In a bombshell development surrounding alleged ballot fraud in Georgia, surveillance video was released Thursday by the company responsible for security at the State Farm Arena. The footage was released along with testimony by Democrat and Republican whistleblowers including election workers, US Postal Service employees, and others who continue to present first-hand evidence of wrongdoing in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
The legal team for the Trump campaign on Dec. 3 presented the surveillance footage at a Georgia state legislature hearing that shows ballot-counting workers telling poll observers late at night on Election Day to leave before pulling tubs of ballots that seemingly had been hidden under tables covered with black cloth. The ballots were then allegedly illegally counted in the overnight hours with no official election observers present.
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The incident had been outlined in signed affidavits of individuals who swore that the incident took place, but who were dismissed by media outlets and even the Republican Secretary of State.
Until now.
WATCH THE SURVEILLANCE VIDEO:
In the hearing on Dec. 3, Jacki Pick, a lawyer who is volunteering with the campaign’s legal case, said the team received video footage from State Farm Arena’s vote-tabulation center in Fulton County, Georgia. The team said that GOP poll watchers weren’t allowed to watch the counting process in the poll center.
According to Pick, an unusual occurrence took place later in the evening at around 10 p.m. local time: A woman—described as a blonde woman with braids—told workers to stop counting and notified everyone to go home.
Describing the video footage, Pick said, “Everyone clears out, including the Republican observers and the press, but four people stay behind and continue counting and tabulating well into the night.” The four counted unobserved until about 1 a.m., according to the video.
Pick said that video footage shows Democrat-hired Fulton County election workers waiting at their scanning areas until GOP poll observers and reporters left the room before they started “scanning ballots,” ostensibly without any observation.
It was during this time that the huge lead enjoyed by the Trump campaign began to mysteriously disappear in the county which is a Democrat stronghold in the state.
Pick said that at 11 p.m., once everyone was gone, workers are seen pulling out the suitcase-looking containers and asked rhetorically whether it’s normal to “store suitcases of ballots under a table cloth.” After reviewing hours of the footage, she said that it doesn’t appear to be a normal procedure.
Georgia elections officials have since said those were not suitcases but container boxes that are used to store ballots.
Gabriel Sterling, the head of Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, told a fact-checking website after the footage was released that “if you look at the videotape, the work you see is the work you would expect, which is you take the sealed suitcase looking things in, you place the ballots on the scanner in manageable batches and you scan them.”
Frances Watson, the chief investigator for the Georgia secretary of state, also disputed some of Pick’s claims: “There wasn’t a bin that had ballots in it under that table. It was an empty bin and the ballots from it were actually out on the table when the media were still there, and then it was placed back into the box when the media were still there and placed next to the table.”
It’s unclear what she was referring to, as the video shows the containers being pulled from under a table.
Neither official explained to the website why the suitcase-looking boxes for ballots were kept under a table and were then taken out after other workers were—as Pick claimed—told to go home on Election Night after 10 p.m. They also did not say where the suitcases came from or who placed them under the table.
Watson furthermore said the area was still open to the public and that nobody told poll observers to stay or leave. But her claim and similar ones made by Fulton County officials, however, have been disputed by Georgia GOP Chair David Shafer, who on Thursday, wrote that the assertion that an observer was present during the process are “untrue, as the video shows. Our position is unchanged. Ballots were counted unlawfully and in secret.”
“Even had state monitors been present, the law still requires that ballot counting be open to partisan monitors and the public. But state monitors were not present, as the @GaSecofState now acknowledges and the video shows,” Shafer said.
Pick further alleged that the same woman with the blonde hair in braids, whom she said may have been the manager, had placed the table there earlier. It’s not clear where those ballots came from, and it’s not clear when the containers were placed under the table, Pick added.
Witnesses have sworn in affidavits that the counting continued until the early morning hours, Trump’s team said.
Pipe burst didn’t happen
According to statements by counting officials on the night of Nov. 3 a pipe burst caused a two-hour delay to vote counting in a room where absentee ballots were tabulated at the State Farm Arena.
However, a local attorney who filed a records request about the burst pipe only received a brief text message exchange about the incident describing it as “highly exaggerated … a slow leak that caused about an hour-and-a-half delay” and that “we contained it quickly—it did not spread,” according to the text conversation that the attorney, Paul Dzikowski.
“As it turns out, there never was a burst pipe or water main, which some news outlets reported,” Dzikowski stated.
“The water inside [State Farm Arena] was caused by a leaking toilet, which, as you know, can be remedied by simply hand-turning off the water supply line to the toilet. In any event, the leak was minimal and was resolved in the early morning hours, well prior to the time the elections staff halted the counting.”
–From news sources including AP, The Wall Street Journal and the Epoch Times