Biden won state by fewer than 12,000 votes
In Georgia, a state Joe Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes, county election officials still have not complied with a law requiring them to provide documents certifying the chain of custody of more than 400,000 mail-in ballots.
The request for the drop-box transfer forms was made by The Georgia Star News under the Georgia Open Records Law. Last July, the Georgia State Election Board passed an emergency rule requiring election officials to maintain the transfer forms.
But officials for the state’s largest county, Fulton, and another major county, DeKalb, said they didn’t know if they had the documents and promised to reply later, Georgia Star News reported.
But four months after the Nov. 3 election, those counties and 33 others have failed to comply with the law.
Overall, no chain of custody has been provided for an estimated 404,691 of the estimated 600,000 votes by mail-in ballot deposited in drop boxes, delivered to county registrars and counted in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election, Star News said.
The report pointed out the emergency rule passed by the election board last year “required that every county election office maintain a ballot transfer form that documented the movement of every absentee by mail ballot placed in a drop box and delivered to the county registrar prior to the election, with the number of absentee ballots picked up from each drop box, the signature of the two person team who picked up the ballots, the time of the pickup, and the time of the delivery of those ballot to the registrar, and the name of registrar who received those ballots.”
In Congress, a bill sponsored by Democrats would nationalize election procedures, eliminating many of the security measures established by states, such as chain-of-custody and signature standards.
The Star News report noted Georgia’s estimated 300 drop boxes were funded by the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which was sponsored by a $350 million payment from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
