Peach Tree Times

Seventy-four Georgia counties cannot produce thousands of original ballot images, whose retention is required by law, from the 2020 general election, an investigation by the election watchdog group VoterGA has found.

“These violations are yet another glaring reason why Georgians cannot trust the secretary of state’s office,” Garland Favorito, co-founder of VoterGA, said during a news conference announcing the findings. “We desperately need a multicounty audit of the 2020 election to resolve these serious problems before 2022.”

Favorito said that VoterGA submitted open records requests (ORR) for the images to each of the state’s 159 counties. Six counties said they had no images at all. Twenty-two said they had recount, not original images. Twenty-eight counties said that had only partial images and 18 failed to comply with the ORR, Favorito said.

Most failed to respond but others were asking “exorbitant” fees for images that most counties provided for around $25-$50.

“Fees requested by counties ranged from $0 to $1,700, which is too unnecessarily expensive to comply with ORR law,” Favorito said.

Six of those counties claim to have mailed images that VoterGA team members have not yet received. These images could also be incomplete or recount images only.

“Recount images don’t have original time stamps that can be used for audit purposes nor do they have original meta data that shows how votes were initially interpreted,” Favorito said. “The images can also be changed by tampering between scans and are, therefore, invalid to audit an election.”

Dominion voting systems automatically creates ballot images for in-person voting on compact flash memory cards, VoterGA reports. The images should then manually uploaded to the county’s election management server (EMS).

Federal law requires that election records be retained for 22 months. State law requires a 24-month retention period for election documents, including digital records.

At the new conference, VoterGA showed written confirmation from former state election director Chris Harvey granting permission to erase in-person ballot images from the memory cards.

Many of the complaints in Georgia regarding the 2020 election have stemmed from former President Donald Trump's unfounded allegations that he lost the Peach State by 11,000 votes due to voter fraud, as previously reported by the Associated Press. Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate to lose Georgia since 1992.