In a nationwide televised interview in January, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger rattled together an impressive list of steps his state took to ensure the November elections were correct. “We had safe, honest elections,” he told 60 Minutes.
This rosy assessment, however, hid an ugly truth in his agency’s own files: A handpicked contractor overseeing the election count in Fulton County wrote a 29-page memo in November detailing the “massive” election integrity errors and mismanagement, which he is in the polling centers in the Atlanta area.
The bombing report, organized like a diary to the minute, cited a litany of high-risk issues such as double counting of votes, unsecure retention of ballot papers, possible violations of voter privacy, the mysterious removal of voting material at a vote collection center and the suspicious movement of “too many” Ballot papers on election day.
“This appears to be a massive chain of custody issue,” warned contractor Carter Jones in the memo his company Seven Hill Strategies gave to Raffensperger’s office shortly after the election.
This blatant notation was written around 4:00 p.m. on Election Day when Jones watched postal ballot papers arrive “in rolling 2k bins at a time” at the district’s central postal voting center in the Atlanta State Farm Arena.
“It is my understanding that the ballot papers should be transported in numbered, sealed boxes to protect them,” he wrote, noting that they were not.
He also feared that the postal vote would appear too extensive. “Too many ballots are coming in for safe black ballot boxes,” he noted.
You can read the full report Just the News received from the State Department office here.
Jones also expressed concern about the temporary workers used by a company called Happy Faces to scan and count ballot papers after an election observer allegedly witnessed a conversation in an elevator in which one of the workers revealed his intention to “f * ck sh * t “up.”
“I need to keep an eye on these two,” wrote Jones. “Maybe it was a bad joke, but in the presence of an election observer, the timing was very bad.”
He wrote that the two suspect workers were assigned to a “team that validates and boxes already scanned ballots in preparation for a later examination” because “this is the place where they can least do anything to achieve their stated goal.” to reach”.
However, Jones expressed greater concerns about the agency’s hiring of workers. “What does Happy Faces do to check the people they send to make sure they are not sending people who really want to ‘fuck sc * t up’?” He asked.
Happy Faces spokespersons did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Fulton County spokeswoman said she will speak to electoral staff working with Happy Faces, but she hadn’t responded further at press time.
The public appearance of the Jones report on Thursday did not confirm enough suspicious votes to overturn Georgia’s election results or prove a conspiracy to commit widespread electoral fraud. But his portrait of incompetence, mismanagement and poor electoral processes in Georgia’s largest electoral center refutes claims by state officials that the elections were successful.
Raffensperger told Just the News that he supports the removal of Fulton County’s top election officials but still trusts the election result, which shows Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump.
“It’s no secret that Fulton has had problems in her electoral department for decades, which is why I insisted that a state observer be present to have eyes and ears on the ground,” he said.
Experts said the 29-page report provides a breathtaking roadmap for an independent Fulton County’s vote count investigation, like the one a state judge recently approved to be headed by attorney Bob Cheeley.
“This reveals chaos caused by incompetence and, in some cases, willful violations of the law to help Mr. Biden,” said Phill Kline, the leader of the Amistad Project, which has raised legal challenges across the country to the integrity of elections. “This is in line with the evidence we find in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan, despite the intimidation of Attorney General Garland.”
At the beginning of his surveillance, Jones wrote about the difficulties electoral officials had in distributing election papers to local counties the night before the election. Poll pads are used to screen voters at the district level.
One ward, Jones wrote in the notes, “had only one of two bags of ballot papers, even though the system at the camp indicated that both were checked out of the camp and were on their way.”
“[M]all the bags of election papers and other voting materials are still unpacked and the paperwork does not match, “he reported at the district’s central election camp in Atlanta.
“Some bags have everything and others don’t, but the full ones aren’t organized,” the notes read. “Without a manual count, it is impossible to tell which pockets are missing what, and they don’t have the manpower for that at the moment.”
Jones claims that at one point “someone took the wrong suitcase” [of poll pads]”what he states is a significant security problem.
“Seems to be a mystery who that person was,” he writes. “Should there be any paperwork for safekeeping !! Does that mean that a stranger has just gone out with sensitive election materials? “
The chaos surrounding the polling station installation appeared to be largely resolved by election day morning, but Jones documented numerous other cases of chaotic management and serious security concerns.
For example, the Jones report touches on one of the more persistent unsolved mysteries surrounding ballot processing in Fulton County when State Farm Arena officials appeared to most poll workers to go home around 10:30 p.m. on election night, with the skeleton team continuing to count ballots.
“The news reaches the camp that Sec. Raffensperger ‘tore up’ Fulton just came through the line (apparently someone asked if Fulton would stop scanning at 10:30 am while all the other counties were still working, and Sec. Said ‘Fulton can’t do anything right’) “, were the notes.
Just before 11:30 pm, Jones notes, “Confusion about whether or not they are still scanning at the State Farm because there were reports that the staff there asked the rest of the staff and the press to leave, but I get still reporting numbers. “Jones later arrives at the State Farm Arena just before midnight to find that” the staff are still scanning on all five scanners. “
About twenty minutes later, Jones remarks, “The order is falling[.] Ralph re-scanned some ballots that Shaye had already processed. “
It wasn’t the only case in which Jones claims to have witnessed a possible double-checking of ballot papers. On the second day after the election, Jones watched the count and wrote of a machine that “was shut down because it caused more problems than it solved”.
“Double-feeding and cutting both the envelope and the ballot, resulting in even more duplicates,” he said.
Meanwhile, on election night, Jones appeared to describe difficulties managing flash drives in the state’s electoral equipment.
“They pull compact flashes (CF),” he said. “[P]The oll manager has put a Mobile 2 CF in the Mobile 1 CF slot, which is now causing confusion. People talk about a ‘master bus’ problem for the backups, which seems to be causing the confusion. “
And in one case, the investigator raised concerns that election officials could obtain private information from the documents they were processing, in a serious invasion of voter privacy.
“Are we compromising the secret ballot with our ad hoc procedure?” he asked. “Sorters can see the address on the oath envelope as well as the ballot itself … Voters could theoretically face reprisals if a processor wanted to prosecute them for their election.”
Jones did not respond to repeated inquiries from Just the News, despite speaking of his findings shortly after contacting the Associated Press yesterday, stating that despite all the problems he observed, there was no “dishonesty, fraud or willful misconduct” among election workers.
However, he told AP that Fulton County “needs to address these mismanagement issues because they are getting serious.”
The revelations in Jones’ notes stem from a Just the News review of state audit data which uncovered significant data errors and concerns about the handling of the 2020 election in Fulton County.
Data from the county showed that over 150 letters from postal ballot papers appeared to be missing from the county’s official census, as well as what appeared to be multiple instances of ballot papers scanned multiple times.
State inspection sheets also indicated that many of Fulton’s postal ballot papers, when delivered to state auditors, were not sealed according to security protocol prior to delivery.
