How Georgia Was Stolen…

by Liz Harrington at War Room

It was noon on Dec. 3, 2020, and Richard Barron had a problem.

The 2020 Presidential Election results, already declared by the deep state to be the “most secure in American history,” had just undergone a machine recount in Georgia. Fulton County was meeting to certify the results in less than 24 hours, and the then-Elections Director was more than 17,000 votes short.

Joe Biden, a despised corrupt career politician who had been running for president (and failing spectacularly) since 1987, allegedly received the most votes for president in U.S. history, yet simultaneously could only sneak by in Georgia by some 13,558 votes. It didn’t add up, and neither did the numbers in Fulton County. The first machine count had dragged on for days after Nov. 4, the day Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger promised the counting would be finished and President Trump’s over 103,000 vote lead was insurmountable. The 17,234 votes Fulton County had to come up with were important.

“The recount, we concluded that on Wednesday night [Dec. 2],” Barron said at the Fulton Election Board meeting to certify the results. “We submitted our results and then yesterday the state allowed us to do reconciliation. The results changed.”

That was an understatement.

When you have a problem like a 17,000 vote discrepancy in an election you’re claiming was decided by less than 13,000 votes, who do you call? The Elections Group, of course. They seemed to pop up everywhere, out of nowhere, in 2020. Setting up drop boxes and training election officials in Madison, Wisconsin. Programming the machines in Maricopa County, Arizona. Its members briefing CISA on how to “#PROTECT2020.” Protect it from whom?

Barron sent an email to Ryan Macias, of the Elections Group, at 12:13 p.m. There was no subject and nothing in the body of the email, only a file attached, a very important file, entitled, “Batches Loaded Report.”

Three and a half years after that email was sent, the Georgia State Election Board heard the results of an investigation into the recount, and confirmed Fulton County violated election rules.

The evidence brought by independent investigators showed over 20,000 ballots were inserted into both the original results and the second machine count out of thin air. Simply put, Fulton County did not have the paper ballots to justify their original results, and they got caught. Of course, investigators and lawyers from Brad Raffensperger’s Secretary of State office, who handled the investigation into the complaint, claimed otherwise. Don’t worry about the electronic record of the votes (which are counted…electronically), they said, we have the paper ballots — they just won’t let anyone else see them. And Fulton County is seeking to destroy them. Sure, the investigation confirmed there are missing ballot images and duplicate ballots. Were they counted? Who’s to say? It’s not like they could go check the cast vote record and the paper ballots. Oh, wait.

The mantra during the hours-long review of the case at the Georgia State Capitol last month was, “Let’s just move on.” Tell that to President Donald J. Trump and 18 others who Fulton County is trying to put in jail over the 2020 Election.

It was something to behold. The “experts” from the Secretary of State’s office tried to characterize the complainants as plebes and know-nothings, while exposing that they know next to nothing about their own elections. They say what they’re told to say. Despite their efforts to discredit the complaint, they were forced to admit the truth: Fulton County does not have supporting documentation to back up its election results in 2020.

Charlene McGowan, the general counsel for the Secretary of State, admitted as much when she said ballot images are “part of the paper trail that we use to confirm the accuracy of the results.”

All in-person votes in Fulton County, roughly 375,000, have no ballot images from the original results, and, according to the complaint, there are 17,852 missing ballot images from the recount. Statewide, there were 1.7 million ballot images missing or destroyed after the Election. By McGowan’s own admission, Georgia does not have a paper trail to justify its results.

McGowan confirmed ballot images are still missing, and duplicate ballots were scanned, they just didn’t bother to check if they were counted, which would have been easy to do since they were given a list of the exact ballots with corresponding batch numbers. They didn’t want to have to reveal the answer. According to the cast vote record, they were.

The Secretary of State’s office passed the blame off to Fulton County, which they said “used improper procedures” during the machine recount. They never addressed how it was their own office that ordered Fulton to reconcile the count when it was off by over 17,000. Yes, Fulton County did send its results to an outside group, but that was okay because he was a paid consultant, according to a memorandum the state investigators did not produce publicly. It was the same for all their claims. Nothing was made public, and the complainants were not allowed to address the board, outside a two minute public comment period. Investigate yourselves, keep the findings hidden, and allow no rebuttal. Nice work if you can get it.

Even the newly-appointed Republican Board member Rick Jeffares, hand-picked by Lt. Governor Burt Jones, was conveniently missing from the proceedings, leaving Dr. Janice Johnston the sole member to ask tough questions and offer motions for accountability, none of which were seconded.

The rest of the Board seemed content, along with Fulton County and the Secretary of State, to brush the whole thing under the rug.

“There is a concept called res judicata, which is the civil equivalent of double jeopardy,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, a Democrat Board member, wincing, when the fact that the hand count audit, which was the second count of the ballots, also included thousands of duplicates and false Biden votes, was brought up. “We have already heard this. It has been done. It is finished.”

The only problem is, no one has been held accountable or prosecuted once over the stolen 2020 Presidential Election, let alone twice, except, of course, those who objected to it. And if America is to have free and fair elections again, the matter is far from over.

Case Number 2023-025

It has been nearly 2 years since Joseph Rossi and Kevin Moncla sent an official complaint to the State Election Board, revealing Fulton County had “no physical ballots” for the votes it added to the recount. In all, Rossi, a retired PepsiCo executive and chemical engineer, and Moncla, an independent investigative journalist, discovered there were at least 42,000 votes in the certified count of the 2020 Presidential Election that have no actual paper trail, including duplicate votes, and over 20,000 from tabulators that “do not exist.”

Rossi and Moncla are emblematic of the countless patriots who have dedicated their lives since November 2020 to getting transparency and accountability to America’s voting systems. That transparency and accountability is sorely lacking in Georgia, and in Fulton County, in particular. Election after election, Georgia certifies and re-certifies results that are tangential to reality. Close races turn into unbelievable landslides, and landslides turn into unbelievably close results.  Outcomes are flipped, and only discovered if you’re lucky enough to get a real hand count. Years after the fact, it might come out that Fulton County’s results were “incomplete,” or they will cop to a consent order (the underlying facts of which reveals they counted at least 4,081 false votes for Joe Biden), and agree to “implement written policies” and “train all of its election staff.” But nothing ever changes. The results are whatever they say they are, regardless of the facts and evidence.

The evidence shows President Trump won Georgia. That was a problem for the powers that be, so the count was dragged out, and results were exchanged in order to create margins necessary for Biden to overcome a landslide defeat. When by 5 p.m. on Election Day in Atlanta only 14,152 people had showed up to vote, they knew they had a problem. That’s the turnout equivalent of filling a dozen circles at a campaign rally. They were not going to have the votes to overcome President Trump’s massive lead, even with their drop box stuffing on the front end, and their “QR Code mismatch” error, skimming rural Republican votes off the top. This is why there are no ballot images for in-person voting in Fulton County. This is why they kept scanning late at night after observers had left, “so the number would go up.” This is why none of the early in-person votes were witnessed to and signed, why their machine seals were broken, the memory cards swapped out, and their “results” were printed on different tabulators. This is why the records they do have show 4,000 absentee ballots were scanned at the exact same time. This is why after three counts, they ended up with three different results. And this is why the last two, both the hand count audit and the certified second machine count, had to rely on thousands of duplicate votes in order to try to replicate their first bogus result.

Rossi and Moncla’s complaint makes this obvious. The State Election Board assigned case number SEB2023-025 to the complaint in April 2023. After slow-walking the investigation for months, it was finally set to be heard on December 19, when at the eleventh hour it was pulled from the Board meeting’s agenda. Raffensperger’s general counsel took the investigation over, and five months later, the Secretary of State’s office was finally ready to unveil its cover up.

‘It Did Not Come Up With the Same Number…’

Results of the second machine count were due by midnight on Dec. 2, 2020. Fulton County announced it had completed the recount at 12:52 a.m. But they didn’t have enough ballots. Twelve hours later, Barron was sending the insufficient totals to someone who was not an employee of Fulton County, the Secretary of State, or any office in the state of Georgia. Instead, he was sending the results, which came nowhere close to matching the original count, to the “Elections Group,” a shadowy outfit that showed up in 2020 in very select places that happened to be the most important election offices in the country.

By 11:15 p.m. the next evening, the news media was reporting there were “about 3,200 votes outstanding” in Fulton County, a number eerily close to the 3,125 duplicates that would end up in the final count. The Batches Loaded Report — which contains the actual results as recorded as the votes are scanned — from the same day showed a 17,234 ballot shortfall. The media was checking the results on the Secretary of State’s website, which hadn’t been “updated since earlier in the evening.” But where were these numbers coming from, if not the Batches Loaded Report, which is what Dominion uses to total the results, and shows when they were loaded into the server? Perhaps it was a second Batches Loaded Report, obtained by Moncla via a public records request for the Recount Batches Loaded Report, that showed Fulton County had managed to add over 16,000 votes to the total, but yielded yet a different result, at 527,741 votes, than the 511,543 of the first report, and the 527,925 Fulton County ultimately certified. As Dr. Johnston said, “I would think that the third count…that took those very same ballots, and ran them through the big [ImageCast Central] ICC fast scanners, should have come up with the same number, and it did not come up with the same number.”

This second Batches Loaded Report shows 13,000 early in-person votes were scanned between 10 p.m. and midnight on Dec. 2. But that’s impossible, according to the Batches Loaded Report Barron sent to Macias. Those votes were not there, and it was processed at 12:06 p.m. on Dec. 3, after those votes were supposedly scanned. Someone was fudging the numbers.

‘I didn’t go that far with this.’

At the State Capitol on May 7, members of the public had 2 minutes to address the Board. Joseph Rossi ended his time with one word: “Vindicated.”

The last time Rossi had a complaint investigated by the State Election Board, SEB2021-181, it ended up in the hands of Secretary of State investigator Vincent Zagorin, who claimed the numbers from the hand audit, the only time the paper ballots were counted by hand, “are somewhat irrelevant.”

Rossi had found 36 inconsistencies in the hand recount totaling 6,695 votes that should not have been included, for a net total of 4,081 false votes for Joe Biden. This is in one county (Fulton), in one subset category of votes (mail-ins), in an election decided by 11,779 votes. He had painstakingly gone over the hand count results to find the errors, which were confirmed by Governor Brian Kemp’s office, and have now been admitted to by Fulton County in a consent order signed in June 2023.

Zagorin led the investigation, which crept on for more than a year. He told the State Election Board in March 2022 he purposefully did not count the total of the vote discrepancy and “try to figure out exactly what the number was.” The errors only accounted for over a third of the entire election margin, after all.

“The ones that were in there twice,” Zagorin said, “I didn’t sit there and write out the — the specific number.

“I didn’t go that far with this,” he said.

Zagorin didn’t want to find the total just like McGowan didn’t want to find out if the duplicates were counted. Once you find the truth you have to do something about it. And they certainly didn’t want that.

Months prior to Zagorin’s admission, back when she was working in Attorney General Chris Carr’s office, McGowan made a phone call to John James, an attorney and friend of Rossi’s who helped him with the analysis. Raffensperger was not responsible for the injection of thousands of votes in the hand count audit, she told him. James transcribed the conversation that took place on Dec. 4, 2021.

“The purpose of her call was apparently to convince me that the [Secretary of State] has no responsibility for the errors exposed in Fulton County,” he wrote. The message was, essentially, back off. It didn’t work. Rossi was able to get the 4,081 false Biden vote total from the hand recount on the record during the May 7 Board meeting, despite Sara Tindall Ghazal’s objections, and her misinformation that the 36 errors accounted for only hundreds of votes.

McGowan was also involved in trying to stop a separate investigation into Raffensperger for the hand count errors, because Georgia statute places the responsibility with the Secretary of State office, which never forced Fulton County to update the results. When former State Election Board Chairman William Duffey asked about opening another investigation, McGowan replied, in an email sent July 21, 2023, “I have instructed our investigations division that this office will not be opening up a case on this complaint.”

Moncla and Rossi found the Batches Loaded Report sent to Macias the day after the recount only had 511,543 votes, far short of the 528,777 total of the first machine count. But that number wasn’t accurate, either. The complaint found the total from the first machine count, the original results, included 20,713 votes from 10 tabulators “for which Fulton County has no records.” Meaning, the vote totals should have always been less.

“That is, the tabulators do not exist,” Moncla and Rossi wrote. “There are no poll open tapes, no daily status tapes and no poll closing tapes. We submitted Open Records Requests to Fulton County specifically seeking the 10 tabulator tapes, but Fulton County responded by saying that they had ‘No such records.’”

When it came time for the recount, that fact made replicating the results rather difficult.

Hence the 17,852 missing ballot images and 3,125 duplicate ballot images that ended up in the certified second machine count results, totaling 20,977 unsubstantiated ballots. This figure is almost identical to the number of ballots, 20,713, that appeared from tabulators in the first count out of thin air. Some time in between when Barron sent the Batches Loaded Report to Macias and the results were certified on Dec. 4, 16,382 votes were added, for a total of 527,925, almost making up the shortfall.

During the Fulton County Board meeting to certify the results, Barron admitted, under questioning from a Board member, they were “short.” But he never said just how short they were.

“Once we start uploading all those results [to the Secretary of State], you’re looking at the final numbers, so you can see that it’s short,” Barron told the Board. “And at that point the only thing you can do is go back and reconcile to see where those are. We were in touch with the state through that, and they told us on Thursday morning to go back and reconcile that before we went through certification.”

Barron said he was “in touch with the state,” but he did not say he was in touch with Macias. He also claimed the problem was because one of the scanners Fulton County had borrowed from DeKalb County was “zeroed out” in the process of scanning absentee ballots, and thus created two identical sets of batch numbers from the same scanner, necessitating one set of the batches to be rescanned.

“Once that occurs there are only two ways you can do it, either you have to append those batches at the end or you can scan them on different scanners,” Barron said. “So we used the different scanners rather than appending them on the end.”

But that was not what Fulton County did. At least 49 batches of votes were added to seven of the same tabulators that were used before, beginning at 8:10 p.m. on Dec. 3, after the Batches Loaded Report was sent to Macias, and after the recount deadline had passed.

McGowan attempted to borrow Barron’s inexplicable explanation for the missing ballots, without ever addressing the fact that the reports show they appended 5,119 votes to the seven tabulators. Still left unanswered, who put these results there?

The state investigator’s report, which McGowan presented to the Board but did not release to the public, is even less plausible. Nadine Williams, the warehouse manager Barron put in charge of the recount, who is now the Fulton County Elections Director, said in a memo addressing the complaint dated May 2, 2024, the issue was a “duplicate tabulator number.” “In this case, two scanners were accidentally labeled identically” causing the first upload to be “erased.” Yet, in the investigator report Williams contradicts herself and says it was the second set of batches that did not scan, not the first. Williams is quoted saying the scanner was “programmed with the same tabulator and batch numbers” causing the software to “interpret them as one” and reject the “scanned ballots as a duplicate batch.”  There’s another problem: Dominion’s manual says all of this is impossible.

Rossi and Moncla’s request for rebuttal, June 13, 2024

The McGowan report claims this was all because of one high-speed scanner, tabulator 816, also identified as “ICC 16.” Yet, the Batches Loaded Reports show at least seven tabulators had votes added to them on Dec. 3. And none of the votes attributed to tabulator 816 changed. Carter Jones, the Secretary of State monitor, said two scanners were named the same. Barron did not say two scanners were named the same, he said one machine was “zeroed out” and created two identical sets of batch numbers.

And this is not the same tabulator Barron said with which there was an issue. The day the machine recount was certified, he said it was ICC14, not 16. He also said there were 62 batches that had to be rescanned, not 97, which is what the McGowan report said. He also said the machine could only accept the first set of batches, not the second.

So it was either one “zeroed out” machine or a “programming error,” two tabulators named the same, or just one that had the same batch numbers, it was either ICC16, or 14, with 62 batches or 97, it only accepted the first results or the first results were “erased,” or the second batches were “rejected,” all on a system Dominion says if you’re trying to load results from a tabulator that has already been loaded, it tells you, and you have to delete or purge the results. Or maybe they just needed an excuse to keep scanning, because they did not have enough votes. And they still cannot keep their story straight.

Using tabulator 816 to explain away the 17,000 shortfall is the ultimate red herring. The Batches Loaded Report showed a total of only 511,543 votes. The state investigator report invented a new number, and said Fulton County only had 506,127 scanned ballots, rescanned 21,798 votes from tabulator 816, and ended up with 527,925 votes. Except those votes, the 21,798, were always included in the results. This was never the source of the shortfall. The state report does not even attempt to address why there were only 511,543 total votes.

While trying to dismiss the importance of the Batches Loaded Reports, the state actually admitted that these reports were used as “a reference in determining what the totals were and should have been.” In her memo, Williams said “its primary function was to verify the scanned ballots.” Thus by their own admission, 511,543 ballots were scanned, they did not have enough, and sent the results to Ryan Macias to determine what the totals “should have been.”

“However it was done,” Moncla and Rossi wrote, “16,198 votes were in fact added to the recount between the time of Mr. Barron’s email to Ryan Macias at noon on December 3rd and the time of the [Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections] FCBRE meeting the following morning.”

Barron never acknowledged the discrepancy was greater than the election margin, that the count was initially off by over 17,000 votes, and once that gap was nearly bridged, there were over 20,000 unsubstantiated votes within the total. These numbers were certified with the facts hidden from the public, President Trump, and his team, who were challenging the election.

Mark Wingate, a Republican member of the Board, expressed displeasure at the discrepancy at the time, which he believed to be only 3,000 to 4,000 votes. Barron let the Board believe this false impression, rather than informing them the deficiency was over five times greater.

“We’ve counted these three different times, or you all have, Director,” Wingate said, “you’ve gotten three different results every time that they’ve been counted.” Wingate pointed out that after each count, there were less and less votes.

Mary Carole Cooney, the then-elections chairwoman, said the counts they certified were only “slightly different,” and claimed that, as an attorney, “really the gold standard is whether there is a discrepancy large enough to change the outcome of the race, and we are very far from that.”

The discrepancy was, in fact, large enough to change the outcome of the Presidential Election. A more important question is, why was there such a large discrepancy in the first place? The most likely explanation is when Fulton County finished scanning, they did not have enough paper ballots to justify their original “results.”

‘Unelected Until Proven Elected’

Ultimately, the certified results included 17,852 ballots without ballot images.

It is not just Rossi and Moncla saying this. Philip Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the brain behind the first risk-limiting audit in the nation, determined there were 17,752 ballot images missing.

When Stark was brought in for the plaintiffs in the Curling v. Raffensperger lawsuit, a complicated and long-running legal battle to rid Georgia of touchscreen electronic voting machines (but not the equally vulnerable electronic tabulators), as an expert witness, his declaration eviscerated Raffensperger’s hand count audit, which he called “security theater.”

Stark found the numbers of the counts differed so substantially at the precinct level — specifically President Trump’s votes from Election Day were undercounted by the machines twice — it left voters with no confidence their votes were “counted at all, much less counted as cast.”

 

In one Fulton County precinct of only roughly 4,200 total votes, President Trump’s Election Day totals were off by nearly 50 percent from the hand audit to the machine recount.

Stark determined Georgia had no reconciliation process, no definite ballot manifest, or physical inventory of the paper ballots. The audit, then, was just the voting system “checking itself.”

This was the opposite of the intention of the risk-limiting audit Stark himself created.

“You start by assuming that the answer is wrong, you start by assuming that the reported winner didn’t really win,” Stark told NPR in 2017. (A safe assumption in 2020.) “Then you start saying ‘I’m going to collect evidence,’ and if the evidence becomes convincing that the winner really did win, I get to stop auditing.”

As NPR put it, “Unelected until proven elected, so to speak.”

The evidence never became convincing Joe Biden won. Instead of questioning their own results, Georgia officials did not want any questions at all, and smeared anyone who dared ask. It was, like in all the Swing States, “Elected, we won’t prove it, and shut up if you can prove otherwise.”

McGowan now claims the state was able to come up with about 518,000 ballot images from Fulton County’s machine recount, though they refused to show this evidence to the public, or to the complainants. If true, this still makes Fulton County at least 9,925 ballot images short, nearly the entire election margin.

Stark also confirmed there are at least 376,863 missing ballot images from the original results —  the entirety of all in-person early voting — something Fulton County claims is news to them. (Dr. Johnston put the number at 380,761.) Stark examined the machine recount and concluded “there is ample evidence” the same votes were counted multiple times, adding “thousands of bogus votes to the reported machine-count results.”

“That is,” Stark said, “thousands of Fulton County voters’ votes were included in the reported totals more than once.”

This is something Gabriel Sterling said did not happen.

Sterling was the “voting system implementation manager” in 2020, a fancy title to cover up the fact he had left his job at the Secretary of State’s office before the presidential election to become an outside contractor with a $200,000 contract, four times his normal government salary.

Sterling claimed the hand count audit “proved” no ballots were scanned twice. Except that wasn’t true. The counts were entered into Arlo, a VotingWorks software system controlled by the Secretary of State’s office, and included numerous duplicate batches, that is, the same entries two or three times. These were discovered by Rossi and others and eventually confirmed by Gov. Kemp’s team in 2021. By February 2022, Raffensperger had to admit Fulton County was “off by several thousand ballots” because “they scanned some of those ballots twice.” But that is not what he told the Unselect Committee. When he testified, under oath, before Congress in June 2022, Raffensperger falsely stated the hand count audit “came remarkably close to the first count.” The count included at least 6,000 votes (and likely a lot more) that should have never been there, including 4,081 false Biden votes, which has never been updated in the official hand count results. Sterling testified the hand count was “dead on accurate.” Arlo was also used in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada in 2020.

“That audit showed that there was no problem with the machine scanning,” Sterling had claimed. “If somebody took a stack of ballots and scanned them multiple times, you would have a lot of votes with no corresponding ballots.”

That could explain why multiple witnesses working as senior poll managers at the World Congress Center on Nov. 14, 2020 saw stacks and stacks of “pristine,” unfolded mail-in ballots. In other words, they had vote totals, but not the ballots.

The witnesses believed the ballots were photocopied and fraudulently added into the hand count (at 98 percent margins for the benefit of Joe Biden). This means batch entries during the audit were not only fraudulently entered more than once to get the numbers to “match,” but thousands of the ballots themselves were not real either. The hand count audit was “short,” too.

Litigation surrounding these allegations is still hung up in court. Though the parties have been granted standing and a review of the ballots, that review has still not happened. Fulton County is now seeking to destroy the 2020 ballots before they can be seen, claiming there is no room to store them, despite the fact they recently secured a 60,000 square foot warehouse at tremendous cost to Atlanta taxpayers.

Contrary to what the Secretary of State and other Georgia officials have said, the three counts do not match.

 

Of the 17,852 missing ballot images from the machine recount, 13,390 went to Joe Biden and 4,319 went to President Trump, a 75 percent margin for Biden. There were also 107 votes for Jo Jorgensen, 34 blank votes, and two write-ins. Of the 3,125 duplicates, 1,565 went to Biden, 1,383 went to President Trump, 52 went to Jorgensen, and 16 were blank – almost a 50-50 split, almost as if they had gotten the margins they wanted, they just needed the totals to increase. Removing these false votes from each candidate’s total reduces the margin in the Presidential Election to just 2,526 votes.

By removing the additional 4,081 false votes given to Biden in the hand count audit, the outcome of the 2020 Election is changed by just two investigations prompted by Moncla and Rossi. No wonder they did not want to take them “that far.”

‘Above and Beyond’

They say the cover up is always worse than the crime, but that is questionable when the crime is stealing an election. Fulton County claimed the 10 missing tabulators responsible for over 20,000 unsubstantiated ballots from the original count, did, “indeed exist,” and had poll managers sign affidavits attesting to the same. However, their “proof” revealed they used serial numbers of different tabulators and proved Fulton County’s results for early voting in 2020 were tampered with, and fraudulently printed out on different machines.

Rossi and Moncla are seeking an opportunity to rebut the state’s claims at the May 7 hearing. They submitted a 44-page factual response to the State Election Board on June 13. The response outlines how Fulton County appears to have forged the existence of the 10 tabulators, by using images of other tabulators. The machines they claim exist are not present on the county’s own checklists for early voting.

What Fulton County inadvertently revealed is that the results from early voting were printed out on machines that did not tabulate the votes, in violation of numerous election statutes required to reconcile the results.

“[T]he Investigator’s Report failed to provide evidence as to the existence of the tabulators in question,” Rossi and Moncla wrote. “What they did provide is evidence that the security seals for thirty-seven (37) Advance Voting tabulators were broken and the memory cards were unlawfully removed during a live election.”

“What our investigation has determined is that the memory cards of multiple tabulators were replaced with ones programmed with a different identity,” they wrote.

For instance, a fourth ICP tabulator was invented at Wolf Creek Library, when according to the Logic and Accuracy checklist for the precinct there were only three tabulators. The open tape for “ICP4” shows the same serial number as the third scanner. The closing tape for ICP 3, however, is unsigned (in violation of election rules), and has yet another serial number, one of 12 machines that were used to close out the entirety of the early voting “results.”

What Fulton County produced was a mismatch of some open tapes, some results tapes, but never one each for the same machine to reveal the history of its use during the election, and pictures of other scanners that they tried to pass off as the missing ones. They said they could not produce all records for the tabulators in question because of “complicated” “storage issues.”

Dr. Johnston also requested information on the mystery tabulators, and said at least 150 pieces of information are still missing.

“I would consider this over 150 [election law] violations if these are not produced,” she said during the Board meeting.

“The complaint alleged that 10 tapes that should have been run the night of the Election or at the end of advanced voting were missing,” said Cathy Woolard, the chair of the Fulton County Board of Registrations and Elections. “We have provided documentation that shows that those scanners existed, that they were taking votes, and that chain of custody, at least insofar as what happened at the precinct, was proper.

“We have given as much information as have been asked for,” she said. “We have gone above and beyond.”

In their pursuit of transparency from Fulton County and the state of Georgia, Moncla and Garland Favorito, the head of the election integrity group VoterGa, tried for months to obtain open tapes in order to reconcile the results. They are called zero tapes because their entire purpose is to make sure before the polls open that all candidates have zero votes. Out of over 500 tabulators used in the 2020 Election, they were only able to obtain nine zero tapes.

 

 

Fulton County has now provided seven more, and none were accompanied with a closing tape, and at least three revealed serial numbers for different machines. Moncla has since discovered closing tapes for entirely different polling locations, where results were supposedly closed on the same machine at the same time. If they are willing to fabricate evidence of tabulators, would they be willing to fabricate evidence of votes? Woolard is right. They did go above and beyond.

‘They chose Fulton County’

The name Ryan Macias was hardly mentioned on May 7, even though he is a central player in the allegations raised in the complaint. Why was the elections director of Fulton County sending election results to anyone outside Fulton County? More specifically, why was Richard Barron sending results — which were off by 17,000 votes — to a “subject matter expert for CISA/DHS,” the same government agency that in 2020 was spying on Americans and creating an unconstitutional censorship apparatus, and which had already declared the quite obviously insecure 2020 Election the “most secure in history”?

Barron had been introduced to Macias several months before. Noah Praetz, the co-founder of the Elections Group who used to run elections in Cook County, Illinois (Yes, that Cook County), informed Barron in early September 2020 that Macias would be joining their team on the ground in Fulton County, and would be “extremely helpful in all of your technology related efforts.”

Praetz noted Macias would assist Fulton County’s Emergency Operation Center, and “some of the USDR stuff,” or United States Digital Response, which Fulton County worked with to create a portal in 2020 to “aid us in absentee ballot processing and delivery.” Fulton County disputed the complainants who said Macias was not employed by the county, and said he “served” as a consultant during the 2020 Election.

Emails from Fulton County showed the Elections Group itself appeared out of thin air.

 

 

“The Elections Group came to us on a grant,” the open records office in Fulton County wrote in an email to Moncla in December 2021. “No agreement was signed with them. They were paid by the Elections Group. The county paid zero for them to be here. They chose Fulton County.”

The arrangement was an unusual one. The three-page memorandum attached to the investigative report providing “proof” Macias was a contractor shows he was not paid, and shows the Elections Group was involved in Fulton County even earlier than September. The agreement signed between Praetz and Fulton County Manager Richard Anderson, who formerly ran the Federal Reserve as COO, was for $1.00. Notably, the line for the Department of Registration and Elections to sign was left blank. In exchange for this “consulting fee,” the Elections Group would provide four people: a full-time former elections official for “deep management,” a full-time technician as an “onsite team support analyst,” a part-time project manager, and a “part-time senior level election consultant.” How nice of them.

Who is Ryan Macias? He was the Election Assistance Commission’s top tech expert who controlled how electronic voting systems were certified and decertified before he abruptly left in May 2019. His leaving was seen as a blow to the agency ahead of the 2020 Election, as he was in the middle of overseeing an “important update to voting system security guidelines.” Macias reportedly left the EAC because of the management style of its then executive director, Brian Newby, a Republican, who was the subject of several hit pieces in Politico in 2019, citing unnamed “former election officials, former federal employees, and others.” I.e. hacks from the Obama Administration.

Prior to working for the federal government, Macias spent a decade working in California’s elections. He contributed to a report released in July 2016 on how to increase voter turnout in San Francisco, providing research about states that switched to all voting by mail, four years before the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2020, with his own election consulting firm and with the Elections Group, Macias would appear in the most pivotal locations, Fulton County, Georgia and Maricopa County, Arizona. Two Ground Zeroes of the stolen election.

 

 

Macias helped write the “Elections Battle Staff playbook,” which was published in December 2019 and laid out a plan to coordinate “election operations” between states. The Harvard University-created playbook included a coordination food chain where a “Federal Battle Staff” works top down with state agencies, governors, all the way to the county level, to then coordinate with the media, NGOs, political organizations, law enforcement, and the elections IT department. You begin to see how an election can be so well “fortified” for the powers that be.

Macias also contributed to the 2018 playbook, which included players in the Russia collusion hoax, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook and Crowdstrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch on its senior advisory group.

Macias and Praetz gave a joint presentation to CISA in September 2019, before the Elections Group was created and before COVID, on how to “increase engagement and support provided to local election officials.” Macias spoke on how CISA could provide resources to election officials and “technology providers” to “#PROTECT2020.” Praetz’s portion of the presentation was, ironically, on “election interference” and “disinformation.”

The presentation’s theme was “CISA Gears Up for 2020 Election Security.” Yet just a few months later, the presenters were teaching local officials in Swing States how to bring in drop boxes and rapidly increase mail-in ballots, a form of voting so insecure it has been banned in France since 1975.

The Elections Group claimed it was created in “early 2020” to assist with “massive changes to election plans” because of Covid, according to its website, in a page it has since memory-holed. On March 26, 2020, just 11 days into the COVID lockdowns, there was already a “National Task Force on Election Crises,” ready to release “guidance” on “How to Protect Elections in the Age of COVID-19.” Naturally, the group recommended “Expanding no-excuse absentee vote-by-mail,” “Maximizing early voting days and hours,” and “Increasing the number of polling places and other voting options.” All of these methods were exploited in 2020, and not just to stuff the ballot box, but to make it easier, with a near total lack of chain of custody, to move the numbers around.

Members of the so-called “cross-partisan” task force included Macias, Jennifer Morell, the other co-founder of the Elections Group, and a who’s who of the deep state, including Jim Baker, the former FBI general counsel who was involved in the illegitimate warrants to spy on President Trump’s 2016 campaign, and Mary McCord, who oversaw the collusion hoax investigation at the Justice Department. These efforts are always cross-partisan.

The task force was convened by Protect Democracy, a liberal group co-founded by the associate White House Counsel under Barack Obama, which later would provide legal counsel to Ruby Freeman after she was told to leave her home by the FBI.

The Elections Group said its purpose was to provide “mentorship and materials” to election officials. They created guides to ballot drop boxes, with animated videos on how to collect ballots from them while wearing a mask. Praetz and Morell “recruited a deep bench of experts around the nation who could lend a hand” for their Election Superheroes Project, an effort which has since been erased from the Internet, but was cited in the contract signed with Fulton County.

The Elections Group’s partners included the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a Mark Zuckerberg nonprofit used to subvert the election by funneling millions into Democrat cities, and the National Vote at Home Institute, which for years prior to 2020 pushed for universal mail-in voting. The Elections Group gave its “deepest thanks” to CTCL and others for helping them “leverage existing technology, tools and research to facilitate solutions for election officials.” Solutions for problems, like say, being over 17,000 ballots short during a recount.

Members of the Election Group essentially ran elections in multiple Swing States. They “chose Fulton County” and helped “keep the warehouse running,” where they were abreast with the schedules of election workers, including lunch and dinner breaks.

An Elections Group representative was seen “printing ballots for no apparent reason” on Nov. 1, 2020 at 10 p.m. Praetz instructed Fulton to have test mailings “so we can monitor ballot mailing time across the country.” In a separate email in September, Praetz told Barron that Macias had “worked closely with Runbeck over the years and we have some ideas on your mailing of ballots.” Fulton County would order over 1 million mail-in ballots, after they could have been sent to voters. These orders were separate from what Runbeck Election Services was already sending directly to voters, and amounted to more than the entirety of the number of registered voters in Fulton County. Runbeck is also the main vendor used in Arizona.

They were just here to help. Running the warehouse, performing Logic & Accuracy testing, and on hand throughout the whole counting process. Think of the unsolicited call you get from what looks like the same 1-800 number as your bank. They’re from IT, and they’re going to make it so you never fall prey to fraudsters again. Of course their solution involves you giving them all the vital information to your bank account, and the next thing you know, all the money is gone

The ‘Heroes of the Process’

When trying to get answers out of McGowan and the state investigators, Dr. Johnston became perplexed.

“I’m trying to get to the point of finding evidence that 17,852 ballots actually exist,” she said. “So, there either need to be ballot images or we need to go look at the paper ballots…let’s look at the paper ballots.”

McGowan, though she said the proof was in the paper ballots, said no.

When CISA declared 2020 the most secure election in history, the same statement said election officials were still checking their results. Any question of those results — which were still being checked — they said, were “unfounded.” How could they know, unless the outcome was predetermined? And what exactly, then, were they checking? CISA also said everyone could have full faith in the system because there were “paper records of each vote.”

That’s exactly what McGowan said on May 7. She dismissed the idea of needing ballot images, because the “ballot image is not the vote, it is merely the electronic picture of the ballot so that we can go back and people can review them.” Except, in a country that counts its paper ballots by machine, ballot images are how a vote is counted. How is a machine supposed to count the vote, if it did not take an image of that paper ballot first?

Nearly four years later, the questions are still there, and the unconvincing answers are the same. Trust the paper ballots that you cannot see, counted by a system that has no reconciliation, no accountability, and that checks itself. There’s a reason why Fulton County Board of Elections members aren’t allowed to see their own election results.

“The 2020 Election underwent meticulous scrutiny through hand counts, recounts, and court challenges,” said Nadine Williams, “but the story remains steadfast; the outcome remains consistent.”

The story of 2020 goes like this. People who ran some of the most corrupt election systems in the country, in California and Cook County, somehow ended up running the elections in the cities of the most important Swing States in the most important election in history. They were experts in the easily manipulated electronic systems, mandated in Georgia ahead of the 2020 Election, and flush with malleable mail-in votes. After the corrupt news media falsely declared Biden the winner, officials were “double checking the entire election process” just like Georgia “checked” the machine recount to investigate the complaint. All they really checked was the box to remove President Trump from office – and try to cover their tracks. It didn’t matter what the results truly were. They never had the votes. 2020 wasn’t an election, it was a cover up.

When it was all said and done, Stanford University put together an “election oral history,” a propaganda piece that commended the “heroes of the process.” Among those acknowledged: Jocelyn Benson (Michigan), Kathy Boockvar (Pennsylvania), Chris Krebs (CISA), Katie Hobbs (Arizona), Meagan Wolfe (Wisconsin), and Gabriel Sterling (Georgia). The last name on the list was Ryan Macias.

“The job wasn’t done until January 20, 2021,” said Chris Krebs, noting the date when Biden (illegitimately) took office. “Thats where, for me, that was the relief, the burden off the shoulders that, ‘Hey, we did this.’”

Krebs said 2016, or the election of Donald J. Trump, had been a “wake up call.” “The United States needed to rethink its approach to protecting elections,” the oral history states. So CISA got the EAC, the FBI, secretaries of states, state election directors, the International Association of Government Officials, and “private sector entities like voting system and voter registration providers” together. They wanted to control the election, and they did. And they never want to give up control again.

Rather than answer the uncomfortable questions laid before them, like the fact that there are still over 150 missing pieces of information (amounting to 150 violations of election law) from the 10 mystery scanners Fulton County claims they found, the chair demurred.

“We are running an election now, we will be running an election in November,” said Cathy Woolard. “And doing what’s right in 2024 is more important than rehashing 2020.”

Yet, that is all Fulton County, and the nation, has done. The same top-down controlled, corrupt, fraudulent, covered up voting system, a system no one trusts, and oftentimes, doesn’t even work, is being presented again and again for us to vote on, without any meaningful change or improvement. Every election is another rehash of 2020. If they truly want to do what’s right in 2024, they will do what’s right about Nov. 3.

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