Regardless of how it all turns out, the information reported in a RealClearInvestigations article would be major international news in a neutral news environment.
According to the article:
- A Democrat-donor judge in Georgia has sided with plaintiffs in agreeing to unseal 147,000 2020 election mail-in ballots for inspection.
- Four poll workers have filed sworn affidavits about anomalies they said they observed on absentee ballots, from their abnormal "pristine" unfolded condition, to the paper being of different stock than other ballots, to voting bubbles that appeared to be filled in by ink from toner in a printer.
- Joe Biden won the state by just 12,000 vote after a surge of tens of thousands of mail-in ballots counted after some election monitors were "shoo'd" from the venue due to false reports of a major water pipe break.
- The judge, Brian Amero, ordered a May 28 meeting at the warehouse where the ballots are stored to come to agreement on the process for inspection.
- The meeting was postponed after Fulton County filed legal objections to the inspections.
- Judge Amero requested around the clock guards of the warehouse until the inspection.
- However, on May 29, sheriff's deputies guarding the warehouse left it unattended for several hours.
- A motion-detection alarm was triggered shortly after the deputies left.
- County officials say the ballots were not breached.
- The plaintiffs are asking for security camera video to confirm.
The following is an authorized reprint of a RealClearInvestigations article by Paul Sperry.
When Fulton County, Ga., poll manager Suzi Voyles sorted through a large stack of mail-in ballots last November, she noticed an alarmingly odd pattern of uniformity in the markings for Joseph R. Biden. One after another, the absentee votes contained perfectly filled-in ovals for Biden โ except that each of the darkened bubbles featured an identical white void inside them in the shape of a tiny crescent, indicating they'd been marked with toner ink instead of a pen or pencil.
Brian Amero: The judge, a donor to Democrats, ordered ballots unsealed for inspection after poll workers swore under oath Biden votes looked fake.
Adding to suspicions, she noticed that all of the ballots were printed on different stock paper than the others she handled as part of a statewide hand recount of the razor-thin Nov. 3 presidential election. And none was folded or creased, as she typically observed in mail-in ballots that had been removed from envelopes.
In short, the Biden votes looked like theyโd been duplicated by a copying machine.
โAll of them were strangely pristine," said Voyles, who said sheโd never seen anything like it in her 20 years monitoring elections in Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta.
She wasnโt alone. At least three other poll workers observed the same thing in stacks of absentee ballots for Biden processed by the county, and they have joined Voyles in swearing under penalty of perjury that they looked fake.
Now election watchdogs have used their affidavits to help convince a state judge to unseal all of the 147,000 mail-in ballots counted in Fulton and allow a closer inspection of the suspicious Biden ballots for evidence of counterfeiting. They argue that potentially tens of thousands may have been manufactured in a race that Biden won by just 12,000 votes thanks to a late surge of mail-in ballots counted after election monitors were shooed from State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
Garland Favorito, vote-integrity advocate: โWe have what is almost surely major absentee-ballot fraud in Fulton County involving 10,000 to 20,000 probably false ballots.โLinkedIn
โWe have what is almost surely major absentee-ballot fraud in Fulton County involving 10,000 to 20,000 probably false ballots,โ said Garland Favorito, the lead petitioner in the case and a certified poll watcher who runs VoterGa.org, one of the leading advocates for election integrity in the state.
He said the suspect ballots remain in the custody of the election officials and inaccessible from public view.
โWe have confirmed that there are five pallets of shrink-wrapped ballots in a county warehouse,โ Favorito said in an interview with RealClearInvestigations.
He and other petitioners were ordered to meet at the warehouse May 28 to settle the terms of the inspection of the absentee ballots. But the day before the scheduled meeting, the county filed a flurry of motions to dismiss the case, delaying the inspection indefinitely.
โWe will be in court on June 21 to resolve these motions,โ said Favorito, calling them another โroadblockโ the county has tried to throw in their way. He expects talks over the logistics of the inspection to resume after the Fourth of July holiday.
As part of his May 21 order, Superior Court Judge Brian Amero requested officials guard the warehouse around the clock until an inspection date can be set. But just eight days later, a breach in security was reported after sheriffโs deputies left their post for a couple of hours.
โThe front door was [found] unlocked and wide open in violation of the court order,โ Favorito said.
Former President Trump: After deputies interrupted their watch on the ballots on May 29, he implied election officials in the Democratic-controlled county are trying to hide evidence of fraud.(AP Photo/John Raoux)
County officials confirmed that a motion-detection alarm was triggered Saturday, May 29, shortly after the deputies drove away from the building in their patrol cars around 4 p.m. But they said a locked room where the ballots are kept โwas never breached or compromised.โ
Favorito is not convinced, and his lawyer is seeking to obtain the video footage from building security cameras. โHow do we know for certain there was no tampering with the ballots?โ asked Favorito, who said he did not vote for Donald Trump.
News of the security lapse caught the attention of the former President, who has claimed his loss to Biden was marred by fraud. In a statement, he implied election officials in the Democratic-controlled county are trying to hide evidence of fraud. "They are afraid of what might be found,โ he asserted.
Trump is also closely monitoring the ongoing election audit in Arizona, another red state that turned blue in 2020. If evidence of fraud is found in these key swing states, it might help confirm suspicions the election was โstolen" from Trump and the 74 million who voted for him -- as a recent poll found 61% of Republicans believe -- as well as provide the proof of voter fraud that Democrats and major media have long claimed doesnโt exist.
The 38 drop boxes Fulton distributed throughout the county in the November election will be cut to eight in the future. The boxes had been largely unregulated and unattended.Georgia Voter Guide
The cases could potentially give other battleground states incentive to take steps to tighten election security and root out fraud, including passing legislation to limit the use of controversial mail-in drop boxes and require the verification of signatures on such ballots. In Georgia, relatively few mail-in ballots were rejected for invalid signatures in the November general election, even though several thousand had been disqualified for signature issues in the primary election.
In a move that inspired national boycotts alleging voter "suppression," Georgia recently passed a law limiting, but not removing, the drop boxes. The state had installed them for the first time in 2020 under pressure from Democratic groups, who argued officials needed to make voting easier for minorities who didnโt trust the mail and feared going to the polls during the COVID scare.
The 38 drop boxes Fulton distributed throughout the county in the November election will be cut to eight in the future. The boxes had been largely unregulated and unattended โ located outdoors, open 24 hours a day and available for drop-offs until the evening of Election Day, prompting complaints of ballot stuffing and double voting. But now they have to be located inside election offices or early voting locations, and can only be available during the hours when early voting is permitted. The new law also requires ballots be printed on special security paper.
Voting by mail traditionally was limited to voters who had clearly defined and well-documented reasons to be absent from the polls. But Democrats in key swing states lobbied to relax the rules in the middle of the election and amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Mail-in or drop-off ballots create opportunities for voter error and fraud. In a typical election, one in 20 mailed ballots are rejected, according to recent studies. More than 534,000 mail-in ballots were rejected during the 2020 Democratic primaries alone.
Robb Pitts, Democratic chairman of Fulton County commissioners: โThis is nothing more than a circus thatโs being put on by those who promote the โbig lieโ โ that Trump won the election.(AP Photo/Ron Harris)
Still, both Republican and Democratic officials in Georgia say they have found no credible evidence of widespread fraud in the general election. Democrats, as well as many major media outlets, have written off Favoritoโs group's allegations of fraud as โconspiracy theories.โ
โThis is nothing more than a circus thatโs being put on by those who promote the โbig lieโ โ that Trump won the election, said Robb Pitts, the Democratic chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. โWhere does it end? The votes have been counted. The elections have been certified. Itโs over."
Pitts effectively controls the county elections board through his Democratic appointee Mary Carole Cooney, who runs the board. They are in charge of securing the pallets of disputed Biden mail-in ballots awaiting inspection in the county warehouse.
But Judge Amero, who federal elections records show is a Democratic donor, felt compelled to unseal the ballots for a forensics review after reading the sworn affidavits submitted by election monitors. Here are key witnesses in the case:
- Suzi Voyles, a veteran Fulton poll manager who audited the Nov. 14 recount at Georgia World Congress Center, testified she examined several stacks of ballots of about 100 ballots each from a cardboard box marked โBox No. 5 โ Absentee โ Batch Numbers 28-36.โ She said these ballots โcame from the ballot [drop] boxes that had been placed throughout Fulton County.โ
Suzi Voyles, poll manager: "One batch stood out. It was pristine." LinkedInโMost of the ballots had already been handled; they had been written on by people, and the edges were worn. They showed obvious use,โ she wrote in her Nov. 17 affidavit. "However, one batch stood out. It was pristine. There was a difference in the texture of the paper,โ and these mail-in ballots hadnโt been folded even though they ostensibly had been removed from envelopes.
All but three of the 110 ballots in the bundle โ which had been labeled โState Farm Arenaโ โ were marked for Biden and appeared to be โidentical ballots."
The most โalarming peculiarityโ was the identically marked ovals next to Bidenโs name. In every ballot, โThe bubble next to โJoseph R. Bidenโ had a slight white eclipse in the bubble,โ she said, leading her to believe that the batch of 107 Biden ballots had been โcopied" from a single ballot.
Voyles speculated that โadditional absentee ballots had been added [for Biden] in a fraudulent mannerโ at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta on election night.
The void she and other auditors witnessed in the exact same spot of the oval filled in on 107 ballots for Biden โwas alarming to us,โ Voyles said in an RCI interview. โEvery single bubble was precisely alike. I had never seen that before in 20 yearsโ of election monitoring.
But when she and other recount workers raised concerns with county election officials, โwe were told not to worry about it,โ she said. โThey seemed uninterested in the [integrity of the] ballots.โ
After Voyles later blew the whistle in affidavits and state election hearings, she was fired as a poll manager by the Fulton County Department of Elections. โI got the boot for speaking the truth,โ she told RCI. - Robin Hall, a certified Fulton County recount observer, also testified she witnessed a number of boxes of absentee ballots marked โ100% for Bidenโ that appeared to be โperfectly filled out as if they were pre-printed with the presidential candidate selected.โ She stated: โThey did not look like a person had filled this out at home. All of them looked alike."
- Judy Aube also worked at the World Congress Center on Nov. 14 where she observed the same thing: โsuspicious batches" of mail-in ballots for Biden whose markings appeared identical, as if they had been duplicated by a machine and not filled out by a voter at home.
- Barbara Hartman, another election official auditor, also doubted the authenticity of absentee ballots she handled that she said were never folded, as would normally be the case for ballots returned in an envelope by mail or dropped in a box. โThe absentee ballots looked as though they had just come from a fresh stack,โ she swore in her affidavit. "I could not observe any creases in the ballots and [it] did not seem like they were folded and put into envelopes or mailed out.โ Also, โThe majority of the mail-in ballots that I reviewed contained suspicious black perfectly bubbled markings for Biden,โ Hartman stated, adding that โthey looked as if they were stamped."
The veteran poll watchers found no plausible explanation for the anomalies other than possible fraud.
However, election officials have offered an explanation for why the mail-in ballots examined in the stacks did not have folds or creases. They say ballots are sometimes copied onto other paper when they are too damaged to be fed through one of the scanning machines during tabulation. The mailed ballots can be torn or crumpled by postal workers during delivery or by poll workers while opening them and removing them from envelopes, which could prevent the machines from reading them.
From controversial video at State Farm Arena, Atlanta, showing ballots being pulled from under tables.WSB-TV/YouTube
But Favorito suspects the hundreds, if not thousands, of allegedly duplicate absentee ballots for Biden might be connected to spikes in votes for Biden he observed late on election night in Fulton County after election officials cleared monitors from State Farm Arena and pulled cases full of ballots out from under tables and began scanning them.
โThereโs always the chance it was an inside job,โ said Favorito, a career IT professional who's been a leading advocate for Georgia election integrity over the past two decades.
On Nov. 3, Fulton County elections officials informed monitors that they were shutting down the State Farm tabulation center before midnight, only to continue counting throughout the night while no one was watching.
โElection workers donโt bring ballots in after the supervisor has delayed processing until the morning, hide them under a table and then bring them out for scanning and tabulation after the supervisor tells [monitors] they are done scanning for the evening and they go home,โ Favorito said.
โOnce scanning [was] completed, an election line feed showed an unprecedented vote spike that turned the election in favor of Biden,โ he added. In fact, โjust over a half hour after workers scanned the potentially fraudulent ballots, an election line feed showed a 100,000-plus vote spike for Biden.โ
โWhere did those ballots come from and why did they handle them so suspiciously?โ Favorito asked.
Voyles noted that the county elections supervisor who oversaw the secret scanning of the cases full of ballots also helps run the warehouse where the suspect ballots are being stored.
Phone calls and emails to Fulton County went unanswered.
Similar Anomalies, Other Counties
Favorito pointed out that the potential for counterfeit ballots exists in other Georgia counties, not just Fulton.
In fact, two Democrat poll workers blew the whistle on similar anomalies they witnessed inย neighboring DeKalb and Cobb counties, where the electionย process also is controlled by Democrats.
Carlos E. Silva, for one, declared in a Nov. 17 affidavit that he observed a similar "perfect black bubbleโ in absentee ballots for Biden during the recount he worked in DeKalb County. And while overseeing the Cobb County recount, he swore he โobserved absentee ballots being reviewed with the same perfect bubble that I had seen the night before in DeKalb. All of these ballots had the same characteristics: they were all for Biden and had the same perfect bubble.โ
Added Silva, a registered Democrat: โThere were thousands of [mail-in] ballots that just had the perfect bubble marked for Biden and no other markings in the rest of the ballot.โ
Another registered Democrat, Mayra Romera, testified that while monitoring the Cobb County recount, she noticed that โhundreds of these ballotsย seemed impeccable, with no folds or creases. The bubble selections were perfectly made ... and all happened to be selections for Biden."
In a recentย articleย pooh-poohing complaints of fraud in Georgia, as well as Arizona, the New York Times portrayed Favorito as โa known conspiracyย theoristโ and suggested he was a 9/11 truther. As evidence, it cited a 2002 book he published โquestioning the origin of the attacks of Sept. 11,ย 2001.โ
Asked about it, Favorito responded: โMy book did not propose any theories on what happened on 9/11. I donโt mention anything about explosivesโย planted in the World Trade Center, as truthers have baselessly speculated. Rather, he said, he questioned Bush family business connections with theย bin Laden family and other wealthy Saudis, and argued that the war on terror benefited the Bushes. He also faulted the Bush administration forย โobstructing" FBI investigations into the attacks.
Favorito says he is a โconstitutionalistโ and neither a Republican nor a Trump supporter.
My question concerns the Dominion system's "adjudication" process. I watched a video, that I can no longer find, that was done in one of the smaller Georgia counties that demonstrated how a vote can be changed after being flagged by the vote-counting machine. It seems that a ballot has a computer image made and just by using a mouse and a couple clicks you can erase the mark and put in the other candidate's bubble. I'm unclear as to whether or not a new "corrected" ballot is then printed up. Can anyone confirm this?