossoff and Warnock held a virtual rally with former President Barack Obama on Dec. 4.
Trump said the challengers were two of the “most extreme far-left liberal Senate candidates in the history of our country.”
“You must go vote, and vote early starting Dec. 14,” Trump told the crowd. “They cheated and they rigged our presidential election, but we will still win it. And they’re going to try and rig this election too,” he said.
“The voters of Georgia will determine which party runs every committee, writes every piece of legislation, control every single taxpayer dollar. Very simply, you will decide whether your children grow up in a socialist country or whether they will grow up in a free country,” the president said. “And I will tell you this, socialist is just the beginning for these people. These people want to go further than socialism, they want to go into a communistic form of government, and I have no doubt about it.”
He then went on to list what he said were “irrefutable” facts presented in multiple legal cases now heading to the Supreme Court. He said that just some of the available evidence already reveals that enough illegal votes were counted in the presidential race to bring into question the outcome.
“For mail-in ballots—drastically less than the historic norm—in Georgia, 0.5 percent of the mail-in ballots were rejected in 2020 compared to 5.77 percent [in 2016],” Trump said. “That’s a difference of 11 times more.
“It’s hundreds of thousands of votes. … This issue alone is enough to change the election results in many states.”
Trump also remarked that the congressional results tell a very different story from the popular vote for the presidential election. Republicans didn’t lose a single seat in the House, Trump said, and this will potentially be true of the Senate.
“Think of it … normally, you lose 2, 3, 5, and you replay. We lost nobody sitting in Congress,” Trump said of the GOP under his leadership.
“I worked hard in the House with Kevin McCarthy, not losing a single legislative chamber and making big gains at the state level and holding onto the Senate … we better hold onto the Senate.”
Trump then said that with the record number of votes he secured, “the only way [Biden won] is they stuffed the ballot boxes.”
“Let me tell you, this election was rigged … We can’t let it happen again,” he told the crowd to chants of “Stop the steal.”
“We need somebody with courage, somebody that makes decisions,” he said. “We’ll be going up to the Supreme Court very shortly, and we really—if we have courage and wisdom—I think you know what the answer is going to be because you can’t let people get away with what they got away with.”
The president also expressed his condolences to families who have lost loved ones as a result of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic that escaped from Wuhan, as well as to the family of Harrison Deal, one of Loeffler’s young campaign staffers, who died in a car crash on Friday.
He reassured supporters that the “medical miracle” of vaccines are on their way “at a level that nobody ever thought possible” thanks to the many people working with the administration on the "Operation Warp Speed” effort.
Almost one million mail-in ballots have already been requested for the two runoff races, an elections official announced Wednesday.
“You have to get out, you have to vote,” Trump said. “Let them steal Georgia again, you’ll never be able to look yourself in the mirror. We have to hold the line.”
The deadline for voter registration is December 7.
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