In a tremendous win for election integrity activists a judge in Georgia has granted an inspection of ballots cast in Fulton County on the November 3rd. About 145,000 absentee ballots are covered by the order.
“We won!!” said Garland Favorito emphatically this morning on a phone call with volunteers and supporters. Favorito, the head of VoterGA, a voter integrity organization and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, has been trying to get to the bottom of potential fraud in the election since just after Election Day.
Favorito conducted a forensic analysis on ballots cast in Ware County, GA, right after November 3rd. He found 37 votes were switched from Joe Biden to President Trump by Dominion voting machines, after controlling for other possibilities.
“The elections hand count audit did not match the original election returns,” Favorito told ITN in early December. He and his team have been fighting for the ability to inspect ballots cast ever since.
Yesterday a judge granted Favorito and another plaintiff in the case, along with their legal teams, the right to scan all 145,000 absentee ballots cast in the election in Fulton County – Georgia’s largest.
Favorito and his team were granted access to the scanned images of the ballots at a hearing last week. As a result of an inspection of those images, Favorito and his team found what they call “tremendous discrepancies.”
“There are dramatic differences between the hand count audit and the actual ballot images which we’ve looked at,” Favorito said on this morning’s call. “And a lot of those still didn’t come out even yesterday. There’s much, much more to come on that,” he added.
The judge in the case, Brian J. Amero, ruled the absentee ballots can be scanned at a much higher resolution (600dpi) which will allow for closer scrutiny. The scanning of the ballots is scheduled to take place next Friday at a warehouse in Georgia. Exact procedures for the operation will be finalized over the coming days.
The Georgia race was one of the most hotly contested in last year’s election. Only about 12,000 votes currently separate Joe Biden and President Trump in the entire state.