Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr has hired Fulton County Deputy District Attorney, Cara Convery, to head the state’s first Gang Prosecution Unit, per a Wednesday press release from the Office of the Attorney General.
“Cara Convery has established herself as a force in the field of criminal gang prosecution and is a proven leader in Georgia’s legal community,” Carr said.
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The Buckhead Public Safety Task Force (Legislative Reference No. 22-R-3001) issued its final report on Friday, with recommendations and a plan to curb crime in the northernmost Atlanta district, wherein the city stated a new police precinct will open up in June.
“Task Force participants were able to hear from a broad spectrum of public safety stakeholders, and I look forward to seeing that expertise translated into a meaningful action plan,” said District 7 Council member Howard Shook.
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With the Georgia General Assembly’s passage of the Election Integrity Act of 2021, otherwise known as SB202, the application of absentee ballot drop boxes looks significant different in the first statewide elections since the January 5, 2021, federal runoff and special election for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats.
The use of drop boxes in the November 2020 presidential and January 2021 elections were enabled by an emergency rule promulgated by the State Election Board in June of 2020. During the November 2020 election, more than 300 absentee ballot drop boxes were deployed throughout the state, funded with $45 million in “Zuck Bucks” that flowed through the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) into Georgia, according to analysis conducted by Capital Research Center.
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A new complaint to the Georgia State Election Board alleges that more than 300,000 ballots were unreliably recorded on unverified early voting poll closing tapes in Fulton County, Georgia in the 2020 election.
“Fulton County’s Advance Voting poll closing tapes are a fraudulent, un-certified, unsigned, and un-checked false representation of over 311,000 ballots that no court could legally accept,” the complaint alleges.
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A new complaint to the Georgia State Election Board alleges that more than 300,000 ballots were unreliably recorded on unverified early voting poll closing tapes in Fulton County, Georgia in the 2020 election.
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Gov. Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) was confronted over the weekend about election integrity during a Fulton County GOP event, and he responded by saying he was not responsible for Georgia’s consent decree, which some Republicans claim abolished signature verification and allowed for voter fraud in the state.
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A Georgia judge has issued an extraordinary ruling in requiring the state’s largest county to provide an “additional layer of security” for 2020 election records, handing former GOP Sen. David Perdue and 2022 gubernatorial candidate a major victory in his court-related, election-integrity efforts.
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Thursday morning on The John Fredericks Radio Show, host Fredericks talks to Georgia Senator Brandon Beach (#BeachBalls) and the last-minute play to dismiss a vote on election integrity in the Georgia state Senate.
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The Star News Network National Political Editor, Neil W. McCabe visited the Georgia State Capitol Thursday to ask Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger specific questions about the documents underpinning the 2020 election results.
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More than one year after the November 2020 presidential election, Fulton County election officials are offering conflicting accounts about whether video recordings, used to surveil drop boxes where absentee ballots were deposited in the November 2020 presidential election, have been destroyed and whether their actions comply with federal law that requires retention of all election records for 22 months.
The video recordings that may no longer exist would have monitored more than 60,000 absentee ballots being deposited into drop boxes during the majority 35 of the maximum 49 days drop boxes were allowed to have been deployed for the November 2020 presidential election.
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Former President Donald Trump on Thursday and Friday issued a pair of statements commenting on Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s attempts to investigate him for alleged election misconduct. On Thursday, Trump emailed supporters and said his phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger after the November 2020 election “was perfect.”
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Fulton County Commissioners discussed Wednesday whether to extend a contract to the controversial Happy Faces staffing firm, but the discussion irked Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. to such an extent he erupted in a fit of anger. And the longer Arrington spoke the louder and the more antagonized he got — especially when he talked about former President Donald Trump.
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Fulton County commissioners on Wednesday voted four to three to extend the contract with Happy Faces, a staffing firm said to have ties to Stacey Abrams. Commissioners voted this way, despite several people turning out to protest Happy Faces and any possible contract extension. To express their displeasure with Happy Faces, those audience members held up with signs and buttons with a crossed-out smiley face.
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The Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit, a division within the Georgia Attorney General’s office, indicted four Fulton County individuals on multiple trafficking and cruelty to children charges.
Two individuals, Raphel Olivia Sewer and Jody Netter, were charged with human trafficking and cruelty to children in the first degree. Netter also faces charges of rape and statutory rape.
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Pennsylvania Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee contractor Envoy Sage cannot yet gather data from Fulton County’s election devices according to a Friday order of the state Supreme Court.
That directive stays part of a recent Commonwealth-Court ruling that allows the investigation to proceed. Fulton County’s commissioners have voted to comply with the Senate probe, which is part of a broader examination of the 2020 and 2021 Pennsylvania elections and has been spearheaded by the committee’s Republican Chairman Cris Dush (R-Wellsboro). The Democrat-run Pennsylvania Department of State and the voting machines’ manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems are litigating to stop it.
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A far-left philanthropist who has been called “mini-Soros” is allegedly behind bail reform laws across America, including the one in Waukesha County, Wisconsin that freed career criminal Darell Brooks on $1000 bail before he allegedly plowed his SUV into participants of the Waukesha Christmas Parade.
Brooks was charged with six murders and a litany of other crimes after the attack, which also injured dozens more.
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Former Republican senator and declared gubernatorial candidate David Perdue and another Georgia resident this week cited fraud in last year’s elections in Fulton County and filed a suit seeking greater election transparency. In their lawsuit, Perdue and Elizabeth Grace Lennon requested access to Fulton County’s absentee ballots and absentee envelopes from last year. They filed the suit in the Superior Court of Fulton County. Lennon said county officials denied her the right to vote.
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In a rare act for a state chief executive, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has referred the audited November 2020 election results in the state’s largest voting metropolis to the State Election Board after multiple reviews found significant problems with absentee ballot counting that included duplicate tallies, math errors and transposed data.
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Fulton County, Ga. Registration and Elections Director Richard Barron is stepping down on Dec. 31, according to County Board of Commissioners Chair Robb Pitts.
The Fulton County Election Board had voted in February to fire Barron following scathing criticism of his handling of the 2020 elections, Fox 5 Atlanta reported. However, the county’s commissioners overruled the electoral board’s decision, according to Georgia Public Broadcasting.
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Law-enforcement professionals and judges testified at a Georgia Senate hearing Wednesday largely to consider the impact of pretrial release on violent crime in Atlanta and elsewhere, with particular scrutiny being placed on “signature bonds.”
Jeff Hamling, a representative of the Georgia Association of Professional Bondsmen (GAPB), gave the Senate Public Safety Committee a rundown of statistics pertaining to defendants who have been let out of jail under these arrangements. Signature bonds permit prosecutors and judges to release alleged offenders per a signed agreement that the defendants will report promptly for trial. Technically, these bonds have dollar amounts but they do not require defendants to deposit any cash or collateral.
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A panel of experts plan to release data Wednesday proving that unelected judges in Fulton County are dramatically more likely to release criminal defendants in unsecured judicial release. Elected judges, meanwhile, are far less likely to release criminal defendants, according to the statistics.
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U.S. Representative Jody Hice (R-GA-10) this week called on Georgia legislators to appoint a special counsel to investigate alleged election fraud during last year’s presidential election in Fulton County. Hice wants to defeat and replace Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Former U.S. President Donald Trump endorsed Hice for the position in March.
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Henry County Superior Court Chief Judge Brian Amero has reportedly done away with a lawsuit that alleged election fraud in Fulton County, Georgia during last year’s presidential election. Members of the nonprofit VoterGA wanted to inspect Fulton County’s mail-in ballots. This, after four senior poll managers signed sworn affidavits indicating they handled counterfeit ballots during the Fulton County hand count audit.
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Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Monday called upon members of the U.S. Justice Department to investigate Fulton County elections. This, following recent allegations that Fulton County shredded 300 municipal election-related applications in violation of state law. The Georgia Secretary of State’s office has already launched an investigation into the allegations, according to a press release.
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Fulton County School System officials are currently fighting to keep a COVID-19 mask mandate in place while they’re also trying to clamp down on reported vandalism and violence within the schools. The Atlanta-based Reporter Newspapers said late last week that several parents want a Fulton County judge to issue a temporary restraining order and restrict the schools from imposing a mandatory mask mandate.
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A review of transfer forms provided to The Georgia Star News in response to an open records request reveals that the Secretary of State’s office in Georgia is missing chain of custody documents for 6,995 absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes in Fulton County during the November 2020 election.
The number of absentee ballots for which the office has no evidence of the origination of the ballots represents 9 percent of the 79,460 total that Fulton County has recorded as being deposited into drop boxes during the more than month-long early voting and election day period.
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A comparison of chain of custody documents for absentee ballots deposited into drop boxes during the November 2020 election made available separately by Georgia Public Broadcasting News (GPB News) and the Georgia Secretary of State revealed that GPB News received documentation for 4,800 more drop box absentee ballots from Fulton County than Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The number of absentee ballots documented in the chain of custody documents GPB News has versus those the Secretary of State has represents 6 percent of the total 79,460 Fulton County indicated were deposited into drop boxes during the November 2020 election.
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While DeKalb County officials have refused to indicate whether the extended leave of absence of Elections Director Erica Hamilton is job related, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said during a CNN interview that the leave was an outcome of an investigation related to the violation of absentee ballot chain of custody rules during the November 2020 election.
A joint statement issued by DeKalb Board of Registration and Elections Chair Dele Lowman Smith and Vice-Chair Nancy Jester announced that effective September 9, Erica Hamilton was on an extended leave of absence from her role as director of DeKalb County Registration and Elections.
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Members of VoterGA want to inspect Fulton County’s mail-in ballots after four senior poll managers signed sworn affidavits indicating they handled counterfeit ballots during the Fulton County hand count audit. On Monday, in McDonough, VoterGA co-founder Garland Favorito said court officials made a decision and ultimately “kicked the can down the road.”
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Fulton County election officials mismanaged money, mismanaged documents, and failed to comply with various grant requirements, according to a recent audit. The Georgia Star News requested a copy of the audit straight from county officials. The communications staff for the Fulton County Government, though, did not respond before Wednesday’s stated deadline. Staff at the Atlanta-based WSB-TV posted the audit on their website this week.
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Georgia’s Election Board moved Wednesday toward an eventual takeover of elections in the state’s most populous county, reacting to mounting evidence of incompetance and irregularities in the Atlanta area last November.
The board’s unanimous vote was made possible by provisions in the state’s sweeping new voting law passed earlier this year.
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Several people on Wednesday urged members of the Fulton County Commission not to approve a nearly $600,000 contract with an Illinois-based group to review and assess the county’s voter registration and elections operations. County commissioners had not approved or rejected the proposed contract with this organization, The Elections Group, as of Wednesday evening.
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Henry County Chief Judge Brian Amero late last week ordered that all parties involved in the Fulton County mail-in ballot case appear in court next month — for reasons unspecified. According to court documents, Amero ordered the parties to appear at 9 a.m. September 20 in Courtroom A of the Henry County Courthouse in McDonough.
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Fulton County, Pennsylvania election officials are defending their decision to conduct an audit of the 2020 election in their jurisdiction and their right to continue use of their voting machines.
Attorneys from Dillon, McCandless, King, Coulter & Graham LLP who are affiliated with an election-integrity nonprofit known as the Amistad Project, will be handling the case for the small county of about 14,500 residents, situated about 90 miles southwest of Harrisburg.
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A liberal nonprofit that accused President Donald Trump of unleashing a “surge in white supremacy and hate” donated $85,000 last fall to election administrators in Georgia’s largest county as part of a campaign to turn out black votes in the 2020 election. Auditors now want some of that money returned.
The Fulton County Auditor declared this month that county election officials failed to spend all of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s grant for buying absentee ballot drop boxes and did not comply with one of the grant’s primary requirements to publicly disclose how many ballots were collected in the boxes.
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In the latest development related to the absentee ballot chain of custody documents from the November 2020 election, Fulton County elections officials have contradicted Georgia Public Broadcasting News’s claims about their source for the drop box transfer forms and that documents for 18,901 absentee ballots remain missing.
On August 3, The Georgia Star News reported that Fulton County denied the same chain of custody documents for absentee ballots deposited into drop boxes during the November 2020 general election that they purportedly gave to Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) News on or before June 17.
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A day after the November election, as Donald Trump and other Republican candidates clung to evaporating leads in Georgia, vote counters in Atlanta were confronted by a paper ballot known only by its anonymizing number 5150-232-18.
A Dominion Voting machine had rejected the ballot on election night because the voter had filled in boxes for both Trump and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, an error known as an “overvote.” The machine determined neither candidate should get a tally, and the ballot was referred for human review.
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As part of a review of hundreds of pages of election documents from Georgia’s Fulton County, Just the News reviewed dozens of disputed ballots in which election workers known as “adjudicators” determined that a voter intended to vote for Democratic candidate Joe Biden instead of Republican incumbent Donald Trump.
Just the News’s review of the Fulton documents revealed a system rife with subjective judgment of thousands of ballots on the part of a small number of election workers, all of it governed by a confusing patchwork of state laws that simultaneously seemed to sanction and proscribe the practice of ballot adjudication.
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In a stunning development Wednesday, Fulton County has denied The Georgia Star News the same chain of custody documents for absentee ballots deposited into drop boxes during the November 2020 election, that they purportedly gave to Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) News on or before June 17.
Fulton County’s Legal Assistant Shana Eatmon’s emailed response informed The Star News said that there are no documents that meet our open records request.
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Fulton County election officials have failed to meet a second response date they set to provide The Georgia Star News with complete chain of custody documents for absentee ballots deposited into drop boxes during the November 3, 2020, general election. For a third time, Fulton County has extended their response date, this time to August 6, 2021.
Fulton County’s communication about the third extension comes more than eight months and five follow-up requests after The Star News filed an initial open records request on December 1, 2020, for the drop box transfer forms that document the critical chain of custody of absentee ballots deposited in 37 drop boxes installed throughout Fulton County for the 41 days of the November 2020 election period.
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The Pennsylvania Department of State decertified Fulton County’s voting machines on Wednesday after officials there participated in a third-party audit.
The voluntary probe came at the request of Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Gettysburg) who’s currently spearheading a larger effort to audit machines in Tioga, York and Philadelphia counties amid his ongoing campaign to ferret out fraudulent activity during the past two elections.
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Georgia’s Speaker of the House David Ralston is demanding an investigation to “determine if any irregularities or willful fraud occurred” in the state’s largest metropolis last November, saying recent revelations about problems with vote counting in Fulton County merit an independent probe.
Ralston sent a letter late last week to Fulton County election officials requesting that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation be allowed to conduct the investigation.
The request comes after Just the News reported last month that an independent observer for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger noted two dozen pages of irregularities in the Atlanta vote counting center last Nov. 3, including double scanning of ballots, insecure transportation of ballots and possible voter privacy violations.
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Fulton County officials have failed to meet the extended response date they set for providing The Georgia Star News with complete chain of custody documents for absentee ballots deposited into drop boxes during the November 3, 2020, general election.
More than seven months and five follow-up requests after The Star News filed an initial open records request on December 1, 2020, Fulton County Legal Assistant Shana Eatmon said they needed until July 15, to provide the requested documents.
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Robb Pitts, chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, sent a letter to Georgia House of Representative Speaker David Ralston claiming that all counties within the state should be investigated for potential fraud.
“If you are requesting that Fulton County be the subject of such an investigation, then I believe it would only be fair that all counties with issues be subject to investigation,” Pitts wrote in his letter to Speaker Ralston.
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Georgia State Senator Burt Jones (R-Jackson) on Thursday made a formal request for an investigation by the Senate Government Oversight Committee into the failures of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, which he characterized as numerous and documented, catching the attention of 45th President Donald Trump.
In a statement issued by Trump Friday, which included a copy of Jones’ letter, he said:
The Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, together with Brad Raffensperger, allowed this Election in Georgia to be Rigged and Stolen. Why they ever agreed to Stacey Abram’s Consent Decree nobody will ever know. Thank you to Senator Burt Jones and all of the other Patriots for continuing the fight. Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger have done an absolutely terrible job of watching over Voter Integrity in Georgia. They must be held accountable!
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Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Thursday called for two of the top elections officials in Fulton County to be fired after numerous mistakes in the election process have been discovered.
“Fulton County’s continued failures have gone on long enough with no accountability. Rick Barron and Ralph Jones, Fulton’s registration chief, must be fired and removed from Fulton’s elections leadership immediately. Fulton’s voters and the people of Georgia deserve better,” Raffensperger said in a tweet.
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Fox News host Tucker Carlson went on the record Wednesday night to declare that it appears there was “meaningful voter fraud in Fulton County, Georgia” in the 2020 election, contradicting the prevailing Democrat-media narrative that portrays all such allegations as “a big lie.”
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Former President Donald Trump released a statement on Wednesday slamming the recount of the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia — after a lawsuit alleged there was a 60% error rate in the hand count audit.
“The news coming out of Georgia is beyond incredible. The hand recount in Fulton County was a total fraud! They stuffed the ballot box—and got caught. We will lose our Country if this is allowed to stand,” Trump said.
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Petitioners in a lawsuit to inspect Fulton County mail-in absentee ballots from the November 3, 2020, election have added new claims and provided new evidence that the hand recount audit was riddled wth massive errors and provable fraud.
VoterGA, organizers of the lawsuit, made the stunning announcement on Tuesday that revealed “a whopping 60%” error rate in Fulton County’s hand count audit held on November 14 and 15, 2020.
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Republican and former state legislator Meagan Hanson has announced her intentions to unseat Georgia U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA-06). Hanson announced her candidacy Monday on her Facebook page.
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