At least 56 counties in Georgia have destroyed most or all of Dominion Voting System‘s automatically created ballot images in violation of state and federal ballot retention laws, VoterGA reported.
“These violations are yet another glaring reason why Georgians cannot trust the Secretary of State’s office,” said Garland Favorito, co-founder of VoterGA. “We desperately need a multi-county audit of the 2020 election to resolve these serious problems before 2022.”
VoterGA’s investigation also discovered that former State Election Director Chris Harvey violated state and federal laws when he told county election clerks that they could delete original ballot images from in-person voting.
In an email to Harvey, an election official asked if it was “ok to clean the memory cards” to use them for a new purpose, or if “they need to stay loaded for some legal reason.”
“Yes, go ahead and reuse the memory cards,” Harvey responded.
Heather Mullins, an investigative reporter at Real America’s Voice, shared a picture of the email conversation.
BREAKING! GEORGIA!?@VoterGa announced that 74 of GA’s 159 counties cannot produce original ballot images for Nov 2020 election, violating State & Federal laws. An email from the State Election Director instructed election officials to overwrite the memory cards. @RealAmVoice pic.twitter.com/GXQkVgjtyc
— Heather Mullins – Real America’s Voice (RAV-TV) (@TalkMullins) November 9, 2021
Federal law mandates that election clerks store ballots and ballot images for 22 months, while state law mandates a 24-month storage period.
Despite this systematic violation of state and federal election laws, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told Americans to drop their concerns and recognize that “when you lose, you lose,” Business Insider reported.
“We have safe and secure elections,” Raffensperger told MSNBC. “It’s not helpful for either party, I think either party needs to look at what they’re saying and just realize that when you lose, you lose.”
“Accept the facts that you have lost and move on. If you want to run again, by all means,” Raffensperger said. “But accept the results.”
Voters Organized for Trusted Election Results in Georgia requested the ballot images through the state’s Open Records Request Act, according to the group’s press release.
VoterGA asked for ballot images from all 159 of the state’s counties, but 74 have failed to provide the original 2020 ballot images.
Of the 74 counties, 18 remain non-compliant with VoterGA’s lawful request under the ORR Act.
Six counties said that they have complied with VoterGA’s request, but the group said it has not received the ballot images. VoterGA worries that these images, even if received, “may also be incomplete or recount images only.”
The remaining 12 counties have offered to comply with VoterGA’s request if the group pays “exorbitant fees for images that most counties provided for around $25-$50.”
At least one county demanded $1,700 to produce ballot images from the 2020 election, which VoterGA called “too unnecessarily expensive to comply with ORR law.”
Of the 56 counties that responded to VoterGA’s request, six confirmed their failure to keep any ballot images from the 2020 election, 22 stored recount images but deleted the original images, and 20 had kept only a fraction of the original ballot images.
Dominion Voting Systems automatically creates and stories ballot images from in-person voting on “compact flash memeory cards.”
“The cards or drives are then manually uploaded to the county’s Election Management Server,” VoterGA explained in the press release. “Some densely populated
counties also use high speed scanners that automatically transfer images directly to the EMS.”
