On Tuesday, the Georgia State Election Board (SEB) heard several election complaints, including the long-anticipated SEB 2023-025 submitted in July 2022. After almost two years, investigators for the SEB and Georgia Secretary of State’s Office presented their findings. The claimants were not permitted to speak during the hearing. That hours-long presentation will be covered in-depth in a follow-up article.
During the discussion of Complaint 2023-025, however, another reference was made regarding Complaint 2021-181 (and 2022-025), which was based on the “Risk-Limiting Audit” (full hand-count) that Fulton County performed after the 2020 Presidential Election. This resulted in a heated but limited debate between a SEB Member and the complainant.
Rossi, a Georgia resident, has been investigating the 2020 Presidential Election and subsequent elections in the State of Georgia for several years. In September 2021, Rossi submitted evidence to Governor Brian Kemp’s office evidencing “36 inconsistencies” that contradicted the Risk Limiting Audit Report findings regarding the Fulton County hand-count of the 2020 Election. Rossi’s findings only involved the approximately 148,000 absentee ballots cast in Fulton (out of more than 520,000 total ballots cast).
The “36 inconsistencies” consisted of double and triple-counted batches of ballots that accounted for over 6,000 ballots incorrectly counted and reported. Based on the analysis, Rossi stated there would be a net gain of 4,081 votes for President Trump in Fulton County’s 148k absentee ballots alone if the incorrectly counted Biden votes were removed.
Despite over-counting by more than 6,000 ballots, a 4% difference from the machine-counted absentee ballots, the hand-count “audit” somehow matched the machine count (742 vote difference out of all ballots cast). This has never been explained nor corrected by the Georgia SOS.
On November 17th, 2021, Governor Kemp sent a letter and report outlining his office’s findings and confirming Rossi’s report to the SEB for further review. In the letter, Kemp stated that “the 36 inconsistencies…are factual in nature, pose no underlying theories outside of the reported data, and could not be explained by my office after a thorough review.” Kemp’s office spent almost seven weeks reviewing Rossi’s data and findings.
On June 8th, 2023, more than a year after investigators reported to the SEB regarding the complaint, the SEB and Fulton County entered into a Consent Order regarding discrepancies than 6,000-count when comparing the November 3rd machine count to the full hand count. The Consent Order, however, does not mention the ballots in totality but rather only references the “36 inconsistencies”. By phrasing it as “36 inconsistencies,” it sounds much less significant compared to “6,000 extra ballots with a net gain of 4,081, or more than 1/3 the margin of victory statewide.”
During the SEB Meeting on May 7th, Rossi was permitted to briefly address the board to clarify his findings for board member Dr. Jan Johnston.
Rossi stated, “The numbers did match. You’re right, Mr. Chairman. The reason they matched is because they include the duplicated, counted ballots. The duplicates are over 6,000. The net difference for candidate Biden are 4,081 net false absentee ballots, counted for candidate Biden over candidate Trump in the hand audit. And that is only a subset of the 527,000 that were looked at. That was only the 148,000 absentee ballots. So those of you that do math, if you do 4,081 and divide it by 148,000, that’s a 3% error rate. So to answer your question, yes, the hand audit got to 527, but how they got to 527 was [with] over 6,000 duplicated, and the net difference being 4,081 for candidate Biden.”
As Dr. Johnston was thanking Rossi, Member Ghazal chimed in:
“Excuse me. This has been adjudicated and the numbers are entirely different that were found by our investigators two years ago. I cannot let those numbers stand on the record because they are incorrect and our investigators found numbers and it was in the hundreds, not in the thousands.”
Rossi interrupted by acknowledging this isn’t a “back and forth” but went on to state:
“When Dr. Johnston asked the investigators, when they did their investigation, tell me the totality of the errors. You can go back and look at the transcript. Investigator Seguron, and you can almost quote me, we did not go into that for this investigation. Look at the transcript please.”
Member Ghazal then references res judicata, the “civil equivalent of double jeopardy,” and said:
“We have already heard this. It is done. It is finished. This is not the case at hand. The audit, which is never intended to have an equal total, the audit is intended to identify the candidate who won and whether or not the totals accurately identified that. I want to make sure that we’re doing the right thing. That we’re actually talking to this in the correct language here. And that the record reflects accuracy and truth.”
Rossi’s findings were evaluated by the Governor’s Office, investigated by the SEB, and resulted in a Consent Order with the county responsible, yet, Member Ghazal seems unfamiliar with the numbers that are acknowledged in Rossi’s report and may have confused them with a separate anomaly discovered in SEB 2023-025. However, Ghazal specifically references “the audit.” The SEB 2023-025 duplicate ballots (3,125 total) was referring to the December 4th count, which would go on to the “certified” results. Rossi was very clear he was referring to the “audit.”
This misunderstanding from Ghazal is not surprising, though. Several of the SEB members, if any, did not have the opportunity to read the investigation’s findings and Consent Order with Fulton County before the vote on whether to accept it. Emails confirm it was withheld from the SEB by the Attorney General’s Office, though it is unclear whether or not the materials were kept out of the SEB members’ binders intentionally.
According to the emails obtained by open records request, Member Ghazal, the one who disputed the author of the complaint in the above clip, acknowledged that she had not seen the materials but “was comfortable on voting on the case because [she] recalled the complaint, the investigative report, and our own disposition of the initial case with some detail” and that she was “satisfied with the AG’s report that included a full audit procedure plan.”
The SEB would vote 4-1 to accept the Consent Order and findings, with Dr. Jan Johnston being the only ‘nay’ vote.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/05/part-1-georgia-state-election-board-member-misrepresents/
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