Weeks after a Republican election official in Georgia raised questions about the outcome of the 2024 elections, it appears the state will be implementing reforms to ensure that the questionable results aren’t repeated in the future.
The Georgia Election Board on Thursday agreed to a series of measures intended to provide oversight in Fulton County, home to notorious anti-Trump prosecutor Fani Willis and the site of so many votes in 2024 that they outnumbered actual residents, according to one official with the county’s election board.
The Georgia Recorder reported that the board agreed in a 2-1 vote to provide an election overseer this year who will independently monitor Fulton County’s election procedures. The change comes four years after county officials double-scanned 3,075 ballots during a statewide recount, according to the Western Journal. Another complaint stated that 17,000 ballots went missing. However, investigators within the office of Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger concluded the errors would not have changed the outcome of the election where President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump by a margin of 11,779 votes.
In Fulton County, President Biden carried 73% of the initial vote, or 243,000 votes. During a recount initiated by the Trump campaign, Biden lost 932 votes. The following month, Fulton officials acknowledged they had failed to properly back up data to servers during the recount. An official later testified that the errors likely resulted from a mishandling of ballot batches and that changes had been implemented to separate ballots once they are scanned.
Mark Wingate, a Republican on the Fulton County Elections Board, testified earlier this year that his research found that the county has collected more votes than it had voters. “The things that led me to initially have concern about everything was… I started looking at our voter rolls, and I did some fairly simplistic research on the population of Fulton County,” Wingate said during a remote meeting for an unrelated hearing. “What I found out and started pressing with the Election Department [was]… we had more voters on the active voter rolls than we did of the population of the entirety of Fulton County.”
“There was nothing done to answer my questions on that,” he added. “Somebody may have come in and voted that frankly, legally, should not be able to.”
Following the 2020 election, Wingate said he and other board members attempted to obtain chain of custody documents from the county’s election officials, which track where absentee ballots were transported and by whom they were handled. “None of that was delivered,” he said.
“How can I trust as a board member to certify this election when I cannot receive even a sampling, anything at all with regards to chain of custody documents?”
More than 30 drop boxes were placed throughout Fulton County, Wingate testified, allowing voters to submit their ballots during the pandemic without coming into contact with others at a polling location. When he and his colleagues asked to see surveillance tapes from cameras set up to monitor the drop boxes, “there was never an inch of footage that was ever delivered to the board,” Wingate said.