Fulton County suitcase scandal breaks wide-open

Fulton County, Georgia, became a by-word for allegations of voter fraud in the Election of 2020. At issue: whether Officers of Election brought pre-filled-out ballots into the polling place, using their “suitcases” (equipment and supply carrying cases) to smuggle them in, in violation of the law and of every reasonable Officer of Election procedure. At the time, not only did Fulton County deny any wrongdoing, but a judge denied standing to eight voters who sued to have someone from the outside review the election. Over the weekend, an X influencer reviewed the Fulton County Suitcase Scandal at a time when three major lawsuits are pending. That review makes the allegations of voter fraud more tenable than ever.

The Fulton County Suitcase Scandal – a review

To review: Fulton County set up its main polling place for the city of Atlanta (county seat and State capital) in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta. At about midnight, Officers of Election ordered all Party challengers to leave the premises. They announced that a water main had broken, creating a flooding hazard, and that all ballot counting would cease.

Surveillance tapes reveal what happened after the challengers, called poll watchers, left the building. Four OOEs (also called poll workers) stayed behind – and quietly resumed the count. Worse, they extracted their “suitcases” from underneath a black-draped table, opened them, and from them extracted bunches of pre-filled-out ballots. These they proceeded to run through the scanner-tabulator. The footage shows one OOE running the same batch through, three times.

Commentators – including Erick-Woods Erickson, a denizen of Georgia – denied that anything untoward was taking place. Erickson in particular held that the ballots involved were test ballots only.

To make the scandal worse, all the OOEs involved were temporary helpers. Their direct employer was Happy Faces Temps, a temp agency with startup funding from perennial gubernatorial sore loser Stacey Abrams.

These two posts contain what surveillance footage survives.

YouTube took down a video on that channel showing the same thing – but not before the Wayback Machine captured it.

CNAV covered this recently after new evidence emerged, two months ago, of definite untoward-ness.

CNAV credentials

For the record: your editor is an Officer of Election himself. In the fall of 2021, as Virginia prepared for its Pre-Midterm, he applied for and won appointment. He is completing his third year in that office. In those three years, he has worked two different precincts, with about 2200 or 3300 voters at each. He has handled voter check-in, voting booth direction, scanner-tabulator guarding, and curbside voting. The electronic equipment has included electronic pollbooks, a scanner-tabulator, and a Ballot Marking Device – though in this jurisdiction, OOEs reserve that for handicapped voters only. And the vendor? Election Systems and Software, the main competitor to Dominion Voting Systems.

More to the point, your editor knows what a “suitcase” is, in OOE lingo – and what normally goes into it. “Suitcases” contain strictly mechanical equipment, plus fastening tape, ballpoint pens, pads for recordkeeping, and the like. They do not repeat not carry ballots! OOEs transport ballots in corrugated cardboard cartons, and always – always – count them in the presence of Party challengers.

Or at least, that is how your editor’s County Board of Elections orders that Officers of Election do things. Evidently that is not how the OOEs in Fulton County, Georgia – and especially Atlanta – did things on November 3, 2020.

The Fulton County Thread

The influencer Kanekoa the Great needs no introduction, and neither does X’s newest podcaster, Tucker Carlson. When Tucker Carlson discussed the Fulton County Suitcase Scandal, Kanekoa the Great dropped a thread on it:

Though the thread contains only eight posts, these are long-form posts, so the full text runs longer than might at first appear.

The current controversy centers on materials missing from the record. This has caused quite a stir in a criminal fraud case that a judge first tried to throw out. Favorito v. Wan, A22A0939, A22A1097, decided May 11, 2023 in the Court of Appeals of Georgia. Mr. Garland Favorito, co-founder of VOTERGa.org, sued to have an outside auditor examine the Election of 2020. A trial judge dismissed the case for lack of standing, and the mid-level appeals court affirmed. But the Supreme Court of Georgia ruled that the plaintiffs did have standing. So now the case is back before the trial court.

Favorito and his co-plaintiffs developed evidence that 150,000 ballots, in shrink wrap, pre-marked with perfect ovals, were sitting in a warehouse belonging to the Fulton County Board of Elections. Now those ballots are missing, and further evidence suggests that County officials destroyed them. Shortly after Kanekoa dropped his thread, two outside attorneys for the County filed notice of withdrawal.

Reaction

Reaction to the thread was mostly of the I-told-you-so variety. But some users insisted on denying anything untoward. For example:

That started an argument about who else has contested an election, and whether the January 6 Event was an “insurrection” or not.

This post was more typical, and raised an obvious additional question.

More to the point: Jim Hoft reports today that those four OOEs in the surveillance tape, are suing him and his staff for daring to bring the story up.

Hoft separately discussed another federal case in which the judge seems to be reversing herself to save her judicial skin. Curling v. Raffensperger, 1:17-cv-2989-AT. The case came to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, on removal from Georgia’s State courts. Donna Curling of the Coalition for Good Governance sued Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger after a special election took place with Dominion’s Ballot Marking Devices, which the complaint called Direct Recording Electronic Voting Machines.

The irony of this case is especially rich, because leftists were alleging then that voting machines were inaccurate and manipulable. When candidates on the right lost, Judge Amy Totenberg was silent. Tellingly, the Alex Halderman report, that Dominion Voting BMDs are hackable, is directly connected to this very case. Judge Totenberg, who had tried to sit on this report for years, unsealed it last July. And on November 10, she denied Brad Raffensperger’s motion for summary judgment. As a result, this case will go to trial.

Analysis

A floodgate seems to have opened, in which courts that refused to consider election fraud are now considering it. Tellingly, a complaint originally from a leftist plaintiff is moving to trial. The judge – again, perhaps to save her judicial skin – might do away with mandatory Ballot Marking Device use.

Dominion Voting Services’ BMDs are not like those from Election Systems and Software. First, your editor’s jurisdiction uses the ES&S ExpressVote BMD only to assist voters who cannot mark a paper ballot themselves. Second, the output of an ExpressVote BMD is human-readable. That’s how voters were able to catch the strange case of the machine marking their ballots wrong in a judicial retention case in Pennsylvania.

More broadly, voters on the left and right, know that electronic voting machines are a “black box” that gives them no assurance that the jurisdiction will count their votes as they intended to cast them. Dominion’s BMD produces an output the voter can’t even read. And both companies use scanner-tabulators that do not show a voter how he is about to vote! At minimum, the scanner should flash on the screen: “These are the votes you are about to cast in these races. Are you sure? Yes or No?”

Vote on paper and have done with it!

But the best solution would be to move to paper ballots, similar to how the French do it. Lately CNAV has concluded that, instead of pre-printed bulletins having the race and a chosen candidate printed on them, the jurisdiction should provide separate ballots for all races, and let the voter mark them – with a check (√) or X – and stuff them into an envelope. (Or else write in a name.) Such ballots would be easy enough to count, and the French have that down to a science. The French also can accommodate those who can’t vote in person: register a proxy to vote in that person’s stead.

A voter is entitled to know exactly how he is casting his ballot. Furthermore, the convenience of election officials cannot justify a system that confuses voters and allows even the appearance of cheating.