Fulton County, Georgia election officials finally admitted to widespread violations during the 2020 election – five years later.
Officials said poll workers failed to sign off on tapes on approximately 315,000 votes, which was discovered earlier this month after records were obtained through a public information request.
Ann Brumbaugh, attorney for the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, admitted to the Georgia Election Board that the Democrat-dominated county violated state election rules.
“We do not dispute that the tapes were not signed,” Brumbaugh told the board. “It was a violation of the rule.”
David Cross, a citizen investigator, spent more than $15,000 obtaining nearly all of Fulton County’s 2020 election records through an open records request. Cross discovered that 134 tabulator tapes from early voting lacked the three required poll worker signatures required by Georgia law.
These unsigned tapes represent approximately 60 percent of all early votes cast in Georgia’s biggest county during the 2020 presidential election. Fulton County recorded 520,000 total ballots in 2020. 315,000 of those votes were unsigned early votes.
Georgia regulations require each polling location produce signed transcription tapes before polls open and after they close. The opening tape verifies that voting machines begin with a ballot count of zero, while the closing tape includes final vote tallies. State law mandates that three poll workers certify each tape with their signatures to maintain chain of custody and enable proper auditing.
Cross told the election board the violations extended beyond missing signatures. His investigation uncovered what he described as “catastrophic breaks in chain of custody.”
“We found duplicated scanner serial numbers where the memory devices were removed from one scanner and printed on an alternate scanner,” Cross testified.
State Election Board Vice Chair Janice Johnston said she was concerned about the scope of missing documentation. When attempting to match opening and closing tapes, Johnston said, “I couldn’t find it. It’s not there.”
Johnston noted that when investigators requested all opening and closing tapes, the county responded that the incomplete records were “all they have.”
“I just don’t understand how one could even provide a canvas document to say, here are the tabulators, and here are the votes, and these add up to X numbers for the election,” Johnston stated.
State Election Board Executive Director James Mills called the 2020 election case “one of the most egregious things I’ve seen.”
“It’s this kind of junk — and that’s a nice word — that violates our whole system,” Mills said. “How can anybody believe that something is legit, when you have this many breaks in the chain of custody?”
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger admitted to the violations were a “clerical error,” but the error “does not nullify votes.”
In a statement posted on social media platform X, Raffensperger said “all votes were verified with voters having valid photo ID at the end of day” and described the ballots as “legally cast.”
The 2020 election was decided by extremely narrow margins in Georgia. Democratic candidate Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump by fewer than 12,000 votes statewide out of nearly five million cast.
In Fulton County, Biden received more than 72 percent of the vote.
Brumbaugh told the board that errors have been fixed, and that Fulton County now operates under “new leadership and a new building and a new board and new standard operating procedures.”
“The poll watchers are trained specifically,” she explained. “They’ve got to sign the tapes in the morning, and they’ve got to sign the tapes when they’re run at the end of the day. When the tapes come back to the hub with all the documentation, they are checked again.”
The State Election Board voted 3-0 to request that the Georgia Attorney General’s office issue fines totaling $670,000, representing $5,000 per unsigned tape. The vote occurred with the board’s nonpartisan member and Democratic member absent.
Cross argued that the violations warranted stronger action than fines.
“The only honest remedy, five years later, is for the state election board to impose sanctions on Fulton County, have them publicly acknowledge their violations, and for the state to decertify Fulton County’s 2020 advanced voting results,” he said.
The revelations come amid ongoing legal disputes over Georgia’s 2020 election records. Trump has repeatedly claimed that the 2020 election was rigged against him.