ATLANTA — A viral claim that began circulating over the weekend alleging more than 17,000 invalid votes were counted in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia is the product of "bogus online blogs," a spokesperson for Gov. Brian Kemp said Monday.
Kemp's team refuted the claims in a statement provided to 11Alive's Nick Wooten.
“Retelling the same lies for three years does not make them true, even when citing bogus online blogs. The moon landing was real, Bigfoot does not roam the forests of North America, and the 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen," Cody Hall, a senior advisor to Gov. Kemp, said.
The claim appeared to originate with an item for this week's two-day meeting of the State Election Board under the heading "Cases Recommended for Referral to the Attorney General’s Office" - case SEB2023-025, tagged with the description, "Fulton County Tabulator Results 2020."
The case focuses on apparent discrepancies between the initial recount totals reported by Fulton County on December 2, 2020, and the corrected vote totals released the following day. There is also a related case question regarding ballot images, board member Sara Ghazal told 11Alive in a statement.
The recount was the third count in 2020, after the initial machine count and the full hand count, risk-limiting audit.
State Election Board spokesperson Alexandra Hardin provided a July 2022 letter from Gov. Kemp's deputy executive counsel Evan Meyers to the then-State Election Board Chairman William S. Duffey, Jr. noting that Georgia resident Joseph Rossi "has brought forth claims regarding the 2020 general election."
"The Office of the Governor does not have the authority to investigate election matters; such authority resides with the State Election Board," it states. "I ask that you contact Mr. Rossi and review his claims to determine whether any consideration of such claims by the Board is warranted."
The case was originally set to be heard at this week's meeting, but that it has "been continued to a future meeting," Hardin said.
"At no time was Mr. Rossi scheduled to testify or speak before the State Election Board. Accordingly, any report that a ‘scheduled testimony’ was ‘cancelled’ is erroneous," Hardin said.
Ghazal told 11Alive the case was continued "to allow Secretary of State investigators more time to research answers to board member questions in advance of full presentation."
"The board spends many hours reviewing cases prior to our meetings, and in many cases these reviews give rise to further questions," Ghazal said Monday.
Secretary of State spokesperson Mike Hassinger told 11Alive Monday that Fulton County submitted an incorrect number in their recount results in early December 2020 that was off by about 17,000.
The error was corrected through a process called "reconciliation" and submitted for the final, officially certified result.
Former Fulton County election board chair Richard Barron described these events in a Dec. 4, 2020 Fulton County Election Board meeting.
Barron told board members that an operator incorrectly set the scanning machine, resulting in a tabulation error.
"Once we start uploading all those results then you're looking at the final numbers and so you can see that it's short," he said. "And at that point the only thing you can do is go back and reconcile to see where those are. We were in touch with the state through that and they told us on Thursday morning (Dec. 3) to go back and reconcile that before we went through certification."
Fulton County's issues with scanning ballots during the recount were reported at the time and addressed in a press conference by Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger on Dec. 1, 2020.
There have previously been claims over the lack of preservation of some ballot images as well. Reuters reported on some of these issues in 2022.
Fulton County officials told Reuters in July 2022 that state law during the 2020 election did not require the county to maintain ballot images. The law was amended in late 2021 to clarify that election superintendents shall "retain copies of all ballot images" prior to giving election material to clerks. The images are public record.
The Associated Press reported in November 2021 that some counties violated state law by failing to preserve electronic images from the original count of ballots. Fulton County was among the counties that acknowledged that images were missing. Georgia election officials told the Associated Press that the counties have preserved paper ballots, meaning the election results are verifiable.