Peach Tree Times

The lawsuit against Fulton County over alleged irregularities stemming from the November general election, including 5,000 missing absentee ballots, is still “very much alive,” said Garland Favorito, co-founder of VoterGA, the conservative election group behind the complaint.

Favorito told Peach Tree Times that news reports that the suit was all but finished after a June hearing before Judge Brian Amero, chief judge of Henry County Superior Court, were “total lies.”

He referred a reporter to the “News” tab on the VoterGA website that contains side-by-side comparisons of statements in news reports with the facts.

One statement by Georgia Public Broadcasting said: “There is no evidence of counterfeit ballots or any other wrongdoing among Fulton’s absentee votes." The truth, VoterGA says, is that “the Fulton County ballot inspection complaint has produced four sworn affidavits of counterfeit ballots by senior poll managers, two corroborating affidavits from audit monitors and three affidavits for three boxes of near 100% Joe Biden batches, a statistical implausibility.”

Three separate recounts of the Georgia presidential vote found no major irregularities. President Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Georgia since 1992, a result that caused former President Donald Trump and some of his supporters to charge voter fraud. 

Favorito says he expects the next hearing before Amero some time in August, and hopes they can then proceed with the inspection of 147,000 unsealed ballots the judge approved in May. The scheduled date of the inspection was delayed when new defendants asked for a dismissal of the case.

In a July 19 news release calling for forensic audits of all counties, not only Fulton, VoterGA listed the new allegations inserted into its amended complaint, including missing chain-of-custody forms for more than 5,000 absentee ballots. 

“A 60% error rate in the 1,500-plus batch totals for the reported audit results, seven falsified tally sheets containing 850 votes for Joe Biden but zero for Donald Trump and Jo Jorgenson (Libertarian candidate), more than 4,000 ballots that were duplicated in reporting of the audit results and missing tally sheets for more than 50,000 ballots that were not uploaded until months after the audit results were initially published,” the group claims.

Last week, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, demanded the firing of two Fulton County election officials over reports of the additional allegations of ballot fraud.

The Georgia Star reported on June 13 that 25% of Fulton County absentee ballots were not documented with chain of custody documents—the transfer forms that track how absentee ballots arrive at the county registrar’s office. Star news analysis reveals that Fulton County only documented 1,180 absentee ballot transfer forms when state voting numbers indicate there should’ve been 1,565 absentee transfer forms.

The paper also reported that Fulton County records indicate that the 385 missing absentee ballot transfer forms were necessary to provide mandatory chain of custody documentation for a total of 18,901 absentee ballots. Those documents are still missing.