Suitcases stuffed with ballots, hidden under a black cloth-covered table, wheeled out and tallied in the dead of night to throw an election for a candidate working in concert with China could be the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster.
But in Georgia, President Trump and his allies have continued to push the claim as evidence of a “rigged election” and widespread voter fraud.
State leaders have pushed back and said the allegations aren’t rooted in reality.
The evidence presented by Trump’s legal team revolves around surveillance footage taken on election night at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena. His legal team claims observers and election workers were told to leave for the night, and that was when the alleged dirty deeds went down.
Partisan observers and some poll workers claimed they were told to leave the Fulton County tally site but that four election workers stayed behind, pulled suitcases full of ballots hidden underneath a table, and then scanned them without any supervision, all, presumably, in Joe Biden’s favor.
That is coupled with a comment from Fulton County Public Affairs Manager Regina Waller on election night, who told ABC News that the election department sent the State Farm Arena absentee ballot counters home at 10:30 p.m. Since then, Waller has not responded to questions from the state GOP. She has also not returned calls from the Washington Examiner seeking comment.
But in fact, contrary to Waller’s initial claims, Georgia officials insist no one told observers they had to leave, and both an independent monitor and a state investigator oversaw the majority of the counting process.
The confusion came when election workers thought they were done for the night, but then were instructed to continue scanning ballots, local media and the Associated Press reported.
The video, which was viewed more than a million times on social media, shows clips of surveillance footage from a room where Fulton County ballots were being counted. The clip was circulated after volunteer Trump attorney Jackie Pick showed it during a hearing at the state capitol.
Pick said the video showed a staff member telling observers to leave around 10:30 p.m., and that after they left, four election workers stayed behind to count the hidden batch for two hours without any witnesses present.
Richard Barron, Fulton County elections director, pushed back on those claims Friday and said no observers were explicitly told to leave but that some had started to go after they finished their work. As more and more people started to call it a night, they put prepared ballots back in boxes and away under a table to “close out” for the evening.
At that point, election observers and members of the media also started to leave. Then, the election supervisor on site got a call from Barron, who told the team to keep scanning the ballots that had already been prepared. Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, said it was then that workers pulled the boxes of ballots back out and continued scanning.
“These aren’t magical ballots,” Sterling told the Associated Press. “They didn’t show up out of some other room.”
Sterling slammed Trump’s team for manipulating the video to make it seem as though something sinister was taking place. Sterling said he reviewed the entire surveillance tape, not just the sliver Trump’s team claimed was the smoking gun, and found it showed “normal ballot processing.”
“They had the whole video too and ignored the truth,” Sterling tweeted Friday.
You can watch the @wsbtv report to show that the President’s team is intentionally misleading the public about what happened at State Farm Arena on election night. They had the whole video too and ignored the truth. https://t.co/VvKZUxsihk
— Gabriel Sterling (@GabrielSterling) December 4, 2020
Another reality is that there was a period of time when observers were not present during the rescanning process because they had left.
A state investigator and an independent state election board monitor were back at the arena around 12:15 a.m. The two stayed at the facility until the count ended for the night, Barron said.
The secretary of state’s office has launched an investigation into why partisan poll observers left before the scanning ended.
In addition to saying he won Georgia “by a lot,” Trump has also falsely claimed that “a pipe burst in a faraway location, totally unrelated to the location of what was happening, and they stopped counting for four hours,” adding, a “lot of things happened,” and it was during then that the election was stolen from him.
While there was a reported water leak at the State Farm Arena that caused a delay in vote-counting on election night, no ballots were damaged, and vote processing resumed normally.
Trump returned to the Peach State Saturday night to headline a campaign rally for GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who are in tight runoff races against Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
During the rally, Trump again brought up Georgia’s “rigged” election multiple times and claimed he won not only the state but the country.
