Following concerns raised by a Republican election official in Georgia about the 2024 election outcome just a few weeks ago, the state is set to implement reforms to prevent future problems, according to a report.
On Thursday, the Georgia Election Board approved a set of measures aimed at overseeing the electoral processes in Fulton County. This county is not only the workplace of the well-known anti-Trump prosecutor Fani Willis but also a focal point of controversy; according to a county election board official, the number of votes cast there in 2024 surpassed the actual number of residents.
The Georgia Recorder noted that in a 2-1 decision, the board agreed to appoint an independent election overseer for Fulton County this year to monitor its election procedures. This move follows an incident four years ago when county officials double-scanned 3,075 ballots during a statewide recount, as reported by the Western Journal.
One complaint alleged that 17,000 ballots were lost. However, investigators working under the Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger determined that the mistakes would not have affected the results of the election, which saw President Joe Biden win over former President Donald Trump by a margin of 11,779 votes.
In Fulton County, President Biden received 73% of the initial vote, totaling 243,000 votes. However, during a recount prompted by the Trump campaign, Biden’s tally decreased by 932 votes. The next month, Fulton County officials admitted to failing to properly back up data to servers during the recount. An official later testified that the discrepancies were likely due to the mishandling of ballot batches and that procedures had been updated to ensure ballots were separated once scanned.
Earlier this year, Mark Wingate, a Republican member of the Fulton County Elections Board, claimed that the county had collected more votes than it had registered 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.”
After the 2020 election, Wingate reported that he and other board members tried to acquire chain of custody documents from the county’s election officials. These documents are crucial as they track the transportation and handling of absentee ballots. Wingate stated, “None of that was delivered.” He added: “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?”
Wingate testified that over 30 drop boxes were installed across Fulton County, providing voters a contactless option to submit their ballots during the pandemic. However, when he and his colleagues requested to view surveillance footage from cameras monitoring these drop boxes, Wingate stated, “there was never an inch of footage that was ever delivered to the board.”