George election integrity officials traveled to Arizona last week to monitor the forensic audit of ballots cast in the November 2020 election taking place there. About 2.1 million ballots are currently being audited by officials in Maricopa County, AZ.
Garland Favorito hoped to identify technology that could be used in an upcoming inspection set to take place in Georgia.
“They have a great staff, lot of security,” Favorito told supporters on a conference call about the Arizona audit yesterday. “It was very comprehensive. The procedures are very, very precise. Tremendous transparency; there are nine different cameras on Azaudit.org. They probably anticipate still being a couple of months before they have any kind of reports on what they found,” he added.
Last month a judge in Georgia granted Favorito and his election integrity organization VoterGA permission to scan images of nearly 150,000 absentee ballots cast in the November election in Fulton County, GA, that state’s largest.
The images will allow for further inspection of the ballots in order to determine whether voter fraud took place.
The scanning of the ballots was set to take place on Friday, May 28th. Just two days before, Fulton County officials filed a motion to dismiss the case – ongoing since December – based on a legal loophole: a recently-altered Georgia sovereign immunity law.
Adding to the questionable developments in the Georgia inspection is the fact that the facility in which the ballots are warehoused was recently broken into. That breach raised numerous concerns.
Bob Cheeley, a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs in the case, originally offered to hire a private security detail with his own funds to monitor the facility where the ballots are kept. Fulton County officials objected, claiming the presence of a private security detail, which was to be made up of retired and/or off-duty law enforcement officers, would prove intimidating to the facility’s workers. Officials offered to provide County police officers to secure the warehouse instead.
Judge Brian Amero however, denied County officials’ request to block Cheeley from hiring his own security detail, allowing the private security detail but ordering they remain stationed off of the property across the street.
On Saturday, May 29th, three days after County officials moved to block the inspection, at approximately 4pm local time Fulton County officers in two separate squad cars drove away from the facility leaving it unguarded. Twenty minutes later an alarm sensor on the second floor of the facility was triggered.
When Cheeley’s private security detail arrived at the warehouse they discovered a door to the facility not just ajar, but fully opened. The ballots however, which were housed in a locked room within the facility appear to have not been tampered with.
Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat, when asked during a press conference the following week why the facility was left unmonitored and why the officers assigned to it left their post without replacements being on post, declined to comment saying the department had opened an internal investigation into the matter.
This is a picture is that the attorney provided of the door left open at the supposedly secure building were the ballots are being kept. pic.twitter.com/jfqJ2zkdtt
— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) May 30, 2021
“The problem that you’re dealing with here is that it’s a fox in the hen house situation,” Favorito told supporters on a conference call on Saturday June 5th. “Fulton County has a vested interest in destroying this evidence. So getting them to secure it, as they’ve already demonstrated, they don’t care. It seems to me that they would set that up to allow somebody to break in.”
“The sheriffs went away, they didn’t have anybody else come and take their place, they didn’t secure the building, they weren’t monitoring the building and they didn’t have the alarm company monitor the building. It’s like how many mistakes do you have to make before it’s no longer a mistake, it’s intentional,” he added.
Favorito called filing a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain more information on the actions of the officers, along with video footage of the facility a “distinct possibility.”
“Here’s another technique they do – they use this all the time. They open an investigation and then they say sorry, we can’t give you any information because it’s under investigation. This is how they avoid being transparent,” he added.
A supporter on the same call gave what he called a “tongue-in-cheek” explanation of what happened at the facility that day.
“Somebody in Fulton County is probably in a lot of trouble right now because they disconnected the sensor on the first floor but they forgot there was one on the second floor that would also go off when that door was opened. So they didn’t do their job,” the man said.