The Georgia hearing on Thursday revealed what appeared to be damning video of election officials pulling suitcases full of ballots from under tables draped with tablecloths immediately after the press and two Republican field organizers, sent as observers, were asked to leave at about 10 p.m. on Election Day. Absentee ballots and military ballots were being tabulated in the room at the State Farm Arena in Fulton County. Lawyer Jacki Pick, who volunteered to help the legal team in Georgia, explained that "At no time were the organizers allowed to meaningfully observe." She presented the video testimony showing the alleged ballot harvesting activity. The video was presented for the first time to the legislature at the hearing.
According to the witnesses who signed affidavits, a woman with blonde pigtails asked the observers to leave at around 10 p.m. on Nov. 3, "on the basis that they were going to stop counting." They were asked to return at 8:30 the next morning. The observers had been there all day, roped off from the tabulation area without meaningful access. Once the poll observers left, the video shows that four election officials remained despite the announcement that counting was going to stop. Georgia statute requires that observers always be present when counting is in process.
Video evidence shows the four election officials pulling out four suitcases containing approximately 6,000 ballots each from under a table at about 11 p.m. They then began to process the ballots in the tabulating machines. Pick explained that a news crew alerted witnesses to the fact that workers were still inside and, at that point, the witnesses went back to the center around 1 a.m. arriving shortly after the four workers had left the arena.
The Trump legal team who reviewed the video confirmed that ballots are not normally stored in suitcases under tables. In fact, Pick said, it appeared to be "an aberration from how any other ballots were handled that day." The blonde woman had put the table in the room at about 8:22 a.m. on Election Day. They are still investigating when in the time stamps the suitcases were placed under the tables.
The ballots in question were only counted when no one else was in the room—a total of about two hours of unsupervised tabulation of ballots at the rate of about 3,000 ballots per hour. The witnesses confirmed with two other people that ballots were, in fact, being tabulated the entire two hours.
One of the legislators present, Elena Parent, Chairwoman of the Georgia Senate Democrats, challenged Peck about the suitcases, saying Peck's story had been "debunked" weeks ago. Another legislator, however, quickly pointed out that this was the first time video evidence had been seen. The arena had just released the video. Parent was visibly unhappy when contradicted, and requested to hear again from those who had told her the story was debunked. Peck, however, pointed out that Parent could see from the video that ballots were being unloaded from hidden suitcases, then tabulated while no observers were present.
Ray Smith, lead counsel for President Trump's legal team in Georgia, filed a petition today with the Fulton Superior Court, contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election. He said he possessed affidavits from more than 100 Georgia voters who reported violations of Georgia election code and outright "lies and potential fraud." He reported numerous cases of election fraud, some of which are listed below.
In addition, he said there were 395 ballots cast in another state. Another 15,700 ballots were cast by voters who changed address with the post office prior to Nov. 3 and 40,279 moved across county lines failing to properly re-register to vote. All of these instances violate Georgia law. The margin of victory is approximately 12,500 votes as of today's count, less than 1/2 of 1 percent.
Rudy Giuliani spoke, as did a number of fact witnesses—both experts and election workers. Russ Ramsland, cybersecurity expert and co-founder of Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG) spoke about his experience with Dominion voting machines and the SmartMatic software both dating from 2018 as well as 2020. He found a number of statistical irregularities that showed significant bias toward Biden in the election. Significantly, of the mail-in ballots, about 96,000 were returned but "never voted." He explained that it is very "easy to assign a mail-in ballot in the Dominion system."
The other expert witness, Phil Waldron, who is a retired army colonel with specialization in electronic warfare, psychological operations, OPSEC and cybersecurity, told the legislators that the Dominion software is known for its security vulnerabilities. He said it was essentially designed to "keep Hugo Chavez in power" in Venezuela by controlling and manipulating votes. He said the only way one could know the truth about mail-in ballots would be to do a forensic audit, scanning them for marks that would indicate whether they were machine-generated injected votes or votes attributable to citizens. He reported that Georgia had the single largest ballot upload in the nation at 3:36 a.m. on Nov. 4 with over 200,000 ballots. He also said that the error rate in the system for ballots is well below the legal standard allowed in U.S. elections.
Bridget Thorne, a Dominion Systems-trained poll tech worker who has worked with Fulton County elections for nine years witnessed repeated unsecured ballot collection from scanners, and piles of ballots in suitcases left abandoned in the warehouse with scanners. During her shifts, ballots also went missing repeatedly and there were no checks and balances in the system to reconcile test ballots, real ballots, emergency ballots, or provisional ballots. She reported having been reprimanded by a Dominion employee for trying to reconcile the violations of procedure.
On Thursday, a press release was issued that has since been scrubbed from Google's search engine, confirming testimony from Garland Favorito who was able to secure a Dominion machine for the Trump campaign and perform a forensic investigation on the machine. "In Georgia, Ware County Elections Director confirmed that the recently completed hand-count audit totals showed the total electronic vote count shorted Donald Trump 37 votes and added those 37 votes to totals for Joe Biden." It is interesting that his testimony was cut from the hearing because it is pivotal information. His interview with John Fredericks is revealing.
The Ware County director confirmed in an email that 37 votes were switched from Trump to Biden in this small county. The press release confirms that the "74 affected votes represents .52 percent of the 14,192 county votes cast, exactly double Biden’s total statewide margin of .26 percent."
As noted in paragraphs 3 and 4 in the press release, State Election Director Chris Harvey’s Nov. 16 memo essentially "instructed counties to certify all Dominion results if they included all ballots cast. After Harvey pressed counties to disregard any potential Dominion counting inaccuracies, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ordered counties to reset their machines for the U.S. Senate race, which would destroy potential evidence of tabulation malware. Secretary Raffensperger forced Georgia counties to enter their audit results into a centralized ARLO system rather than their own data sources. That broke the audit reporting chain and allowed the SOS office to tell counties what their results are rather than counties reporting their results to the state using generally accepted American election reporting principles. VoterGA polled all 159 counties and found roughly 150 of them had no electronic totals for their own hand count audit."
Many of the same instances of election fraud reported by witnesses in other swing states were also discussed at the hearing in Georgia. Lead counsel, Ray Smith concluded that the actual legal votes in the Georgia election can never be known because the alleged fraud was so significant. He said it is impossible to certify the election and has already requested a new election as allowed by Georgia law. Failing that, he reminded legislators that it is their duty and responsibility to appoint electors in a case where the election code seems to have been so egregiously ignored and violated.
