More than 300,000 votes unverified in Georgia's Fulton County in 2020, new complaint alleges

A new complaint to the Georgia State Election Board alleges that more than 300,000 ballots were unreliably recorded on unverified early voting poll closing tapes in Fulton County, Georgia in the 2020 election.

"Fulton County's Advance Voting poll closing tapes are a fraudulent, un-certified, unsigned, and un-checked false representation of over 311,000 ballots that no court could legally accept," the complaint alleges.

The December 2020 recount in Georgia determined that President Joe Biden won by just 11,779 votes over former President Donald Trump.

The complaint was filed on March 28 by David Cross, who posts 2020 election irregularities updates on the website Election Truth in Georgia, and independent investigative journalist Kevin Moncla, based on Fulton County records released in compliance with their open records request.

The records request follows reporting by Just the News in December 2020 that memory cards had been prematurely removed from vote tabulating machines due to purportedly shrinking ballot storage limits.

According to the complaint, Fulton County violated state law regarding the closing of ballot scanner polls and tampering with ballot scanners. 

At the end of early voting in the 2020 election, on October 30th, "with the ballot scanner polls still open, the seals were broken and the flashcards were removed," according to the recent complaint.

Each flashcard is supposed to be used for only one specific tabulator and is not supposed to be removed until 7 p.m. on election night. Under state law, at least three copies of each poll tape with the total number of ballots stored on the flashcard must be printed, and three witnesses must sign each copy for verification or explain in writing why they will not. 

There were 148 flashcards for early voting in the 2020 election in Fulton County. In response to the open records request, the county produced 138 poll tapes, 136 of which were not signed, meaning the identities of the persons who checked the ballot numbers are unknown.

The 136 poll tapes showed that the corresponding flashcards "were closed on 12 different ballot scanners," in violation of state law, the complaint alleges.

Fulton County "removed the flashcards from 109 tabulators and closed them out on different machines, and it leaves them wide open — unsecure and open to manipulation," Moncla told "Just the News, Not Noise" TV show Monday night. "If those flashcards were put into another machine, then we would never know it. They could have scanned — added additional votes, and we would have no idea."

The county had more than enough tabulators to count ballots without needing to swap out the flashcards, according to Moncla. 

Fulton County "had enough tabulators to supply both early voting and Election Day," Moncla said. "And there was no reason to swap the tabulators out — to take the cards out. They had plenty to do both."

Just the News first learned about the complaint from Real America's Voice correspondent Heather Mullins.

The 2020 election was the first time Georgia used Dominion Voting Systems to process the state's elections. The flashcards, or memory cards, used for Dominion's vote tabulation machines had a maximum ballot capacity of 10,000 ballots, according to a Dominion "customer advisory" released just eight days before the election. That Dominion advisory was cited by Georgia Elections Division Director Chris Harvey in a bulletin circulated to county election officials just a week before Election Day. 

After a test performed by Dominion staff purportedly confirmed that the ballot storage capacity on the flashcards was actually just 5,000, however, Dominion determined that the flashcards should be replaced at 3,000 ballots, according to a statement from an unnamed Dominion official released through Fulton County spokeswoman Regina Waller. The Dominion official attributed the change to "the amount of races that were on the November 2020 ballot and the large number of early voting polling sites that we have in Fulton County."

The March 28 complaint challenges the credibility of the downwardly revised claim of ballot storage capacity on several additional grounds.

"First, election records reveal that ballot scanners were being reprogrammed with new flashcards at various and wide-ranging ballot counts," according to the complaint. "There appears to be no correlation between the number of ballots scanned and replacing the flashcards. Certainly not anything consistent with the ballot count approaching the stated [5,000-count] threshold.

"Second, Fulton County's own records negate that the flashcard storage capacity is 5,000 ballot images. There are several Advance Voting ballot scanners that far exceed the given benchmark, the largest of which scanned 7,206 ballots. Ironically, the largest 'Total Scanned' number of 7,206 was amassed by a ballot scanner after it had been reprogrammed, purportedly because it neared capacity.

"Third, if capacity was the sincere concern which precipitated the flashcard replacement, why is it that after the cards were replaced, they were allowed to scan much larger numbers than those they replaced ...?"

The Georgia State Election Board told Just the News on Monday that it had received the March 28 complaint but had not responded yet due to their workload.