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A year-long investigation into voter fraud in Georgia is set to become a reality with arrests and charges brought against those who harvested ballots illegally in 2020 on a scale never before imagined, says John Fredericks, host of “Outside the Beltway.” The evidence is provided by an investigation of dropbox surveillance video obtained by True the Vote.
“What you’ve got right now is a clear violation of Georgia law where people are going to go to jail. According to Georgia law (and Stacy’s law) only one ballot could be put in a drop box at a time, and that ballot had to be delivered either by the person filling out the ballot (the voter) or someone that was sanctioned to put the ballot in there, friend, family, relative etc. … Every single drop box in Georgia, part of the consent decree, they would have a video camera. True the Vote through FOIA requests got access to the video tapes.”
This interview continues by explaining that a whistleblower who dropped off ballots during the previous election was paid thousands of dollars by the Democrats, and this one individual dropped off more than 4,000 illegal ballots. Furthermore, True the Vote confirmed that as many as 240 ballots were being dropped off illegally, possibly amounting to as many as 1 million votes cast in error.
A Georgia law prohibits third-party organizers from going to polling places and picking up and delivering ballots on behalf of voters, a practice known in the liberal world as “harvesting” that many liberal activists have tried to pass in battleground states without any success. The United States Supreme Court rejected the Democrats’ attempt to challenge a law that outlawed harvesting in the battleground state of Arizona earlier this summer.
During the 2019 campaign season, Rauffensperger led a successful campaign to strengthen Georgia’s prohibition on harvesting in advance of the 2020 presidential election, and he defeated the effort by prominent Democrat campaign attorney Marc Elias to put an end to the harvesting ban. As a part of a series of contacts under investigation by a local district attorney in Atlanta and Congress’s select committee on Jan. 6, Rauffensperger looked at and rejected claims made by former President Donald Trump concerning widespread election fraud during the 2020 election.
As a result of interviews and documents reviewed, Raffensperger received a detailed complaint on Nov. 30 from the conservative voter integrity group True the Vote, alleging thousands of absentee ballots were collected and delivered by activists, often in the middle of the night, to temporary voting drop boxes in various locations around the state.
According to documents provided by the group, its evidence included video footage from cameras installed by counties outside the drop boxes as well as geolocation data for more than 200 activists whose cell phones were shown on the tapes showing purported drop-off dates and times.
According to the group, it also interviewed a Georgia man who admitted to harvesting ballots in the Atlanta area before the Jan. 5 runoff for Georgia’s two seats in the Senate, both of which Democrats won and ended the GOP’s control of Congress. To date, the group has not identified the cooperating witness to state authorities, referring to him simply as John Doe in the complaint.
The group doesn’t claim the ballots delivered by couriers were fraudulent. Nonetheless, third parties delivering ballots to drop boxes would violate Georgia’s law.
In an interview aired on the John Solomon Reports podcast on Tuesday, Raffensperger said that his office had deemed the allegations credible enough to launch an investigation and perhaps issue subpoenas to the State Election Board to obtain evidence.
“We do have some information,” Raffensperger said. “And we are going to investigate that. We did deploy drop boxes that were under 24/7 surveillance, and because they were then that really, you know, can indicate who dropped that information off, and we’re really just going through that.”
In an interview Tuesday, Catherine Engelbrecht, the longtime head of True the Vote, said she wanted to allow the Georgia investigation to move forward.
A statistical analysis by the federally funded research center Mitre Labs found that there was “no evidence of ballot harvesting,” Raffensperger said. The secretary of state’s office did not review video footage from drop boxes after the 2020 election.
As a result, the allegation of a specific individual engaging in illegal harvesting warrants further investigation, he said.
“If people give us, you know, credible allegations, we want to make sure that we do that,” Raffensperger said in the report. “And we have that right now as an ongoing investigation.”
As a means of obtaining evidence, such as the names of suspected ballot harvesters, Raffensperger’s office is considering issuing subpoenas to the State Elections Board.
“That will be one of the processes we’re looking at if we have people that don’t want to come forward for whatever concern because we really need to get to the bottom of it,” he said in the interview. “We just can’t let it sit there and lie. So if it comes to that, then that’s probably the next step that we’d be looking at.”
Earlier this year, Raffensperger rebutted Trump’s claims of widespread fraud in Georgia’s election and asserted on “60 Minutes” that the vote was mostly secure and fair.
There have been many investigations into the sensationalized allegations made by Trump supporters in Georgia in the days following the November election. As an example, claims were made that thousands of dead voters voted, but a final tally revealed only four ballots cast in deceased voters’ names statewide.
Some have also suggested that suitcases of fake ballots were pulled out from under a table in the Atlanta voting center, based on video footage. In truth, the ballots were lawful absentee ballots cast by legitimate voters.
While Raffensperger’s office acknowledged widespread mismanagement and irregularities in Fulton County, Atlanta’s home county, in 2020, those problems were not enough to overcome Biden’s 12,000-vote margin.
As a result, as part of Georgia’s new election integrity laws, Rathensperger and the State Elections Board have taken dramatic steps to place Fulton County elections in receivership, which may mean that state officials, and not local officials, will be responsible for running the county’s elections after 2022. A majority of Fulton’s top election officials have stepped down since the 2020 elections. Raffensperger expects to submit a final recommendation on taking over the county’s election administration later this month.
“For the first time, if we have a county that continuously fails like we do in Georgia, it’s called Fulton County, that we have accountability measure that we can come in, and if they don’t improve, then you can actually replace that county election board,” Raffensperger stated. “And then they’ll hire a new election director to fix the process.”
A decision by Raffensperger to investigate the allegations and secure the video and phone evidence runs contrary to that of Georgia’s governor, fellow Republican Brian Kemp, who, after receiving a briefing from True the Vote last spring, chose not to pursue the matter further when True the Vote refused to divulge names of suspected ballot traffickers.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation was entrusted with the case by Kemp, and it did not issue subpoenas to try to secure video surveillance, phone data, or suspected names from True the Vote.
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