U.S. Superior Court Judge, Brian Amero, has asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) and the state’s election investigators to submit information about the investigations conducted into allegations that last year’s presidential election involved the use of counterfeit ballots.
Amero’s request came as part of a lawsuit that seeks to inspect 147,000 ballots cast in the state’s Fulton County, to determine whether or not incidents of fraud occurred.
The lawsuit is based on accusations by Republican election auditors who claim that they had reviewed “pristine” absentee ballots during the counting process post election. Auditors observed that some of the ballots had perfectly filled in ovals and others had no fold marks, which might be an indication that they were not inserted into absentee envelopes.
In court, Amero stressed that it is “important” to know whether counterfeit ballots were introduced “into the mix.”
The judge has paused the lawsuit for 20 days, giving enough time for the office of Georgia’s Secretary of State and the GBI to respond to his request for more information.
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The State Attorney General’s office has responded by saying that they will soon be updating the court on the findings of the investigation.
Once the investigation is completed, a report is to be submitted to the State Election Board which will then decide whether a further course of action is merited.
Early on, the GBI had assisted the secretary of state’s office in the investigation, but now GBI is not involved in the inquiry. Assistant Attorney General, Charlene McGowan, stated that the secretary of state’s office had checked specific ballot batches but did not discover any counterfeit ones.
The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, Garland Favorito from VoterGA, stated that the judge’s request for more information blocks his efforts to carry out a public inspection of Fulton County’s absentee ballots. He had estimated that up to 20,000 ballots could be fake.
“What we want to do is look at the ballots and see whether they’re counterfeit… We don’t want some organization, claiming election official authorities, to tell us what these ballots are. We the people of Georgia want to see the ballots for our own selves in front of the cameras so everyone can decide: yes they’re counterfeit or no they’re not,” Favorito said.
According to Favorito, the court confirmed multiple things that they have been saying all along.
The claims are that there is prima facie evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential race; that ballots must be inspected to determine whether they are fake or not, and that the petitioners in the case have the “correct standing to pursue their claims.”
Amero’s decision comes as a recent report by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) revealed that 27,787 absentee ballots that were sent to voters by mail during the presidential election were deemed “undeliverable.”
In a press release, PILF pointed out that the number of mail ballots sent to faulty addresses and returned undeliverable was greater than the difference between the winning and losing sides. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 12,670 votes. Out of the total 1.7 million absentee mail ballots sent to voters, the fate of 217,677 ballots is unknown as election officials have no idea what happened to them.
“Now you see why Georgia lawmakers passed mail ballot integrity laws… You can’t ‘vote from home’ with confidence when you learn how many mail ballots failed. The fact that the Biden Justice Department is committed to interrupting Georgia’s integrity law demonstrates the level to which Washington bureaucrats will sink to preserve system weaknesses,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in a statement.
Adams is referring to the Election Integrity Act of 2021 which was signed into law on March 25 by the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp. The law mandates voter identification requirements for absentee ballots among other rules that aim to make elections free from fraud.