On Friday, a Georgia State Court Judge ruled that approximately 145,000 absentee ballots cast and counted in Fulton County, Georgia, must be copied and turned over for inspection to Plaintiffs in lawsuits brought in the aftermath of the outcome of the November 2020 presidential election contest in Georgia.
Friday’s decision came in a lawsuit filed by nine plaintiffs, including Garland Favorito, a Fulton resident and self-styled election watchdog. It’s one of more than 30 Georgia lawsuits stemming from the November presidential election and the January runoff for the U.S. Senate. Some of the lawsuits are still winding their way through the courts.
Back on December 5 of last year, I wrote about a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign in Georgia state court challenging the outcome of the Presidential election contest in Georgia (see Trump Campaign Files Georgia Election Contest in Fulton County Court).
This lawsuit was separate from the ones filed in federal court by Lin Wood and Sydney Powell. The Campaign’s lawsuit being focused on allegations that tens of thousands of invalid votes had been unlawfully counted in favor of Joe Biden. //
What actually happened in the lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign was exactly as predicted in my two articles — no judge was assigned in a timely manner, the Campaign was never given access to the evidence in the hands of the state election officials, and the Electoral College met and cast its votes while the lawsuit was pending. There could have been 2 million, illegally-cast ballots in Georgia, but if the state courts and election officials simply stalled the process for an election contest lawsuit to proceed, nothing was going to happen.
Judge Amero has ordered that high-resolution copies be made of the 145,000 absentee ballots, while the originals will remain in the custody of election officials. But the copies should allow the plaintiffs to look for certain kinds of possible irregularities such as whether any ballots were machine marked and then copied in large numbers. Mailed-in absentee ballots should all be hand-marked by the voter. //
Raffensperger adopted this conciliatory tone, only after his office opposed the effort by the Plaintiffs to gain access to the mail-in ballots counted in Fulton County.
It is worth noting that the infamous telephone call between President Trump and Raffensperger was part of a “confidential settlement discussion” over the state court lawsuit brought by the Campaign that I referenced above. Raffensperger now applauds the effort to examine the vote-counting in Fulton County, based on a “longstanding history of election mismanagement”, but had no interest in doing so during the call with President Trump, wherein he denied there was any reason for such an examination or investigation.
The media and Democrats claimed that in this call, Pres. Trump was urging Raffensperger to “find” more Trump votes to overcome the 11,000 vote deficit that decided the election.
That was false.
What Pres. Trump was urging Raffensperger to do was to “find” 11,000 invalid votes that had been included in Biden’s vote total in the state — his margin of victory. The lawsuit alleged such invalid votes were cast and counted, and that an investigation by Raffensperger — part of the mandate of his office — would reveal that to be true. Pres. Trump was calling on Raffensperger to conduct that investigation.
