Five years after the fact, Georgia election officials have admitted that 315,000 votes in the 2020 presidential election lacked the necessary signature from poll workers and should not have been counted. President Donald Trump was unjustly indicted for alleging just such a violation of election security.
A bombshell report out last week in The Federalist from journalist Brianna Lyman provides all the details on what should be considered one of the biggest election-related scandals in American history. As she relays, election officials in Fulton County, Georgia, the most populous in the state, admitted to failing “to sign off on the vote tabulation ‘tapes’ critical to the certification process.”
The revelation came thanks to the tireless efforts of David Cross, a local election integrity activist who filed a lawsuit against the Georgia State Election Board in 2022.
In the 2020 election, Georgia state law required two basic steps to ensure ballots were counted fairly and accurately. First, at the beginning of each day of voting, poll workers must print and sign a “zero tape,” which shows that every voting machine is starting at zero votes. Second, poll workers must print three “closing tapes” at the end of each day and either sign them or provide a reason for refusal.
But according to Cross’s investigation, an astonishing 36 out of 37 early voting locations in Fulton County failed to sign the closing tapes. Thirty-two polling sites also failed to sign their zero tapes.
As Lyman explains:
“If there is no record of whether the tabulator was set at zero at the start of polling, there is no way of telling whether ballots from a previous election (or ballots from a test run) were left on the memory card and might later be counted. Notably, this happened in Montana, where officials discovered more votes than were cast and believe the votes were leftover sample data that had not been cleared.”
In some cases, the tapes also showed “additional irregularities,” such as polling locations open as late as 2 a.m. and “duplicated scanner serial numbers, where memory devices were removed from one scanner and printed on an alternate scanner.”
In total, at least 315,000 early votes in Fulton County did not have poll worker signatures attached to them and were thus uncertified. “Because no tape was ever legally certified, Fulton County had no lawful authority to certify its advanced voting results to the secretary of state. Yet it did,” Cross told Lyman. “And [Georgia Secretary of State] Raffensperger accepted and folded those uncertified numbers into Georgia’s official total without questioning them. This is not partisan. This is statutory. This is the law.”
This jaw-dropping failure on the part of election officials should raise serious concerns about what other such “irregularities” have occurred – and perhaps still are occurring – in Georgia and elsewhere. But it is also a vindication of President Donald Trump and every other “election conspiracy theorist” who has alleged precisely this sort of misconduct from 2020 onward.
When Trump was indicted in Georgia in 2023 (along with 18 other co-defendants), the charges centered on his supposed efforts to “pressure” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to investigate precisely these sorts of irregularities and violations of the law. At the time, media and Democrats hailed Raffensperger as a hero for insisting that everything was on the up-and-up. Now, it looks like Trump and the “conspiracy theorists” were right – again.
It’s worth remembering the hysteria with which the liberal establishment defended the election procedures in Georgia and Fulton County that we now know to be riddled with errors and inconsistencies. For years, anyone who remotely questioned how early voting was conducted in Georgia was castigated as a “threat to democracy.” Democrat prosecutors were literally trying to throw a former (and, as it turns out, future) president in prison for questioning the legitimacy of the results.
Meanwhile, the co-defendants in the case had to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Many of them were financially ruined. Where is their restitution? Where is their apology from the liberal media hounds that destroyed their reputations and their lives?
Critics will counter that the state performed a recount where every ballot was counted by hand, ensuring the results were accurate. But if we can’t even trust Georgia poll workers and election officials to properly sign closing and zero tapes, how can we trust them to conduct an accurate recount? Moreover, the fact remains that the tapes were not signed. According to the letter of the law in Georgia, they should not have been counted.
Joe Biden was declared the victor in Georgia by 11,779 votes. It’s not a certainty, but it seems a strong likelihood that the outcome would have been changed had those votes been correctly declared invalid. Perhaps they were all legitimate votes cast by lawful voters. But there is now no denying that they were handled improperly – election officials openly admitted as much.
Finally getting to the bottom of what happened in Georgia five years ago is about more than just one election. It’s about demanding that elected officials enforce the law as written and respect the public’s right to seek accountability when that standard is not met. Demanding accessible and secure elections is not a threat to democracy; it is the very mechanism that protects democracy from corruption, complacency, and abuse.
Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
