OPINION:
When the FBI seized voting records from Fulton County, Georgia, last month, it was looking for evidence of “defects” in the vote count from the 2020 election, according to an affidavit unsealed Tuesday that backed up the search warrant.
Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler is joined by Garland Favorito, the founder and president of VoterGA, an election watchdog group in the state of Georgia.
[SADLER] Now, why are we talking about Georgia? There was an FBI, a DOJ raid in Fulton County where they took ballots from the 2020 presidential contest, 700 boxes of them, to look through them to see if there was any voter irregularity or voter fraud that happened during that 2020 presidential election where Joe Biden won the state by a little over 11,000 votes.
Garland, what can you tell us about the raid, about what the DOJ was looking for? You’ve been following, you know, election integrity issues in the state of Georgia for a long time.
[FAVORITO] Well, that’s right. And we’ve been in the middle of this, too, with several lawsuits going in both federal and state courts, Kelly. So let me just give you a little bit of history of how all this started, which led up to the raid just a few days ago. And, you know, of course, the election, as you said, was conducted November 3rd, 2020, very close election in the presidential race, also in the U.S. Senate race. And there was an audit of the presidential race conducted on November 14th of 2020. Georgia mandates one audit for each election cycle, at least they did at that time. And the Secretary wisely picked the presidential race and conducted a full hand count audit.
Well, during that audit, senior poll managers in Fulton County found counterfeit ballots during the count, and I was there that day. They know that they were counterfeit because they were mail-in ballots and they were not folded from being mailed. They were not written with a writing instrument, like a pen or a pencil. They appeared to be toned or copied. They weren’t on the correct paper stock for a ballot, and they were voted the same way down ballot, dozens of ballots in a row. So it’s pretty obvious that they were counterfeit.
But when this was brought to the attention of the Fulton County election officials, there’s no mechanism in the state of Georgia to resolve illegitimate ballots. So they were told to just keep on counting. In fact, the person in charge of the audit is now the elections director in Fulton County. And they did. The next night, they filed sworn affidavits that they had seen the counterfeit ballots. And those affidavits went into a case that was filed by Lin Wood. That case was rejected by a U.S. district court who really didn’t want to deal with that, you know, a judge there that just didn’t want to deal with it.
And then we turned around and used their affidavits and filed, along with the State Farm Arena video, and filed a case on December 23rd of 2020. And that case was an equal protection and due process violation case saying that those counterfeit ballots had diluted the votes of all other voters in the state of Georgia. And that case, which is still active and yet to be heard, that’s a whole other story. But on January 6th of 2021, we went to our first hearing and we got a protective order on the ballots the next day, January 7th. That was for all the absentee ballots and about a dozen different types of electronic records that Fulton County should have had, but we have found since that time that they don’t have. And that’s how this all started.
We then pursued that case. The judge suddenly decided that we didn’t have standing after 10 months. The case went up to the Georgia Supreme Court. We appealed because we knew that we did. The Georgia Supreme Court ruled in our favor and said, yes, anyone has always had standing to sue a government agency or official in Georgia if they violate the law. So they confirmed our standing and they sent the case back down unanimously without even a hearing. We didn’t even get to go to the Supreme Court because it was such a no-brainer case.
And nevertheless, Fulton County has held the ballots from us. They would not let us have these ballots to look at. And after four years, we got the law changed to make ballots public record. And we submitted a couple of public records requests to get the ballots and an electronic copy of them so that we could look at them. And Fulton County told us at the time that they didn’t have the ballots. There were no responsive records to our request. While we now know, at least it appears that that was not true, they did have them all along. And thankfully, the FBI has come in and gotten those ballots for a criminal investigation, which is exactly what should have happened.
Watch the video for the full conversation.
Read more:
- FBI raid of voting records meant to find long-elusive evidence of ballot misconduct in 2020 count
- Georgia’s Fulton County seeks return of 2020 election documents seized by FBI
- DOJ seizure of Fulton County 2020 voting records forces Georgia election transparency
Click here for more Politically Unstable
Please read our comment policy before commenting.