Peach Tree Times

The mystery deepens surrounding the whereabouts of thousands of Fulton County chain-of-custody documents from the 2020 General Elections.

The Georgia Star News reports that Fulton County has denied it chain-of-custody documents for absentee ballots placed in drop boxes that they “purportedly gave to Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) News on or before June 17.”

“Fulton County’s Legal Assistant Shana Eatmon’s emailed response informed The Star News that there are no documents that meet our open-records request,” the article stated.

The article continues to say that “Stephen Fowler of the taxpayer-funded GPB News declared in an article dated June 16 at 2:46 p.m., which was later changed to June 17 at 3:11 p.m., that Fulton County is not missing ballots or hundreds of drop-box custody forms.”

Garland Favorito, co-founder of VoterGa, a non-partisan election integrity group, said that his group has also attempted to locate the chain-of-custody documents.

“A small group of our members spent months analyzing drop-box chain-of-custody forms much like the Georgia Star did for Fulton County,” Favorito told the Peach Tree Times. “We are still missing three days of forms representing over 5,000 votes that are included in the Fulton County results, even though they have no chain-of-custody forms to authenticate the ballots.”

In related news, Republican state lawmakers are demanding a performance review of the county's election officials. And last month, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, called for two Fulton County officials to be removed from their posts.

“Fulton County’s continued failures have gone on long enough with no accountability,” Raffensperger tweeted. “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.”