Georgia Secretary of State Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling this week publicly criticized an audit of votes collected during last year’s presidential election in Arizona.
This, even though election officials in Georgia have failed to provide chain-of-custody documents from their respective state.
Sterling took to his personal social media to complain about the Arizona audit.
“This ‘audit’ in Arizona is another step in undermining confidence in elections,” Sterling tweeted.
“This process is neither transparent nor, likely, legal. Any ‘findings’ will be highly suspect now that chain of custody has been violated by partisan actors.”
Sterling, though, did not mention problems related to last year’s election, specifically chain-of-custody procedures, within his own state.
Nearly half a year after the 2020 Election, and four months after the original inquiry, Fulton County, Georgia officials have failed to fulfill a Georgia Star News’ Open Records Request. That request asked that Georgia secretary of state officials produce complete copies of all ballot transfer forms. Those forms document chain-of-custody in the transfer of absentee vote-by-mail ballots deposited in drop boxes to county registrars during the November 2020 election. This, as required by the Emergency Election Code Rule adopted by the Georgia State Election Board in July 2020.
On January 22, Fulton County Officials responded to The Star News’ Open Records request with two PDF files. As previously reported, those two files – one with a label that ended with BX-1, and another with a label that ended with BX-3 – showed ballot transfer form records for 36,635 absentee votes by mail ballots deposited in drop boxes.
That amount is significantly less than what was expected for Fulton County, given that The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that 145,000 absentee votes by mail ballots were cast in Fulton County in the November 3, 2020 general election out of more than 524,000 votes cast.
A poll of likely voters in Georgia conducted by John McLaughlin and Associates found that 26 percent of respondents said they voted absentee. When the pollster asked the absentee voters if they mailed or deposited their ballot in a drop box, 53 percent said they mailed their ballot while 46 percent said they used drop boxes.
Therefore, the expectation was that Fulton County would have about 67,000 absentee vote-by-mail ballots deposited in drop boxes. Instead, records show only a little more than half that number.
Arizona is having a major audit of more than two million ballots cast in the 2020 election in the state’s largest county, Maricopa. This is a process that the state Senate president claims has been stymied by county officials.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Gabriel Sterling” by Gabriel Sterling. Background Photo “Georgia Capital” by andre m. CC BY-SA 3.0.
