Peach Tree Times

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s call for the firing of two Fulton County election officials stemmed from multiple reports of discrepancies in the hand count audit of the November general elections results, according to a spokesman for the office.

“It all kind of amounted to the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Walter Jones, communications manager for voter education for the Secretary of State Office, told the Peach Tree Times.

The election irregularities were highlighted earlier in the week during a press conference by voter watchdog group VoterGA , the Tucker Carlson Show on Fox News, and a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The AJC reported that nearly 200 absentee ballots were counted twice before a recount.

“Fulton County’s continued failures have gone on long enough with no accountability,” Raffensperger wrote in a Thursday tweet. “Rick Barron [elections director] and Ralph Jones, Fulton’s registration chief, must be fired and removed from Fulton’s elections leadership immediately. Fulton’s voters and the people of Georgia deserve better.”

Also Thursday, Georgia House Speaker David Ralston (R-Blue Ridge) wrote to Barron urging his office to request that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation conduct a forensic investigation into the 2020 presidential election in the county.

“Recently media reports have surface which call into question the way in which Fulton County conducted, counted and audited the November 2020 presidential election,” Ralston wrote. “These reports have been accompanied by video and other evidence, which is part of on-going litigation, and requires thorough examination and explanation.”

At a Tuesday news conference, VoterGA announced it had amended a complaint against Fulton County after an examination of mail-in ballot images suggest that an earlier hand count audit was “riddled with massive errors and provable fraud.”

The error reporting rate in Fulton’s hand count audit was 60%, alleges Garland Favorito, co-founder of VoterGA and one of the plaintiffs seeking declaratory and injunctive relief.

In addition, a VoterGA data team analysis showed that 923 of 1,539 mail-in ballot batch files contained votes that allegedly were incorrectly reported in Fulton’s official results, VoterGA said in a news release.

“These inaccuracies are due to discrepancies in votes for Donald Trump, Joe Biden and total votes cast compared to their reported audit totals for respective batches,” Favorito said during the news conference in Roswell.

Favorito said that errors in the reporting occurred on both sides but that overall the discrepancies favored Biden.

“There’s a tally sheet that showed 100-0 nothing for Joe Biden,” he said. “But at look at the actual result shows something completely different.”

Three separate audits showed Biden carrying Georgia in the 2020 election by more than 11,000 votes. He carried Fulton County by more than 240,000 votes.