VoterGA officials announced this week that nearly 107,000 drop box ballots in the November 2020 election results have improper chain of custody forms, and that calls into question the authenticity of those ballots.
This, according to a new chain of custody study that VoterGA members released Thursday.
“It’s many counties,” VoterGA co-founder Garland Favorito told The Georgia Star News on Friday.
“Fulton County had a lot of problems, but we use examples from a lot of counties around the state. It’s pretty much scattered all over the state.”
Favorito said his organization is non-partisan and has advocated for election integrity for 15 years.
VoterGA members said at a press conference this week that they found violations in Brooks, Franklin, Cobb, and Rockdale counties, among others. They said the study resulted from a statewide analysis of ballot transfer forms obtained via open records requests.
The findings, VoterGA members said, are preliminary.
“The number is expected to increase dramatically as more counties acknowledge they cannot produce oaths for collection team members or admit they have destroyed surveillance videos in spite of federal and state retention laws that require election records to be retained for about two years,” according to a VoterGA press release.
“The findings do not include missing forms that have been previously estimated to grow to approximately 355,000. Further, VoterGAdiscovered that most counties have no records of how many total ballots were collected from drop boxes so there is no way to determine how many ballots were collected when several days’ worth of forms are missing. Specifically, improper chain of custody issues entails violations of State Election Board (SEB) rules or impossible circumstances in the forms.”
Examples of violations include:
• Chain of custody forms that are unsigned by collection team members
• Forms with only one person identified on the pickup team
• Forms with no name of who received it at the County Election Center
• Forms not received on same day of pickup
VoterGA said they also identified problems with drop box videos, many of which they said were prematurely destroyed by the counties.
Georgia gubernatorial candidate Vernon Jones this month called on the federal government – and not State Attorney General Chris Carr – to investigate new claims of ballot harvesting during the 2020 election.
Georgia authorities are investigating an allegation of systematic ballot harvesting during the state’s 2020 general election and subsequent U.S. Senate runoff, according to Just the News. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told the publication that state government officials may issue subpoenas in the case to secure evidence.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star and The Georgia Star News. Follow Chris on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, and GETTR. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Garland Favorito” by Garland Favorito. Background Photo “Drop Box for Ballots” by Paul Sableman. CC BY 2.0.
