Source: Breitbart
First in a four-part series.
Mollie Hemingway’s explosive new book, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, details how a mismanaged election in Fulton County, a corrupt and incompetent Secretary of State’s office, millions of dollars from Mark Zuckerberg-backed nonprofits, and more than 10,000 illegal votes provide compelling evidence for a person to question the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia over Donald Trump in the November 2020 election.
“In the months since the 2020 election, data has been put forth showing strong reason to question the legality of more votes than the margin Biden won [Georgia] by, ” Hemingway writes:
Had a court been willing to hear the argument, and had Trump’s attorneys been able to show the data in the weeks following the election, a good argument could have been made for holding a new election. And that doesn’t even count the tens of millions of Zuck Bucks that flowed into the coffers of Democratic counties in Georgia, much less the millions the secretary of state’s office used to help Democrats with their get-out-the-vote balloting scheme.
“Trump actually won the state. And I’m not crazy when I say that,” Mark Rountree, head of Georgia’s long-time political consulting powerhouse Landmark Communications, told Hemingway.
In this image from video, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Thursday, March 25, 2021. (House Energy and Commerce Committee via AP)
The book will be released on Tuesday. Breitbart News was given a prepublication copy of Hemingway’s chapter on Georgia, which documents the strange events that took place in Fulton County on election night, November 3, 2020:
On Election Night, Georgia Republican field organizer Michelle Branton was told to go to State Farm Arena in Atlanta, where Fulton County was counting hundreds of thousands of mail-in absentee ballots. She was joined by fellow field organizer Mitchell Harrison. [Emphasis added]
…
When they got to the arena, Branton and Harrison, together with a camera crew from a Fox affiliate news station, were sent to a large, angular room where they were told to stay behind a rope at one end of the space. They couldn’t see a thing. The distance “effectively prevented our actual observation of the process,” Branton said in an affidavit.
…
Election workers had been processing ballots since that morning. After Branton and Harrison arrived, employees began wrapping up their work. The last employee finished her stack of envelopes around 10:30 p.m. Across the room, a woman—she seemed to Branton and Harrison to be the supervisor—told everyone to stop counting and to come back at 8:30 a.m., at which point counting would resume. All but about four people left.
Branton and Harrison left, along with the Fox TV news crew. They headed back to the Fulton County Board of Elections warehouse across town. Waller arrived shortly thereafter. But then they began to read on social media that counting hadn’t, in fact, stopped. It was still going on. Harrison rushed back to State Farm Arena with Trevin McKoy, another Republican poll watcher. When they got to the building shortly before 1:00 a.m., they were told that counting had kept going after they left, but was now stopped. They demanded to get access to the ballot counting area, where they witnessed no one counting ballots and were told that the counting had “just finished.”
Video of the vote-counting that night at State Farm Arena, discovered a month later, “showed that after they left, a small remnant of about four workers began pulling trunks containing thousands of ballots from underneath a table with a long tablecloth and running ballots through machines.”
An election worker processes absentee ballots at State Farm Arena on November 2, 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)
Democrats and the establishment media quickly circled their wagons to explain away this huge election procedure irregularity:
Democrats knew that the video looked absolutely awful, particularly since Biden had received a huge spike in numbers from Fulton County at the same time as the footage was timestamped. In came liberal media to tell people not to believe their lying eyes—there was no problematic behavior in the suspicious footage.
After mentioning how some prominent conservative pundits had described the video as troubling, the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple said, “Of course, there’s another explanation, one offered on Friday by Fulton County Director of Registration and Elections Richard L. Barron: ‘According to my staff, that’s just normal.’”
The Washington Post also quoted Barron as saying, “No one from my staff made an announcement for anyone to leave.” With that, the Washington Post was satisfied. Never mind that in addition to the video, there were multiple affidavits from poll watchers and dozens of media reports on Election Night saying that they were told the counting was done for the night. There was no curiosity about why everyone had left at the same time if no one had made an announcement for anyone to leave. Barron’s claim was at best lawyerly and narrow: they didn’t technically ask anyone to leave. Such a sophistical answer wouldn’t hold up against the most modest level of scrutiny. Luckily for Barron, the media wasn’t interested in providing any.
Barron was not the only one who asserted that the video of Fulton County poll workers did not merit serious consideration. Another group purporting to debunk the video was an outfit called Lead Stories, which relies on funding from Silicon Valley tech giants Google and Facebook, in addition to ByteDance, a Chinese-operated company headquartered in Beijing that operates the social media platform TikTok. Lead Stories relied on the same line as the Washington Post, saying, “There was never an announcement made to the media and other observers about the counting being over for the night and them needing to leave, according to [Frances Watson, chief investigator for the Georgia secretary of state], who was provided information by the media liaison, who was present.”
Biden’s narrow 12,670 vote margin of victory over Donald Trump in Georgia’s 2020 election, out of 5 million votes cast in the state, was certified by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, on November 20, 2020.
In this November 11, 2020, file photo, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks during a news conference in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)
In Fulton County, Biden won by a huge margin of 243,904 votes. Out of 524,659 votes cast, Biden was certified as the recipient of 381,144 votes, and Trump received only 137,240.
Of those 524,659 votes cast, 146,994 were mail-in absentee ballots, an estimated 79,640 of which were placed in drop boxes, and an estimated 66,854 of which were sent via regular mail. (Biden received 115,788 of these mail-in absentee ballot votes in Fulton County, while Trump received only 29,479.)
Under an Emergency Election Code Rule promulgated by the State Election Board on July 1, 2020, those 79,640 mail-in absentee vote ballots deposited in drop boxes required chain of custody documentation–a ballot transfer control form that showed the time, date, and number of ballots picked up at the 38 drop boxes in the county in the 41 days before and up to Election Day, November 3, 2020, as well as the signatures of those who picked them up, and then the signature of the county registrar designee who was required to “immediately” receive the document.
Fulton County election workers examine ballots while vote counting, at State Farm Arena on November 5, 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Tami Chappell/AFP via Getty Images)
Hemingway writes that the two GOP Commissioners in Fulton County raised the issue of no chain of custody documents for mail-in absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes on November 13, 2020, days before the Fulton County Election Commission certified the election results in a three to two vote and one week before Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger certified the state’s election results–as delivered to him by all 159 counties in the state, on November 20, 2020:
The problems in Fulton County were so extensive that neither of the Republican commissioners voted to certify the election. For one thing, the first certification was on November 13, but the county was still finding, processing, and tabulating absentee ballots as late as November 12. Later, during the runoff, the county would discover thumb drives accidentally left in voting machines, further worrying the Republican commissioners about chain-of-custody issues and inventory management.
The Republican commissioners also drew attention to the fact that there was no chain-of-custody information provided for the thirty-eight ballot drop boxes spread throughout the county. The commissioners asked for, but were never provided, a document showing who had picked up the ballots or dropped them off, and when, much less whether, all ballots placed into the boxes were accounted for during their transport.
The Republican commissioners also doubted whether Fulton County had even attempted to meaningfully match signatures. And it wasn’t for lack of technology. In July that same year, the Fulton County elections division had acquired a new platform to handle absentee-by-mail ballots from a company called BlueCrest. The stations they purchased had the ability to scan the oath envelope, open the envelope, remove the ballot, and flatten the ballot itself in order to start the scanning process. The system also had optional capabilities for matching signatures to official signatures on file. While Barron had indicated to commissioners that the match capability was being brought into use, the Republicans later found out that the managers never had any intention of using that system. Consequently, there was no effective signature match going on at all.
Hemingway also highlighted a memo from an observer of the Fulton County election process, hired by the Secretary of State’s office, that “raised deep concerns over the integrity of Fulton County’s process.”
Democrat and Republican representatives review absentee ballots at the Fulton County Election Preparation Center, November 4, 2020, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
“But instead of voicing these concerns,” Hemingway writes, “Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger decided to bury them:
He appeared on 60 Minutes in January and announced, “We had safe, secure, honest elections.
In July 2021, Raffensperger would sing a different tune about Fulton County after lawsuits kept the county’s 2020 election integrity problems in the news. “Fulton County’s continued failures have gone on long enough with no accountability. Rick Barron and Ralph Jones, Fulton’s registration chief, must be fired and removed from Fulton’s elections leadership immediately. Fulton’s voters and the people of Georgia deserve better,” Raffensperger tweeted.
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Hemingway said the two Republicans on the Fulton County Election Commission, “were livid when Raffensperger said there were no complaints about Fulton County election irregularities.”
In this March 3, 2016, photo, Mollie Hemingway speaks at the 2016 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)
They had cited those complaints when they refused to certify the county’s election results.
Despite those complaints, Raffensperger certified the election results for Georgia on November 20, 2020, and then recertified those results on December 7, 2020.
Our next reports in this series will be on the actions of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, illegal votes that were counted, and the influence of Mark Zuckerberg’s millions of dollars of contributions to nonprofits that were active in Georgia.
