Eleven months after the November 3, 2020 election, a review of transfer forms provided to The Georgia Star News in response to an open records request reveals that the Secretary of State’s office in Georgia is missing chain of custody documents for 6,995 absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes in Fulton County during the November 2020 election.
The number of absentee ballots for which the office has no evidence of the origination of the ballots represents nine percent of the 79,460 total that Fulton County has recorded as being deposited into drop boxes during the more than month-long early voting and Election Day period.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, certified the results of the November 3, 2020 election–which gave Georgia’s 16 Electoral College votes to Joe Biden by a margin of 12,670 votes out of 5 million votes cast–on November 20, 2020 without having seen or reviewed the chain of custody documents associated with an estimated 600,000 absentee ballots deposited in 300 drop boxes around the state. Fulton County’s 79,460 absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes were about 13 percent of the state total of 600,000.
Just the News reported that the Secretary of State’s office did not receive these chain of custody documents from county election offices throughout the state until January and February of 2021.
Secretary of State Raffensperger has never offered an explanation as to why he certified the state’s election results without having even looked at the chain of custody documents for absentee ballots placed in drop boxes.
The absentee ballots in Fulton County should have been documented on at least 140 separate drop box transfer forms, a process put into place through Emergency Rule 183-1-14-0.8-.14 promulgated by the State Election Board in July 2020.
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