Georgia State Law:
“All proceedings at the tabulating center and precincts shall be open to the view of the public.” O.C.G.A, § 21-2-483(b).
There are ballot scanners on the video, and ballots were being fed into the scanners for at least 82 minutes before any ‘official monitors’ showed up.
The video was taken at the State Farm Arena, in Atlamta, which was Georgia's largest vote counting center.
The video shows workers at the polls taking out four boxes filled with ballots from under a table, after clearing the room of other workers and poll watchers.
Jacki Pick, an attorney with Trump’s legal team said, “The same person that stayed behind, the person that cleared the place out under the pretense that we are going to stop counting is the person who put the table there at 8.22 in the morning. I saw four suitcases come out from underneath the table.”
The four workers began counting the 'under the table' ballots without a supervisor present.
Why are those ballots separate from all the other ballots? Ballots are usually stored in the corner, or they come through the front door -- they are not hidden under a covered table.
Why are those ballots being counted when the place is cleared out with no witnesses?
Each of the five tabulating machine can process about 3,000 ballots an hour, so when unsupervised, the votes counted could easily exceed the less than 12,000 margin of victory for Biden in Georgia.
It’s unknown, however, if the votes tabulated without supervision were for Trump or Biden.
Two election officials in Georgia disputed some claims from the Trump campaign. They alleged no one asked the poll watchers to leave or stay, but didn’t clarify why the ballots were pulled out from under the covered table after the poll watchers were cleared.
Several poll observers in Georgia said under penalty of perjury that they were effectively told to go home on election night before ballot counting resumed for several hours with no observers present.
Republican poll observers Mitchell Harrison and Michelle Branton said in affidavits: At 10:30 p.m. on November 3 inside an absentee ballot counting room in State Farm Arena, a woman shouted to everyone to stop working and return the following morning at 8:30 a.m.
“This lady had appeared through the night and Mitchell and I believed her to be the supervisor,” Branton wrote in an affidavit. Nearly all workers left, except a handful of people. All ballot counting stopped.
The poll observers were the only outsiders left, along with a Fox News crew. Harrison spent time seeking answers from Regina Waller, the Fulton County’s public affairs manager for elections, but she refused to answer the questions, he said in an affidavit.
A few minutes later, Branton, Harrison, and the crew left. Only four people remained in the room including Waller, when they had departed. The group later heard that ballot counting had resumed at the arena, despite the public being told that it had ceased for the night. Observers rushed back at around 1 a.m. on Nov. 4 and found that to be the case.
David Shafer, the head of Georgia’s Republican Party, said “Our Republican observers and members of the news media departed State Farm when they announced they were shutting down for the night and would resume counting at 8:30 a.m. the next day.” He said the workers “continued counting ballots in secret until 1 a.m.”
“We have launched an investigation into why the monitors from the political parties left before scanning ended. While it was their right to leave early, we want to make certain they were not misled into thinking scanning had stopped for the night when it had not,” said Walter Jones, a spokesman for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The Fulton County, Georgia explanation is the Republican monitors and news media are to blame for believing the election officials who told them that they were shutting down, packed up the voting equipment, and started cleaning.
A county spokeswoman told said Registration & Elections Director Richard Barron told the Board of Commissioners that when he learned that staff were dismissed at 10:30 p.m., he advised that some workers needed to continue.
Poll manager Susan Voyles, who was helping audit ballots at Georgia World Congress Centers, said she was told to go home on November 15 after counting just 60 ballots, even though workers at nearby tables had thousands to process. “We offered to help on some larger piles that were still evident, and the officials present were adamant that they did not need any help,” she said in an affidavit.
Carlos Silva, a trial lawyer from Florida, said in an affidavit that he saw two vote counters in Dekalb County pull out a pile of ballots that had two distinct characteristics. “One, I noticed that they all had a perfect black bubble and were all Biden select. I was able to observe the perfect bubble for a few minutes before they made me move away from the table. At no time did I speak to the poll workers or obstruct them in any way. I heard them go through the stack and call out Biden’s name over 500 times in a row,” he said. He also said he witnessed something similar in Cobb County.
Observer Nicholas Zeher said he never saw vote counters or anyone else verifying signatures as ballots were counted. He also said he saw ballots on a review table with markings only for Biden and no other candidate. And he saw a batch of ballots where the bubble for Biden appeared to be a perfect black mark. The affidavits were entered in a federal court case, Pearson v.
Georgia election officials tried to explain the ‘smoking gun’ video that showed them allegedly throwing out poll watchers and then continuing to count ballots. Poll watchers have alleged they were told that the counting was going to stop.
Election officials are now claiming they never told the poll watchers that and the poll watchers just left of their own accord. According to the “Fact Check,” this was the story from Frances Watson, chief investigator for the Georgia secretary of state:
There was never an announcement made to the media and other observers about the counting being over for the night and them needing to leave, according to Watson, who was provided information by the media liaison, who was present. She said they just followed the “cutters” as they left.
She said: "Nobody told them to stay. Nobody told them to leave. Nobody gave them any advice on what they should do. And It was still open for them or the public to come back in to view at whatever time they wanted to, as long as they were still working."
In addition, she explained that the only ballots that were scanned after the media and other observers had left were those that had already been opened in front of these observers.
That's not true.
Poll watchers reportedly signed sworn affidavits that they were told that the counting was going to stop at 10:30, exactly the time the poll watchers and the media were ejected from the room by the election officials.
ABC News tweeted on Election Night at 10:34 after the media was told the count was stopping. " NEW: The election department sent the ballot counters at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta home at 10:30 p.m., Regina Waller, the Fulton County public affairs manager for elections, tells ABC News."
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) November 4, 2020
A senior source in the Secretary of State’s office told Fox News that there was a “designated observer,” there the whole time.
That’s not true.
There was a state election board monitor present from 11:52 to 12:45 p.m. and the deputy chief investigator for the secretary of state’s office was present beginning at 12:15 a.m., accord to that monitor.
Party poll watchers are entitled to be there.
There was not someone there “the whole time.” There was no one there for 82 minutes from 10:30 to 11:52.
Gabriel Sterling, the state’s voting system implementation manager, told Newsmax on Friday that the video in question does not show what Trump’s legal team is claiming. “We’ve had our investigators watch all, many, several hours of it yesterday and what essentially happened is, and we knew about part of this on election night itself, around 10:15-10:20, there’s two groups of people in this room that are working,” Sterling explained. “There are cutters, the people who are opening the envelopes, and there’s the ones who are scanning.”
He continued, noting that the cutters completed their work and started leaving. The others started to leave also but were instructed to stay. The election monitors also exited and later claimed that they were told by officials to leave, according to Sterling.
The officials pointed out that there was an “82-minute” time period in which there was no election observer present. But the entire period was captured on video footage. Sterling also stated that the containers were not suitcases.
Nevertheless, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp called for a signature audit from the secretary of state after viewing the footage.
