ATLANTA, Georgia – Georgia Republican Party Chair and former state senator David Shafer said Wednesday that election officials unlawfully counted thousands of ballots outside the presence of designated observers.
Shafer also said thousands of ballots vanished. And no one counted them.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) has launched two separate investigations — and Georgia Republicans are urging him to launch a third, Shafer said.
“The margin [for the election results] is narrowing with each discovery of errors, but the issue here is larger than the outcome of the presidential race,” Shafer told The Georgia Star News Wednesday.
“We need a system that counts every lawful vote and rejects every unlawful vote and gives people confidence that the winners of the election are the ones who take office.”
Shafer tweeted Wednesday that one monitor discovered a 9,626 vote error in the DeKalb County hand count.
“One batch was labeled 10,707 for Biden and 13 for Trump — an improbable margin even by DeKalb standards. The actual count for the batch was 1,081 for Biden and 13 for Trump,” Shafer said.
“Had this counting error not been discovered, Biden would have gained enough votes from this one batch alone to cancel out Trump’s gains from Fayette, Floyd, and Walton. We were limited to one monitor for every 10 counting tables and we were kept some distance from the tables. There is no telling what we missed under these unreasonable restrictions. The miscounted batch had been signed off by two official counters.”
Twitter, however, disputed Shafer’s statement as did two members of the legacy mainstream press in separate tweets.
Cook Political Report editor Dave Wasserman, for instance, called Shafer’s tweet “grossly misleading.”
“The recording error during the DeKalb hand count doesn’t impact the overall Georgia margin because the tally was recorded correctly in the original count,” Wasserman tweeted.
But Shafer, a longtime conservative warrior in Georgia politics, fired back and told Wasserman that he was wrong.
“We have no idea whether either the first or second hand count matches the original machine count because the audit has not been completed,” Shafer tweeted.
Meanwhile, Brendan Keefe of Atlanta-based WXIA told Shafer that the original machine count got it right.
“Human hand count of one batch in audit got it wrong and was immediately caught–because there can’t be 10,000 + votes in a 1,000 + vote batch. Corrected on the spot,” Keefe tweeted.
“No conspiracy or change in outcome of margin. No ‘extra’ votes added.”
But Shafer told Keefe he was also incorrect, too.
“The error was not ‘immediately caught’ or ‘corrected on the spot.’ It was discovered by a Republican monitor after TWO official vote counters signed off on the erroneous report. It took a brief argument and hours of recounting to collect the error,” Shafer tweeted.
Elsewhere on Twitter Tuesday and Wednesday, Shafer, guns blazing, said he was “still reeling at how this election was so adamantly declared to have been ‘free from irregularity’ before votes were counted, machines audited, or returns certified.”
Shafer also tweeted one or more unidentified people discovered a total of 2,755 uncounted votes in Fayette County, with more uncounted votes discovered during the hand count, mostly for Donald Trump, because no one uploaded a memory card.
Meanwhile, in Walton County election officials there found a memory card that no one uploaded. The number of uncounted votes is not as large as in Floyd County or Fayette County, but President Donald Trump will still pick up votes, Shafer tweeted
“We are waiting on a lot of the large urban counties to report,” Shafer told The Star News.
“The large counties are the ones that have historically had trouble conducting the elections, so you would expect them to find mistakes, but they are auditing themselves, and our observers have not had meaningful access to the audit. Our observers have not had a meaningful opportunity to view the audit.”
Georgia adopted a new voting system earlier this year. This is the first election that has paper backup ballots that people can use to audit the machine counts, Shafer said.
“We are doing everything in our power to make sure that the lawful votes are counted and unlawful votes are rejected,” Shafer said.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star and the Star News Network. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “David Shafer” by David Shafer. Background Photo “Ballot” by Matthew Johnson. CC BY 2.0.
