Georgia Election Officials Thoroughly Debunk Trump's Lies

Georgia Opens Investigation Into Possible Illegal Ballot Harvesting In 2020 Election
Martin Walsh, January 5, 2022

Georgia authorities have opened an investigation into allegations of systematic ballot harvesting during the state’s 2020 general election and subsequent U.S. Senate runoff.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told Just The News that officials could soon secure subpoenas.

“Georgia law strictly prohibits third-party activists from picking up and delivering ballots on behalf of voters, a tactic called “harvesting” that liberal organizers have tried to get legalized in many battleground states without success. The U.S. Supreme Court this summer rejected Democrat efforts to overturn an Arizona law that outlawed harvesting in the battleground state,” Just The News reported.

“Raffensperger, who is seeking reelection in 2022, led a successful effort in 2019 to strengthen Georgia’s prohibition against harvesting ahead of the 2020 presidential election and defeated an effort by prominent Democrat lawyer Marc Elias to overturn the harvesting ban. Raffensperger also reviewed and rejected claims by former President Donald Trump of widespread fraud during the 2020 election in a series of contracts under investigation by a local district attorney in Atlanta and the Jan. 6 select committee in Congress,” the outlet reported.

The report continued:

According to interviews and documents reviewed by Just the News, Raffensperger’s office received a detailed complaint from conservative voter integrity group True the Vote on Nov. 30 saying it had assembled evidence that scores of activists worked with nonprofit groups to collect and deliver thousands of absentee ballots, often during wee-hour operations, to temporary voting drop boxes distributed around the state during the pandemic.

The group informed the secretary its evidence included video footage from surveillance cameras placed by counties outside the drop boxes as well as geolocation data for the cell phones of more than 200 activists seen on the tapes purportedly showing the dates and times of ballot drop-offs, according to documents reviewed by Just the News.

The group also said it interviewed a Georgia man who admitted he was paid thousands of dollars to harvest ballots in the Atlanta metropolitan area during the November election and the lead-up to Jan. 5, 2021 runoff for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats, which were both captured by Democrats and ended GOP control of Congress. The group has yet to identify the cooperating witness to state authorities, referring to him in the complaint simply as John Doe.

Raffensperger told Just The News that his office has deemed the allegations credible enough to open an investigation and possibly seek subpoenas from the State Election Board to secure evidence.

“We do have some information,” Raffensperger said. “And we are going to investigate that. We did deploy drop boxes that were under 24/7 surveillance, and because they were then that really, you know, can indicate who dropped that information off, and we’re really just going through that.”

Raffensperger conceded the allegation that a specific individual engaged in illegal harvesting warrants investigation.

“If people give us, you know, credible allegations, we want to make sure that we do that,” Raffensperger told Just the News. “And we have that right now as an ongoing investigation.”

“That will be one of the processes we’re looking at if we have people that don’t want to come forward for whatever concern because we really need to get to the bottom of it,” he said during the interview. “We just can’t let it sit there and lie. So if it comes to that, then that’s probably the next step that we’d be looking at.”

Georgia Voting Bungled: Hand Recount Drops Democrat Winner to 3rd Place
Jon Dougherty, June 3, 2022

A shocking new report lays bare the anxiety many voters continue to feel about ballot integrity following the 2020 elections.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Democratic primary for a county in Georgia has been called into question after a hand count revealed that voting machines were off by thousands of ballots.

Democratic DeKalb County School Board member Marshall Orson, who is running for the county commission, asked the local election board on Thursday not to certify results as it was scheduled to do because of “numerous errors” with the local race, the paper noted.

Instead, he requested an “independent review” as well as a formal recount of the election in a letter to the board.

“There is no rational basis for believing that there are not continuing issues with the results and the results should not be certified with the continuing existence of multiple substantive issues and concerns,” Orson wrote. “Doing so would pose a substantial risk not only to the confidence the public will have in the overall election results from this race but could extend to the entire primary as well as the general election.”

Just the News adds:

The initial Democratic primary results showed Orson winning for commission District 2 with Lauren Alexander in second place and Michelle Long Spears in third. This would have put Orson against Alexander in a runoff election.

However, Spears noticed that the results showed she received zero votes at most election precincts.

The secretary of state’s office admitted late last month to making several programing mistakes in the ballot equipment that affected the final tally.

There was an attempted re-scan of the ballots in District 2, but ultimately a hand count was conducted, concluding around midnight on Memorial Day.

Wednesday evening, the results of a hand count were published, which showed that Spears, the last-place candidate, is now in first place and is heading for a June 21 runoff election against Alexander. Former first-place finisher Orson, meanwhile, was pushed down to third place.

Spears managed to gain about 2,600 votes from the original matching count, and Alexander managed to collect a few hundred more as well, according to the Journal-Constitution. But Orson lost some 1,600 votes from the original vote tally.

Reports noted that the Dekalb County Election Board is scheduled to certify the results Friday afternoon.

Georgia has been one of a handful of states experiencing significant election controversies beginning with the 2020 elections.

For instance, “a complaint filed in April to the Georgia State Election Board claims that more than 300,000 ballots in the 2020 election were unreliably recorded in state’s largest county of Fulton,” Just the News reported.

In March, a ballot harvesting investigation launched by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s (R) office also moved forward after the state’s election board approved a sought-after subpoena following allegations stemming from the 2020 election.

The subpoena allowed Raffensperger’s office to begin gathering evidence and testimony into what has been an ongoing probe regarding whether third-party liberal activists illegally collected thousands of absentee ballots in the general election in November as well as a subsequent run-off election that wound up determining Democratic control of the U.S. Senate, Just the News reported, adding:

The vote was a major win for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who announced the investigation into alleged ballot harvesting in January and was seeking the subpoena authority to assist the probe.

The subpoena power will allow Raffensperger’s team to secure evidence about a whistleblower who alleged to an election integrity group that he participated in a large operation to gather ballots in which activists were paid $10 for each ballot they delivered.

Georgia law expressly prohibits third parties from collecting, gathering, or delivering absentee ballots, except in the case of immediate relatives.

“A vote on whether to issue the subpoena had been delayed several weeks because the Elections Board could not determine who would be its new chairperson. However, the board unanimously chose member Matthew Mashburn last week during a meeting to serve as interim chairman. Afterward, the board voted in favor of the subpoena during a closed-door session,” Just the News reported.