Election Integrity: The Furor Over Fulton County

The controversy over the 2020 presidential election took a sharp turn last week when the FBI executed a search warrant at the offices of the Fulton County Election Board in Georgia. It’s a dramatic development. Atlanta’s Fulton County was the epicenter of Donald Trump’s disputed loss of the state in 2020. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton called the search warrant a “vindication” for Trump. Candidate Trump “almost went to jail for raising the questions that have now been validated by a federal magistrate,” Fitton told Newsmax. “The reason the search warrant was approved was because a federal magistrate looked at the facts and made the conclusion that there was a reasonable belief that a crime had taken place…specifically election crimes.”

The search warrant is damning. It directs the seizure of a broad array of physical ballots from 2020, voting machine tabulator tapes, electronic ballot images and voter rolls, and authorizes “a review of electronic storage media and electronically stored information” to locate further evidence.

The official record reflects that Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020 by just 11,799 votes. The heart of the Fulton County dispute is ballots—ballots cast on Election Day and after, absentee ballots, ballots lost or stolen or fictitious.

Cleta Mitchell, founder of the Election Integrity Network, recently broke down the 2020 ballot concerns in a comprehensive memo, “A Snapshot of the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”

Mitchell notes that as of Election Day 2020, the Georgia secretary of state reported that 4.7 million ballots had been cast, with Trump leading by 103,705 votes, and 94,000 ballots left to count.

Yet by November 20, “official results included four times the number of ballots that were outstanding” as of Election Day. That is, the total number of ballots cast was now 5,023,159—with another roughly 300,000 ballots counted instead of the 94,000 ballots noted on Election Day.

What happened?

Where did those 300,000 extra ballots come from?

Mitchell notes that “74,000 absentee ballots were reported as cast” when the polls closed on Election Day, but four days later, about “148,000 absentee ballots were counted.”

Additionally, “tens of thousands of ballots arrived…on and after Election Day in unsecured mail carts and with no chain of custody.”

Of the 148,000 absentee ballots in Fulton County, Mitchell notes numerous irregularities. More than 132,000 lack a digital scan file, raising questions about authenticity. The electronic file anomalies “strongly suggest deliberate ballot image file manipulation.”

Another problem: according to Fulton County and state officials, while 148,319 absentee ballots were counted for Fulton County, only 125,784 voters were recorded as casting an absentee ballot. “Therefore, 25,534 more ballots were counted than voters recorded as having voted by absentee ballot.”

Record keeping appears to have vanished. For all in-person voting in Fulton County, both early and on election day, “no digital record exists for any votes cast in person.” Every ballot image was destroyed, “in violation of both state and federal law.”

The FBI search warrant also notes tabulator issues. The Mitchell memo cites multiple problems with the tabulators, including serial number anomalies, closing tape problems, and more than 20,000 ballots unmoored to any known tabulator.

Additional problems included discrepancies in the later hand recount, which “added 6,691 fictitious votes” and a failure to investigate those votes.

Mitchell says there also is “significant factual evidence” of manipulation of memory cards in vote tabulators; testing and installation issues; “failure to reconcile results prior to certification;” missing absentee ballots; and no “forensic audit of voting machines.”

Until now, questions raised about the 2020 election in Fulton County have been dismissed by the media and the Left as sour grapes or conspiracy mongering. Mitchell, long associated with Trump election integrity efforts, is vilified by the Left. But she vigorously defends her Fulton County research, and with a federal magistrate finding grounds that election crimes may have been committed, it appears that a serious investigation is gaining steam.

Read the Mitchell memo here.

Read the full Election Integrity Network report on the Fulton County 2020 Election here.

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Micah Morrison is chief investigative reporter for Judicial Watch. Tips: [email protected]

Investigative Bulletin is published by Judicial Watch. Reprints and media inquiries: [email protected]