An attorney representing the former head of Black Voices for Trump has asked a Fulton County judge to unseal ballots cast in Fulton County in the 2020 presidential election arguing they could help clear him of criminal charges.
The motion, filed Monday on behalf of Harrison Floyd, asks Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee to order the unsealing of ballots and the production of ballot envelopes, Dominion voting machine reports, absentee ballot applications, and forensic examinations of computer drives and storage devices used in counting the votes.
“Mr. Floyd seeks the materials ... because the State asserts that he and other defendants knowingly made false statements about the November 03, 2020 General Election and knowingly sought to overturn the November 03, 2020 election results,” Todd Harding, Floyd’s Georgia-based attorney, wrote in the motion.
Floyd is charged with conspiracy to solicit false statements, influencing a witness, and racketeering. The indictment alleges that Floyd, through a series of phone calls and texts with co-defendants Stephen Lee and Trevian Kutti, harassed Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
According to the indictment, Lee, an Illinois pastor, reached out to Floyd for help contacting Freeman. Lee, who is white, allegedly said he thought Freeman might trust Floyd, who is Black. Prosecutors claim Floyd recruited Kutti to help convince Freeman to meet at a Cobb County police precinct. There they allegedly encouraged her to make false statements about the counting of ballots at State Farm Arena.
Elections experts in Georgia were skeptical the election records Floyd is seeking would provide any new information.
Joseph Kirk, elections supervisor for Bartow County, said he is in favor of “evidence-based elections,” but he doubts that unsealing more than 500,000 ballots would reveal anything not turned up by multiple recounts and investigations.
“I just don’t know what they are going to find at this point that hasn’t already been seen and publicized,” he said.
Kirk, whose county uses the same machines and operates by the same rules as Fulton, said he audits every election he conducts.
“I’ve not seen anything to question the legitimacy of these elections,” he said.
The motion asks McAfee to hold a hearing to rule on the motion. No date for a hearing has been set. Harding, Floyd’s attorney, did not return a call seeking comment.
Georgia law requires ballots to be secured and sealed after elections are certified, keeping them confidential unless a judge can be convinced that there’s a good reason to review them.
Previous efforts by conservative activists seeking a public inspection of absentee ballots from the 2020 presidential election have failed in court.
No fraud was discovered by state election investigators when they reviewed absentee ballots in Fulton County and ballot envelopes in Cobb County.
Investigators for the Georgia Secretary of State told a judge in fall 2021 they were unable able to find any alleged counterfeit ballots in Fulton County. The Georgia Court of Appeals recently revived the case on technical grounds.
An audit of voter signatures on 15,000 absentee ballot envelopes by the GBI and state investigators also didn’t reveal any fraud in Cobb County in December 2020.
