Newly released notes, recorded by an election observer, describe a number of issues observed in Georgia’s largest county during the 2020 election.
Carter Jones was tapped into by Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to see firsthand the elections in Fulton County. His notes describe what he saw November 2-7, 2020.
The problems began when Jones arrived at the English Street warehouse around 9 p.m., where various election papers were being held, after Raffensperger’s office had received reports throughout the afternoon that materials were not being delivered to polling stations on time or at all.
Just four minutes after arriving, Jones saw an election official working to reset election papers for a district. The precinct only received one bag of pads, although the system in the warehouse indicated that both were checked out.
Jones said many bags of pads and other materials were unpacked and the paperwork did not match. He used the word “chaos” and said there was a lot of “confusion”. A district official blamed the foreign minister, claiming he had received an “erroneous file,” but officials from the bureau replied that the alleged problem was “easy to refute”.
Problems kept cropping up on election day. At the State Farm Arena, Jones said there had been “too many ballots for safe black ballot boxes” that workers carried 2,000 in roll bins at a time.
“That seems like a massive chain of custody problem. I understand that the ballot papers should be transported in numbered, sealed boxes to protect them, ”he said.
Later that night, the monitor learned of reports that Fulton County officials said they would stop counting for the night, causing observers to leave only to resume without monitoring.
Jones didn’t arrive until about an hour after the workers started counting again.
At around 12:08 pm on November 5, Jones reported that “order is falling.”
Ralph Jones, a Fulton County election official, “rescanned some ballots that Shaye had already processed,” added Moss, an election worker.
“Inspector James Callaway is coming to investigate allegations that Fulton staff told the press to go home and scan without an observer,” he said shortly afterwards.
About 30 minutes later, the staff finally sealed the ballot papers after they had been left unsealed for an indefinite period of time.
Jones left and fell asleep after returning to the warehouse.
Media teams film while poll workers edit postal ballot papers at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Georgia on November 2, 2020. (Megan Varner / Getty Images)
On the afternoon of November 5, when workers attempted to scan determined ballots, all five scanners failed and Dominion Voting Systems technology staff began uploading them to flash drives. Best practices are not to turn off all scanners at once, and according to the monitor’s notes, a backlog began to build up.
Fulton County voted over 106,000 ballots. This procedure applies to ballot papers that the tabulating machines could not read. People then pore over the newspaper to find out who the voter wanted to vote for.
At 7:07 pm, workers heard that they had only scanned 10,000 ballots in five hours. “People are realizing that there are at least 8-10 hours of work left to do for employees to redouble their efforts,” said Jones.
About 30 minutes later a new wave of workers arrived. Jones heard a worker ask a colleague if he was “ready for a long night.” The second replied: “Yes, I am ready to” [expletive] [expletive] above.”
“I have to keep an eye on both of them. Maybe it was a bad joke, but in the presence of an election observer, the timing was very bad, ”wrote Jones, wondering about the screening practices of Happy Faces hiring the temporary workers. He also said there appeared to be “a lot of on-the-fly training” with the recently arrived workers.
When polling officer Rick Barron’s girlfriend visited him even though he didn’t have credentials to be in the room, Barron read tweets from fans who enjoyed wearing a Portland Timbers lanyard, said Jones around 10:30 p.m. are hastening their work .
Barron was fired in February but remains at his job.
Under time pressure, the workers kept walking until the early hours of the next morning. But the slog wore her down. Ralph Jones, for example, made “mistakes”.
“The employee tells him that he counted the same batch incorrectly twice. He was off by one both times, ”wrote the monitor.
Jones, the monitor, later said Moss found some “sloppy closing papers” filed by one of the workers.
At around 11:30 am on November 6, a worker described as “panicking” told Jones that four boxes or trays of ballot papers were “found” in the warehouse. Ralph Jones said the ballots were healed and collected before the polling stations closed. The worker later agreed, saying the ballot papers had not been “found”. Jones reminded both of “the importance of precise language when it comes to stakes that high”.
The count finally ended on November 7th.
Jones’ notes were received and published by Just the News (pdf). Raffensperger’s office confirmed the authenticity of the notes to the Epoch Times. Fulton County did not respond to requests for comment, and neither did Jones.
The county is currently under investigation after statutory voting forms are lost.
The observer’s presence was made possible by a consent order approved by the state election committee chaired by Raffensperger in 2020. The arrangement came after Fulton County suffered problems in previous elections.
The notes and a report that Jones later submitted to the board of directors have only now been released because “it just didn’t occur to us” to publish them, a spokesman for Raffensperger told the Epoch Times via email.
A law recently signed by Governor Brian Kemp opens up the possibility for civil servants to take over elections in counties that have repeated problems with execution. Raffensperger supported this provision, said the spokesman.
In a statement to news agencies following the announcement of the latest investigation, Robb Pitts, chairman of the Fulton County Commission, accused Raffensperger of “laying the groundwork for a hostile takeover of Fulton County’s Board of Registrations & Elections.”
“His comrades in this fight are conspiracy theorists who promote the same Big Lie that he supposedly doesn’t believe in. The votes were counted three times, including a hand-count, and President Biden was ahead each time. Given the 2020 results, I would suggest that he focus more on the next election than contest the last one, ”said Pittman.
Jones, the observer, said in his final report that what happened at State Farm Arena between 10:30 pm and 11:52 pm on election night “remains elusive.” If election observers truthfully reported what happened, “then there is a serious problem,” he wrote.
Raffensperger’s chief investigator said in an affidavit in December 2020 that observers and the media were “not asked to leave” but “simply left alone” when a group of workers left. She also said that there were “no secret ballots” produced from under hidden tables, as some have claimed.
Jones also described “persistent chain-of-custody issues throughout the postal voting processing system” in relation to the 2020 elections and the mitigating audit that was conducted.
Jones recommended improved training, stronger processes, and some sort of debriefing to identify problems and solutions.
Raffensperger said the election went largely smoothly and there was no evidence of enough fraud to swing the election. Democrat Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump by less than 12,000 votes, according to the certified results. Before 2020, no democrat had won Georgia since 1992.
Jones, who has had election surveillance experience since his time with the International Republican Institute, told the State Election Board in February that he had observed “many sloppy processes,” including “the type of fingerprinting of what I will call systemic disorganization “.
“However, at no point in my 270+ hours during the Fulton County’s election process from October through January did I see any illegality, fraud or willful misconduct,” he also said.
