“Conspiracy Theorists” Right Again on 2020 Georgia Election Irregularities

Five years after the fact, Georgia election officials have admitted that 315,000 votes in the 2020 presidential election lacked the necessary signature from poll workers and should not have been counted. President Donald Trump was unjustly indicted for alleging just such a violation of election security.

A bombshell report out last week in The Federalist from journalist Brianna Lyman provides all the details on what should be considered one of the biggest election-related scandals in American history. As she relays, election officials in Fulton County, Georgia, the most populous in the state, admitted to failing “to sign off on the vote tabulation ‘tapes’ critical to the certification process.”

The revelation came thanks to the tireless efforts of David Cross, a local election integrity activist who filed a lawsuit against the Georgia State Election Board in 2022.

In the 2020 election, Georgia state law required two basic steps to ensure ballots were counted fairly and accurately. First, at the beginning of each day of voting, poll workers must print and sign a “zero tape,” which shows that every voting machine is starting at zero votes. Second, poll workers must print three “closing tapes” at the end of each day and either sign them or provide a reason for refusal.

But according to Cross’s investigation, an astonishing 36 out of 37 early voting locations in Fulton County failed to sign the closing tapes. Thirty-two polling sites also failed to sign their zero tapes.

“If there is no record of whether the tabulator was set at zero at the start of polling, there is no way of telling whether ballots from a previous election (or ballots from a test run) were left on the memory card and might later be counted. Notably, this happened in Montana, where officials discovered more votes than were cast and believe the votes were leftover sample data that had not been cleared.”

In some cases, the tapes also showed “additional irregularities,” such as polling locations open as late as 2 a.m. and “duplicated scanner serial numbers, where memory devices were removed from one scanner and printed on an alternate scanner.”

In total, at least 315,000 early votes in Fulton County did not have poll worker signatures attached to them and were thus uncertified. “Because no tape was ever legally certified, Fulton County had no lawful authority to certify its advanced voting results to the secretary of state. Yet it did,” Cross told Lyman. “And [Georgia Secretary of State] Raffensperger accepted and folded those uncertified numbers into Georgia’s official total without questioning them. This is not partisan. This is statutory. This is the law.”

This jaw-dropping failure on the part of election officials should raise serious concerns about what other such “irregularities” have occurred – and perhaps still are occurring – in Georgia and elsewhere. But it is also a vindication of President Donald Trump and every other “election conspiracy theorist” who has alleged precisely this sort of misconduct from 2020 onward.

When Trump was indicted in Georgia in 2023 (along with 18 other co-defendants), the charges centered on his supposed efforts to “pressure” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to investigate precisely these sorts of irregularities and violations of the law. At the time, media and Democrats hailed Raffensperger as a hero for insisting that everything was on the up-and-up. Now, it looks like Trump and the “conspiracy theorists” were right – again.

It’s worth remembering the hysteria with which the liberal establishment defended the election procedures in Georgia and Fulton County that we now know to be riddled with errors and inconsistencies. For years, anyone who remotely questioned how early voting was conducted in Georgia was castigated as a “threat to democracy.” Democrat prosecutors were literally trying to throw a former (and, as it turns out, future) president in prison for questioning the legitimacy of the results.

Meanwhile, the co-defendants in the case had to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Many of them were financially ruined. Where is their restitution? Where is their apology from the liberal media hounds that destroyed their reputations and their lives?

Critics will counter that the state performed a recount where every ballot was counted by hand, ensuring the results were accurate. But if we can’t even trust Georgia poll workers and election officials to properly sign closing and zero tapes, how can we trust them to conduct an accurate recount? Moreover, the fact remains that the tapes were not signed. According to the letter of the law in Georgia, they should not have been counted.

Joe Biden was declared the victor in Georgia by 11,779 votes. It’s not a certainty, but it seems a strong likelihood that the outcome would have been changed had those votes been correctly declared invalid. Perhaps they were all legitimate votes cast by lawful voters. But there is now no denying that they were handled improperly – election officials openly admitted as much.

Finally getting to the bottom of what happened in Georgia five years ago is about more than just one election. It’s about demanding that elected officials enforce the law as written and respect the public’s right to seek accountability when that standard is not met. Demanding accessible and secure elections is not a threat to democracy; it is the very mechanism that protects democracy from corruption, complacency, and abuse.

Thank you for referencing that article MtnClimber.

“Conspiracy Theorists” Right Again on 2020 Georgia Election Irregularities

As a side note to this thread, please consider the following.

Regarding alleged compromised election integrity, the following information is evidence of the deep state uniparty and its determination to continue its ongoing abuse of its repealable (hint) 16th Amendment direct taxes power imo.

First, consider that when the 14th Congress found existing tax revenues, lawmakers got all happy and unsurprisingly decided to spend it. They drafted the Bonus Bill of 1817 to build roads and canals for transportation support of soldiers and commerce, basing the bill entirely on the General Welfare Clause (GWC)which turned out to be a mistake.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises [emphasis added], to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

While President James Madison (4th pres.) agreed with lawmakers that the bill would be good for transportation purposes, he clarified in his veto explanation (ahem) that while the GWC gives Congress the power to appropriate taxes, Congress overlooked that the clauses following it in the Constitution's Article I, Section 8 were intended to limit what Congress could spend taxpayer dollars for. (Section 8 is actually one long sentence.)

The legislative powers vested in Congress are specified and enumerated in the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution, and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by the bill is among the enumerated powers, or that it falls by any just interpretation within the power to make laws necessary and proper [emphasis added] for carrying into execution those or other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States. —President James Madison, March 3, 1817: Veto Message on the Internal Improvements Bill

Madison also noted that the bonus bill didn't even pass Congress wild card excuse for justifying spending, the now infamous "Necessary and Proper Clause."

Note Thomas Jefferson's advice against ignoring parts of the Constitution.

The general rule [is] that an instrument is to be so construed as to reconcile and give meaning and effect to all its parts. --Thomas Jefferson to -----, 1816. ME 14:445

So the 14th Congress had flunked Constitution 101(!) under "Professor" Madison, generally regarded as the father of the Constitution.

At the other extreme, consider that PDJT47 has effectively been applying the "Madison test" to much federal spending this year.

Getting back to crook lawmakers, likewise for presidents, that confused and misguided voters have been electing for approaching 250 years, other than Jefferson and Madison, it's very questionable if the country has had a Congress and POTUS that respected its Section 8-limited spending powers. Abuse of federal spending went into high gear after ratification of 16th and 17th Amendments, 17A popular vote for federal senators, especially after Constitution-ignoring FDR got into the Oval Office.

Getting back to 2020 Georgia election "irregularities," note that Section 2 of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment is a penalty for states where ballot box fraud has occurred.

Note the zero tolerance, "hair trigger" wording of that section which federal and state governments, under the boots of the corrupt, constitutionally undefined political parties, are evidently ignoring imo.

But when the right to vote at any election
is denied to any
or in any way abridged,
Section 2: Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election [all emphases added] for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. [Apportionment of Representatives]

But here is third party opinion that both state and federal governments are wrongly ignoring Section 2, glaring evidence of the very corrupt uniparty imo.

No serious effort was ever made in Congress to effectuate § 2, and the only judicial attempt was rebuffed.2 , cert. denied, 328 U.S. 870 (1946). —Apportionment Clause
The Section had long been dead. But there are two camps of legal scholars who wish to revive it. The first consists of those who would like to see Section Two enforced to punish states that abridge their citizens’ right to vote, especially in the wake of Shelby County v. Holder. Recently, Joshua Geltzer, the executive director at Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and the former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, added himself to this camp. The second camp is using Section Two, which distinguishes on the basis of gender, as evidence that Section One’s Equal Protection Clause does not prohibit gender-based discrimination. Jonathan Mitchell spearheads this movement. —The Worrisome Ghost of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Second Section
(Again) The general rule [is] that an instrument is to be so construed as to reconcile and give meaning and effect to all its parts. --Thomas Jefferson to -----, 1816. ME 14:445

It would appear that it is highly questionable that John Ossoff / David Perdue’s race should have gone to a runoff with these revelations and that Perdue should have won re-election outright on election night. Now how many Senate votes over the last 5+ years did that impact with the Senate so closely divided if in fact the Republican Perdue would have been in that Senate seat vs. the Democrat Ossoff? In fact, I believe the Republicans would have held the majority 51-49 from January 2021-January 2023, right? That would have also affecting the floor agenda. Then assuming the 2022 elections went the same way, it would have been 50-50 split, which, although the Dems would have had the majority with Harris’ tie breaking vote, still could have impacted the results of a number of votes. Biden might also have been prompted to appoint a less radical justice than Kentanji Brown Jackson (or Breyer might not have even stepped down). And judges would not have been fast tracked for approval Biden’s first two years, impacting the current makeup of the judiciary, and even so, again, a number of this outright communist judges would not have been approved or even appointed at all.

This has a lot more implications than just a statistic on paper, and the potential implications of what would *not* have happened that did end up happening with just the issue of that one Senate seat alone being reversed is far more than trivial.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.