Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (l) and chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state Gabriel Sterling, arrive to testify before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, June 21, 2022. (Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
In Fulton County, Georgia, serious flaws in the 2020 election recount operations were identified. The Secretary of State and his staff originally lied about these mistakes, but then collaborated with the Attorney General’s office and the State Elections Board to exonerate the Secretary of State.
Georgian Joseph Rossi discovered 36 errors in the Fulton County data in the RLA report posted on the SOS website. Despite being turned down and ignored, Rossi managed to get these errors in front of Governor Kemp’s office. Kemp and his team took action when errors were pointed out, putting a team of four individuals on the 36 errors identified by Rossi and spending 8 weeks confirming their work.
The Georgia State Elections Board (SEB) initiated an investigation into the Fulton County data from the RLA report, labeled SEB2021-181. The SEB identified violations and errors in the 2020 Election recounts in Fulton County. Another complaint for Fulton County was filed July 8, 2022, specifically calling out 3125 duplicate ballot counts and 17,852 votes counted that do not have a corresponding ballot image. This complaint resulted in the creation of investigation SEB2023-25, which is complete and will be presented to the SEB on December 19, 2023.
The SOS’s office lied about the accuracy of the recounts in Georgia. Post-Governor Kemp’s validation letter from November 17, 2021, the SOS’s office, the AG’s office, and the Georgia SEB worked to exonerate the SOS of any responsibility for these numerous errors and violations. There is also an open inquiry before the Georgia SEB (SEBBI2023-001) regarding Election Code Violations committed by the SOS.
The investigations noted in this series were independent of two court cases that occurred in Georgia after the 2020 Election. At least three individuals involved in a recount identified 148,000 fraudulent ballots, and Fulton county and state are still preventing access to these ballots. A separate audit of voting machines was initiated after the 2020 Election, showing that the systems used in Georgia had security issues and bad actors could hack into them and change election results.
Gabriel Sterling from the SOS’s office emailed Joseph Rossi on February 9, 2021. In this email he stated,
“All of the tally sheets have been available online on the SOS website for nearly 2 months. Here is the link…”
After reviewing the tally sheets for both Houston County and Fulton County, Rossi found errors with Fulton’s batch sheets and stated in an email to Sterling dated February 21, 2021,
“Note that the total vote count for Fulton based upon a summation of the Batch Tally Sheets = 246,922 votes, which falls far short of the final vote count for Fulton County = 525,283.”
Sterling responded to Rossi in an email dated February 24, 2021,
“After reviewing your email, we reviewed our inventory of physical batch sheets for Fulton. We have determined that not all documents were scanned to digital files. We are in the process of scanning those documents. We expect to have our website updated before the end of the week.”
The original Sterling statement regarding “all of the tally sheets,” was obviously false. Furthermore, this is the first indication that Sterling/SOS office never bothered to check the errored data posted on the SOS website for public view and also that they could not be trusted with their statements.
In Gabriel Sterling’s email to Joseph Rossi, of February 9, 2021 – when referring to the RLA Report for Fulton posted on the SOS website, he stated,
“We know with 100% certainty that the ballots were not tallied multiple times because the hand re-tally showed that…”
In June of 2022, at the Jan 6th hearing, at the 13:00 minute mark of the Raffensperger/Sterling testimony, Sterling states, with Raffensperger seated to his right,
“And by going through the hand tally that the Secretary pointed out we showed that if there had been multiple ballots scanned without a corresponding physical ballot, your counts would have been a lot higher than the ballots themselves.”
When referring to the RLA Hand Audit – Sterling described it as “dead on accurate.”
“When we did the 100% hand recount we found 3 counties that messed up, you know, fairly significantly…number 2 was Fulton County. All of a sudden they were off by several thousand ballots, well it’s because you scanned some of these ballots twice.”
The RLA Hand Audit for Fulton County, as posted on the SOS website, cannot be both “dead on accurate” and “off by several thousand ballots” due to multiple scanning. SOS Raffensperger admitted to multiple scanning of thousands of ballots and shared that the results were “dead on accurate” in his Jan 6th hearing. The SOS’s office worked with others to cover up and exonerate them of any wrongdoing, as they had contrasting claims regarding the 2020 Election results. (The Lead Report, 11/25/2023) (Archive)