The tight 2020 election spawned countless allegations in Georgia, inspired by Donald Trump’s false claim that the race was stolen.
Four years later, allegations of a rigged election linger — though there’s no indication the outcome that delivered the state to Democrat Joe Biden was incorrect. State investigations repeatedly concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to back up claims of coordinated fraud.
Isolated cases of wrongdoing have been found, such as a husband who returned his recently deceased wife’s absentee ballot or a handful of people who voted in both Georgia and another state.
No conspiracy has been revealed, no ringleaders identified, no details uncovered of how anyone would have pulled off a scheme.
Yet many Republican supporters of Trump say they haven’t found enough answers, and they believe investigations were inadequate.
Three vote counts, two by machine and one by hand, showed Biden defeated Trump by about 12,000 votes in Georgia. Investigators have found errors by election workers in some cases, such as double-scanned ballots during a disorganized recount, but they never uncovered intentional misbehavior.
Here’s what investigations have found — and what questions remain unanswered — surrounding several popular fraud claims involving ineligible voters, vote-flipping, drop boxes, illicit ballots and late-night counting at State Farm Arena.
State Farm Arena video
It was perhaps the most sensational allegation of the 2020 election — two Fulton County election workers allegedly caught on video counting fake ballots after hours on election night.
The security footage came from State Farm Arena where workers counted ballots. It showed them pull containers of ballots from beneath a table and begin scanning them. From those bare facts Trump’s attorney — Rudy Giuliani — spun a wild tale of voter fraud for a Georgia Senate panel.
He said the election workers ordered Republican observers and the news media to leave under the guise that counting was done for the night. Afterward, Giuliani said, the election workers pulled “suitcases” of fraudulent ballots from beneath the table and counted them. He called it a “smoking gun” for fraud.
The Trump campaign used the footage in ads urging supporters to call Georgia legislators, demanding they overturn Biden’s victory. Lawmakers were deluged with calls and emails. Some lawmakers told the campaign they were prepared to overturn the results, campaign records show.
But the allegation was false.
Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC
Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC
Investigators from the FBI, the GBI and the secretary of state’s office reviewed the full video — not just the excerpts Giuliani played — and interviewed election workers and the Republican observers. They concluded the video showed nothing but ordinary ballot counting.
The “suitcases” were regular ballot containers. They were stored under the table when workers thought they were done counting for the night. No one ordered the observers to leave — they left on their own when they thought counting was done. But election officials later ordered workers to resume counting, which they did in full view of security cameras.
The secretary of state’s office quickly debunked the allegations. But the Trump campaign repeated them for months while two election workers — Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss — endured death threats.
Eventually, the election workers won defamation settlements from the right-wing One America News and Gateway Pundit. They won a $148 million defamation verdict against Giuliani, who has stopped repeating the allegations.
Double-scanned ballots
An investigation by the secretary of state’s office confirmed election workers scanned over 3,000 ballots twice in Fulton County during the recount of the 2020 presidential election.
Republicans who conducted their own review of ballot images showed evidence that the ballots weren’t just double-scanned, but they were also counted twice in the recount. They also said the number of repeatedly counted ballots was closer to 4,000.
The miscount didn’t change the overall results by much. Trump narrowed his gap with Biden during the recount, gaining 345 net votes in Fulton, where 73% of voters supported Biden.
The State Election Board reprimanded Fulton for the problem in May, but unanswered questions remain.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Critics of Fulton want more investigation into how the error occurred and why thousands of ballots from the initial count weren’t included in the recount, apparently replaced by the double-counted ballots. In addition, about 250 test ballots that should have been removed from ballot boxes were included in Fulton’s recount.
Answers will be hard to find so long after the 2020 election — and after previous investigations haven’t found any indication of intentional misconduct.
“I definitely think the attorney general should be involved in a full-on investigation,” said Holly Kesler, Georgia state director for the conservative organization Citizens Defending Freedom. “I would say this Fulton County situation is fraud. I can’t accuse anybody of anything, but I know it’s happening. To me, that’s fraudulent activity.”
An election monitor who observed Fulton in 2020, Carter Jones, said he saw human errors, misplaced ballots and poor record-keeping during the COVID-19 pandemic, but he never witnessed any attempt to alter the count.
Since the State Election Board reprimand of Fulton, the board’s membership has changed with a new Republican majority that wanted to reopen the investigation and install election skeptics as monitors. Those efforts haven’t been successful.
Fulton hired an election monitoring team on its own that includes Jones and Ryan Germany, former general counsel for the secretary of state’s office.
Ineligible voters
Many of Trump’s voting fraud claims were vague. But when he challenged Biden’s Georgia victory in court, his claims were very specific.
He said at least 66,247 underage people, 10,315 dead people, 2,423 people who were not registered to vote in Georgia and thousands of other ineligible people had cast ballots. It was a stunning — and dubious — allegation.
His numbers came from two analyses that compared Georgia’s registration and voting lists to U.S. Postal Service change-of-address data, a privately maintained national voter registration database and other data. For example, they matched voters’ names and dates of birth to people in other databases to find underage voters.
In court documents, the analysts admitted they didn’t have access to information they needed to make definitive findings. But Trump’s lawyers dispensed with the caveats, asserting in court documents “many thousands of illegal votes were cast.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC
Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC
Election experts quickly debunked the findings, calling them “highly inaccurate,” “wildly unreliable” and “worthless.” They said matching voters to people found in other databases is prone to false matches, in part because different people with identical names and birth dates are common in large databases. Georgia’s 2020 registration database includes about 7.7 million voters.
What’s more, Georgia’s publicly available data includes only a voter’s birth year — not their full birth date. That made potential matches highly suspect.
Finally, experts said Trump’s analyses didn’t account for the fact that it’s legal for some people — including college students, “snowbirds” with vacation homes and people on temporary work assignments — to vote at their original residences.
Even Ken Block, an expert hired by the Trump campaign in 2020 to look for fraud, rejected the analyses.
“Every single claim they asked me to look at was false,” Block told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
State investigators also rejected the claims. They found four absentee ballots cast in the names of dead people, not 10,315, as Trump claimed. All four ballots were cast by relatives of the deceased.
The number of underage and unregistered voters investigators found: zero.
Vote flipping
The most well-known suspicions of voting machines are based on the idea that they could switch votes from one candidate to another.
There’s not a single confirmed example of vote flipping in a Georgia election. Accusations of reversed votes have never been substantiated.
False allegations about Georgia’s voting machines, manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems, resulted in a $787 million settlement of defamation claims against Fox News.
“There is zero evidence of a machine flipping an individual’s vote. Are there elderly people whose hands shake and they probably hit the wrong button slightly and they didn’t review their ballot properly before they printed it? That’s the main situation we have seen,” said Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office. “That claim was a lie through 2020 and it’s a lie now.”
The most recent example of a vote-flipping allegation came in Whitfield County, where a middle-aged man told election workers he thought a voting machine had changed his vote on a ballot question this month. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican and Trump supporter, repeated the vote-flipping allegation.
Credit: Ben Hendren
Credit: Ben Hendren
Election Supervisor Shaynee Bryson said she helped the voter cancel his printed-out ballot before casting it, and he was able to vote again without further difficulty. She said it’s possible the voter made the wrong selection on the touchscreen.
Many objections to voting machines are based on concerns about the vulnerability of computerized systems to possible hacks.
While it’s possible votes could be changed if someone gained access to election computers and installed malware, that doesn’t mean it’s ever happened in an election.
In another case in Ware County, a lawsuit alleges that a batch of absentee votes were flipped from Biden to Trump between the initial count and a recount in 2020.
But Election Supervisor Carlos Nelson said that isn’t what occurred.
Nelson said an election worker rescanned a ballot batch that didn’t feed into the scanner correctly the first time, and the worker mistakenly accepted both scans instead of discarding the original. The problem was corrected during an audit and recount.
The error meant that ballot batch labels and numbers were different between the initial count and recount, but no votes were flipped, Nelson said. During the recount, Trump gained 38 votes and Biden lost 42 votes.
‘2000 Mules’
The right-wing conspiracy film “2000 Mules” spread the fantastical idea that shadowy and unnamed individuals deposited fraudulent ballots into drop boxes across metro Atlanta.
It wasn’t true.
The publisher of the film apologized to a Georgia man shown in the movie as he returned absentee ballots for himself and his family, which is legal. Salem Media Group made its apology to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by the man.
The GBI reviewed the ballot-stuffing allegations and found they lacked sufficient evidence to merit a law enforcement investigation. The film relied on cellphone signals to show when people moved within about 100 feet of drop boxes, but the GBI found that data didn’t indicate crime had been committed.
Credit: Alyssa Pointer / Alyssa.Pointer@ajc.com
Credit: Alyssa Pointer / Alyssa.Pointer@ajc.com
The State Election Board dismissed cases of alleged illegally returned ballots that were featured in “2000 Mules,” confirming that ballots belonged to family members.
And the conservative organization behind the allegation of fraud, True the Vote, acknowledged in a court filing it didn’t have evidence to support its story of a “ballot trafficking” scheme.
A defamation lawsuit against True the Vote and conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza is still pending.
Matt Mashburn, the State Election Board’s acting chair at the time, said investigators exhaustively tracked down allegations of illegal voting but none was proved.
“Accusing someone of a crime when they’re engaged in innocent, lawful behavior is a risky thing to do,” Mashburn said. “You can completely and utterly disprove something like this ballot mule thing — completely disproven — but something else keeps popping up.”
