Atlanta election observers say they were told to go home

FPI / December 7, 2020

The Trump campaign legal team released video showing containers full of ballots being wheeled out from underneath tables to be counted after election observers said they were told to go home.

This occurred at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta during the counting process on Nov. 3 into the early morning hours of Nov. 4.

Georgia officials continue to insist that none of this was unusual.

But several poll observers have testified under penalty of perjury that they were effectively told to leave the arena before ballot counting resumed for several hours with no observers present, The Epoch Times reported on Dec. 5.

Meanwhile, a newspaper seeking chain of custody records for ballot drop boxes in DeKalb County was told by county officials that the records may not exist.

Mitchell Harrison and Michelle Branton, both Republican poll observers, said in affidavits that at approximately 10:30 p.m. on Nov. 3, inside an absentee ballot counting room, a woman shouted to everyone to stop working and return the following morning at 8:30 a.m.

“This lady had appeared through the night and Mitchell and I believed her to be the supervisor,” Branton wrote in an affidavit.

Following the instruction, nearly all workers left, except a handful of people. All ballot counting stopped, the witnesses testified.

The Epoch Times report noted that the poll observers were the only outsiders left in the arena, along with a Fox News crew. Harrison spent time seeking answers from Regina Waller, the Fulton County’s public affairs manager for elections, but she refused to answer the questions, he said in an affidavit.

A few minutes later, Branton, Harrison, and the crew left. Only four people remained in the room including Waller, when they had departed.

The group later heard that ballot counting had resumed at the arena, despite the public being told that it had ceased for the night. Observers rushed back at around 1 a.m. on Nov. 4 and found that to be the case.

David Shafer, the head of Georgia’s Republican Party, said Thursday in a statement: “Our Republican observers and members of the news media departed State Farm when they announced they were shutting down for the night and would resume counting at 8:30 a.m. the next day.”

Citing surveillance video footage that showed everyone leave but a handful of workers, he said the workers “continued counting ballots in secret until 1 a.m.”

But Gabriel Sterling, an official in Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office, contended that the poll workers were not explicitly told to go home.

Sterling said he “has accepted Fulton County’s explanation that the Republican monitors and news media are to blame for believing the election officials who told them that they were shutting down, packed up the voting equipment, and started cleaning.”

Sterling said in a statement that the video in which containers of ballots are pulled from underneath a table “shows normal ballot processing.”

A huge spike in Biden ballots took place at 1:36 a.m. after the containers were pulled out from under the table.

Fulton County Registration & Elections Director Richard Barron told the Board of Commissioners that when he learned that staff were dismissed at 10:30 p.m., he advised that some workers needed to continue and that the processing area was never closed to observers.

In DeKalb County, The Georgia Star News reported that county officials say they do not know if they have the transfer forms for ballot drop boxes. The Star News sought the forms in an open records request.

“it has not yet been determined if responsive records to your request exist,” county officials said in response to the Star News's request.

“DeKalb County and [the DeKalb County Department of Voting, Registration and Election] VRE are currently operating within its COVID-19 Emergency Response Plan. These remote operations and VRE’s current workload greatly impact how soon responsive records can be provided,” the response from the county stated. “VRE is expected to make this determination within thirty business days.”

The Georgia Star News requested the ballot transfer forms from several counties. Cobb County and Cook County have complied with the request, each providing copies of the forms.

A spokesperson for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told Breitbart News last week that the ballot transfer forms are in the possession of individual counties.

Free Press International