Georgia’s Election Board has referred 35 cases of potential voter fraud to local prosecutors and the attorney general.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, chairman of the five-member election board, said in a statement:
“Election fraud is not tolerated in Georgia. When there is evidence of it, the people responsible face prosecution… Georgia has multiple safeguards in place that allow our team of investigators to discover fraudulent voting… They worked to catch the wrongdoing in these cases, and they maintain the security of Georgia elections.”
Among the most notable cases are four instances in which convicted felons were registered to vote or actually voted. That is illegal according to Georgia’s election law. In another four cases, non-citizens were found to have been registered for the voting process.
One case involves a woman from the Coalition for the People’s Agenda who submitted 70 false voter registration applications. The Fayette County Board of Elections and Voter Registration and its director Floyd Jones are also accused of improperly handling four memory cards that involved registering 2,760 votes in the 2020 presidential election. Officials also discovered that almost 2,755 votes were left uncounted during the initial count.
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Another principal respondent in the voter fraud case is a group called The New Georgia Project. It has ties to Senator Democrat Raphael Warnock, who was elected to the Senate last month. The New Georgia Project submitted 1,268 voter registration applications after the 10-day deadline was over. The people who had applied lost their right to vote in the March 19, 2019 election. During this time, Warnock was the CEO of the project.
The New Georgia Project was founded in 2014 by Democrat Stacey Abrams and has, until now, enabled around half a million people from underrepresented communities to vote in the state. According to Raffensperger, the New Georgia Project is one group that sent letters to people outside the state for mail-in ballots, violating Georgia law. The group had encountered legal troubles before when it was found not to have paid unemployment taxes.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis asked Georgia state officials to preserve all records related to the administration of the 2020 presidential race. Willis has instructed that special care be given to papers that might indicate attempts to influence people who were administering the election.
Any attempt to destroy records will be treated as a criminal law violation. Raffensperger’s office has confirmed that they have received Willis’ instruction and said they are already preserving all election documents in compliance with a law that mandates such preservation for 22 months after the election.
The Georgia legislature is also considering a bill that will block private funding of elections. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg channeled $419 million into various nonprofits that played a critical role in swaying the election in the five battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) had donated around $3 million to Raffensperger’s office for educating voters about election processes.
Much of the nonprofits’ funds were used to pay for election staff, equipment, PPE, and absentee ballot postage costs.
“That money was beneficial to the counties, but one role of government is to run elections, and I don’t think it’s appropriate to allow outside organizations to do it… We want as little influence on elections as possible,” Republican Joseph Gullett, a former member of the Paulding County elections board, told AJC.
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