Georgia State Senate Judiciary Subcommittee held another hearing on election fraud on Wednesday. Chairman William Ligon (R-GA-White Oak) oversaw the hearing.
Witnesses testified to multiple variants of election integrity issues, including the voting machines, voting systems, poll workers and adjudicators, and even the printed QR ballots themselves. A consistent message throughout the testimonies reflected a lack of helpfulness from the secretary of state’s office.
Witnesses included those who weren’t able to speak during prior hearings. Each individual was given a time limit. The opening witness was Kathy Latham, the Republican Party of Georgia Under 80,000 Caucus chair and Coffee County Republican Party chair.
Latham alleged that ballot scanners were having multiple issues, and that they didn’t receive new scanners to replace the broken ones. She also alleged that election officials discovered that ballots could be altered ballots during the adjudication process. Latham added that officials couldn’t see from their end who had adjudicated which ballots.
Latham explained that Coffee County couldn’t duplicate their results. She alleged that they ran 15,000 ballots through a scanned recount five times and received five different numbers each time. Latham shared that the county was intimidated into certifying their results.
“Three people from the secretary of state’s [office] showed up with guns and badges and handcuffs, and two Dominion tech reps – they came with the intent of intimidation,” stated Latham. “[The official] said, ‘You want a recount? We’ll have a recount.’ There were no Democrats, no Republicans there to watch this recount, and the attorney called to an area private school, got a group of sophomores. They sat there and divided the ballots into 100-count batches and they proceed to scan them – and they wouldn’t scan. The Dominion tech ran into the [same] problems that Coffee County ran into. The Dominion tech sat on the floor for two hours with a manager trying to figure out why they couldn’t get the machines to do what they needed to do.”
In addition to Coffee County, Latham added that six other counties informed her that they’d been forced to certify their recount results by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.
“One county was 106 votes off, and the secretary of state’s office told them they must certify that number,” stated Latham. “Another county, which was a small county, was 2.3 percent off – they were told they had to re-certify. Another county was off – they questioned it. The Secretary of State said, ‘Upload your stuff, let us look at it,’ they called them back and said, ‘Oh, we found a missing batch,’ and then [the totals] magically matched.”
Other witnesses alleged additional, varied problems with the voting systems. Testimonies included ballots that were sent to incorrect addresses and barcodes on absentee mail-in ballots consistently scanned incorrectly when checking them in. The witnesses testified that they’d reported these issues to the secretary of state’s office, but the officials were unable to explain or rectify them.
Witnesses also alleged improper ballot processing, including the workers sharing user profiles to adjudicate ballots and ballot shredding.
Another witness, technology expert Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, alleged that fake, printed ballots were scanned at Fulton County. Pulitzer also alleged that ballots were printed differently – such as with or without barcodes – depending on what political leanings the county had.
The reliability and origins of Arlo, the risk-limiting audit process used by the secretary of state’s office last month, was also brought into question.
Fulton County received its fair share of scrutiny from multiple witnesses. A few raised concerns over the viral “suitcase ballots” video, shared by President Donald Trump. As a result, the subcommittee passed a motion to have Fulton County turn over all absentee ballots processed at the State Farm Arena to the Cheeley Law Group for investigation.
The hearing took around 5 hours total, hosting almost twenty witnesses in total, including Trump legal team attorney Rudy Giuliani.
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Corinne Murdock is a reporter at The Georgia Star News and the Star News Network. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to [email protected].
