Fulton admits: Chain-of-custody ballot documents missing

FPI / June 16, 2021

A Fulton County elections official has admitted that chain-of-custody documents for ballots from the county's 2020 election drop boxes are missing.

“A few forms are missing” and “some procedural paperwork may have been misplaced,” Mariska Bodison of Fulton County Registration & Elections told The Georgia Star News.

An analysis conducted by The Star News of drop box ballot transfer forms for absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes provided by Fulton County in response to an Open Records Request "showed that 385 transfer forms out of an estimated 1,565 transfer forms Fulton County said should have been provided are missing – a number that is significantly greater than 'a few' by any objective standard," the outlet reported on Monday.

The total number of absentee ballots whose chain-of-custody documentation is missing is more than 6,000 votes greater than Joe Biden’s certified margin of victory in the state, the report said.

"This is the first time that any election official at either the state or county level from a key battleground state has made an admission of significant error in election procedures for the November 3, 2020 election," The Star News reported.

While corporate media continue to declare election fraud news off limits, and Big Tech actively censor the distribution of such news, The Star News has been at the forefront of reporting on irregularities in Georgia's Nov. 3, 2020 election.

Bodison said in a statement emailed to The Star News: “As we review the documents provided to you and our daily log. We noticed that a few forms are missing, it seems when 25 plus core personnel were quarantined due to positive COVID-19 outbreak at the EPC [Fulton County Elections Preparation Center], some procedural paperwork may have been misplaced.”

The Star News found in its investigation that required chain-of-custody documentation for 385 drop box collections and the associated 18,901 absentee ballots have not been provided by Fulton County.

"The admission of missing chain-of-custody documents by a Fulton County official is important for several reasons that cut to the very core of public confidence in the outcome of the 2020 presidential election," The Star news noted.

Those reasons include:

• Biden was certified as the winner of Georgia’s 16 Electoral College votes in the 2020 election by the narrow margin of less than 12,000 votes out of a total of 5 million votes cast statewide.

• Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has taken no action in 156 of Georgia’s 159 counties to secure copies of any absentee ballot drop box transfer forms and review them for accuracy and consistency with reported absentee ballot vote counts. In April his office announced investigations into three small counties that “failed to do their absentee ballot transfer forms” in the November 2020 election in compliance with rules and regulations.

• More than seven months after the November 3 election, 28 Georgia counties have failed to respond at all to The Star News Open Records Requests to produce absentee ballot drop box transfer forms. To date, The Star News has obtained absentee ballot drop box forms from 59 counties that provide chain-of-custody documentation for 266,492 absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes during the November 3, 2020 election, which means that no chain-of-custody documentation has been produced for about 333,000 absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes out of an estimated 600,000 absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes during the election.

The Star News reported on Sunday, "These absentee ballots are at the center of a lawsuit filed by Garland Favorito and eight other Georgia residents, who have sued Fulton County to produce these ballots for a forensic audit. Henry County Superior Court Judge Brian Amero ruled in May that this audit could proceed, but allowed the plaintiffs to review only the digital images of these 145,000 absentee ballots. . . An estimated 145,000 absentee ballots – between 75,000 and 78,000 of which were originally deposited in drop boxes and between 67,000 and 70,000 of which were sent via the United States Postal Service – were transferred from the centralized counting facility at the State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta to the EPC at some point after the counting of votes for the November 3 election was completed."

Fulton County subsequently filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, and Judge Amero put the audit on hold. Judge Amero has scheduled a hearing later this month to consider Fulton County’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit and stop the audit.”

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