The Trump legal team has presented what they say is compelling evidence of voter fraud, alleging that election night video footage from Fulton County, Ga., shows at least four suitcases of ballots being pulled out from under a table after election supervisors had told poll workers to leave the room. The footage appears to also show four women staying behind to count votes. Georgia election officials deny that there was any impropriety and say that normal procedures were followed.
The Trump legal team presented this evidence during a hearing on Georgia voter fraud before a Georgia State Senate committee.
WATCH: Video footage from Georgia shows suitcases filled with ballots pulled from under a table AFTER supervisors told poll workers to leave room and 4 people stayed behind to keep counting votes pic.twitter.com/AcbTI1pxn4
— Team Trump (@TeamTrump) December 3, 2020
“Wow! Blockbuster testimony taking place right now in Georgia,” tweeted President Trump Thursday afternoon. “Ballot stuffing by Dems when Republicans were forced to leave the large counting room.”
Wow! Blockbuster testimony taking place right now in Georgia. Ballot stuffing by Dems when Republicans were forced to leave the large counting room. Plenty more coming, but this alone leads to an easy win of the State!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2020
Trump added, “Plenty more coming, but this alone leads to an easy win of the State!”
Rudy Giuliani declared this evidence to be the smoking gun.
SMOKING GUN FROM GEORGIA
— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) December 3, 2020
ELECTION IN GEORGIA IS NOW PROVEN TO BE A FRAUD.
— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) December 3, 2020
Grant Stinchfield of Newsmax called the footage “a total game changer!”
But, others say there is an explanation.
Stephen Fowler of NPR says that the man in the blue jacket that can be seen in the video is “an official monitor from the secretary of state’s office who was there watching the vote counting.” According to Fowler, “While some partisan monitors left, it wasn’t unsupervised.”
According to fact-checkers at Lead Stories:
Two high-level officials with the Georgia secretary of state’s office and a state elections board monitor each told Lead Stories that their investigations revealed nothing suspicious in the video. The officials said the ballots seen in the video were in regular ballot containers — not suitcases — and they had been removed from their envelopes and processed while news media and election observers for the Republican Party and Trump campaign were present. The media and party observers were never told to leave because counting was over for the night, but they apparently followed workers who left once their job of opening envelopes was completed, the chief investigator for the secretary of state told Lead Stories. The observers were free to return at anytime, she said. Georgia law allows observers, but does not require them to be there for ballots to be counted, she said.
But according to Jacki Pick, an attorney working with Trump’s legal team, even though “two Republican field organizers had been sent” there to observe the vote counting, “At no time were they permitted to observe in any meaningful way.”
Pick explains that the four election workers remained behind and continued counting and tabulating “well into the night,” even though GOP workers said in sworn affidavits that a poll worker had declared at 10 p.m. that counting had concluded for the evening and would not resume until the following morning.
According to Pick, the poll workers that stayed behind continued “counting, unobserved, unsupervised, not in public view—as [Georgia] statute requires—until about 1:00 in the morning,” Pick said.
GOP poll workers learned that counting continued from news crews.
“This shocked them, so they returned back to State Farm Arena at about 1:00 in the morning where they confirmed that people had in fact just left,” said Pick.
Pick also said that the Trump legal team wasn’t sure if storing ballots in suitcases under tables was standard procedure. Reviewing footage from earlier in the day shows that it was not routine.
“Where did they come from? Who put them there? When did they put them there?” Pick asked
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Matt Margolis is the author of the new book Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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