By Jack Phillips
President Donald Trump’s legal team on Dec. 3 presented surveillance footage at a Georgia state legislature hearing that appears to show ballot-counting workers telling poll observers late at night on Election Day to leave before continuing to count and pulling out what appears to be suitcases filled with ballots.
A spokesperson for Fulton County, in an email to The Epoch Times, did not dispute the authenticity of the video.
“To date, we are aware of no credible reports of voter fraud or wrongdoing in Fulton County. Any credible report of such activity will be investigated and addressed as provided by Georgia law,” the spokesperson said.
In the hearing on Dec. 3, Jackie Pick, a lawyer who is volunteering with the campaign’s legal case, said the team received video footage from State Farm Arena’s vote-tabulation center in Fulton County, Georgia. The team said that GOP poll watchers weren’t allowed to watch the counting process in the poll center.
According to Pick, an unusual occurrence took place later in the evening at around 10 p.m. local time. A woman—described as a blonde woman with braids—told workers to stop counting and notified everyone to go home.
Describing the video footage, Pick said, “Everyone clears out, including the Republican observers and the press, but four people stay behind and continue counting and tabulating well into the night.” The four counted unobserved until about 1 a.m.
Pick said that video footage shows Fulton County election workers waiting at their scanning areas until GOP poll watchers and reporters left the room before they started “scanning ballots,” ostensibly without any observation. Pick noted that this contravenes state and county law.
At 11 p.m., once everyone was gone, the workers are seen “pulling ballots out from underneath a table.” At the hearing, Pick asked rhetorically whether it’s normal to “store suitcases of ballots under a table cloth.” She said after reviewing footage that it’s not a normal procedure.
It’s not clear whether election workers knew they were being recorded. The footage was taken by security cameras belonging to State Farm Arena.
The lawyer further alleged that the same woman with the blonde hair in braids, presumably the manager, had placed the table there earlier. It’s not clear where those ballots came from, and it’s not clear when the purported suitcases of thousands of ballots were placed under the table. Whether they’re suitcases or a special carrier for ballots also isn’t clear.
Witnesses have sworn in affidavits that the counting continued until the early morning hours, Trump’s team said.
“Why are they counting them when the place is cleared out with no witnesses?” Pick said.
She argued that the number of ballots there is “beyond the margin of victory” in the presidential race. Three scanners—which can carry out several thousand ballot processes per hour—are believed to have been working for several hours until the early morning hours, she said.
President Donald Trump said on Twitter that the video is significant evidence showing voter fraud.
“Wow! Blockbuster testimony taking place right now in Georgia,” Trump wrote. “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!”
In the hearing, it was noted that officials cleared out State Farm Arena on election night, allegedly due to a pipe break. Pick and other members of Trump’s team said it’s not clear whether this was the reason why poll workers and members of the press were kicked out.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, told reporters this week that Fulton County “cut corners” during the second recount. Officials with the secretary of state’s office said last month that they were seeing “managerial sloppiness” and “chain of custody” issues in the county.
Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chairman Rob Pitts challenged the criticism during a public hearing on Dec. 3, saying he would give the county “an A+” for how it handled the election.
In early November, a Fulton County spokeswoman told The Epoch Times via email that officials were “not aware of direction given to any observers to leave.”
Registration and Elections Director Richard Barron said that when he learned that staff were dismissed at 10:30 p.m., he advised that some workers needed to continue.
“Based on that directive, a smaller crew continued to work through the night. It may be possible that observers left at the time the majority of the staff left, but from the information we have, the processing area was never closed to observers,” the spokeswoman added.
Georgia Republican Party Chair David Shafer said Fulton County officials “falsely announced that the counting of ballots would stop at 10:30 p.m.”
“This video proves our allegation—that they continued counting ballots in secret until 1:00 am,” Shafer wrote in a tweet on Dec. 3.
Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
