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Georgia GOP Chair: Fulton County Rescanning 12,000 Ballots Due To ‘Unexplained Technical Problems’

   DailyWire.com
'I'm a Georgia Voter' stickers on a table at a polling location for the 2020 Presidential election in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020. American voters, at least those who've not yet cast ballots, go to the polls Tuesday to choose between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden and cast votes in U.S. House and Senate races and state and local elections. Photographer: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Georgia Republican Party Chair David Shafer said Wednesday night that Fulton County is rescanning a batch of 12,000 ballots over “unexplained technical problems.”

“Fulton County Commissioner [Liz Hausmann] just alerted me that Fulton County is re-scanning a batch of 12,000 ballots due to unexplained technical problems,” said Shafer. “We have dispatched Republican monitors back to the tabulation center. This is maddening.”

Hausmann confirmed Shafter’s claim via Twitter: “Thank you [Georgia] GOP for responding so quickly to send monitors back to the GWCC from the #News that the Fulton #recount2020 was not complete after all??” she wrote via Twitter. “[Shaking my head] #MidnightDeadline.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, recently slammed Fulton County over the constant “dysfunction” relative to the statewide recount requested by the Trump campaign, Fox News reported Tuesday.

“Us and our office, and I think the rest of the state, is getting a little tired of always having to wait on Fulton County and always having to put up with their dysfunction,” Raffensperger said. “They can still make it by our midnight Wednesday deadline, but they seem to want to make it a dramatic finish.”

On Sunday and Monday, Raffensperger said, the county stopped working at 5 p.m. “Yesterday announced they will scan from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. today,” he said Tuesday. “As of an hour ago, Fulton County only had eight of the 17 high-speed scanners going because of staffing shortages.”

Fulton County has had numerous issues counting votes, including a server crash and a reporting issue that required officials to rescan more than 300,000 ballots, Fox noted.

“The real issue is a Fulton County employee made several compounding errors,” the secretary of state said. “Instead of following the procedures that my office and the vendor laid out, Fulton County once again cut corners. The biggest one being [the employee] backed up the election project on the server itself instead of on an external backup. Because of that decision, they lost the ability to upload hundreds of thousands of scanned ballots.”

Rob Pitts, on the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, asked why his county is being picked on and asserted that there has been “no hanky-panky with the recent election.”

“I’m still not clear why they continue to pick on Fulton County, Georgia,” Pitts said, according to 11Alive’s Christie Dietz. “We are the largest county. I can’t speak to the other counties, but I can tell you without shadow of a doubt, there was no hanky-panky with the recent election.”

As noted by The Daily Wire, Raffensperger announced on Monday that he has opened 250 investigations into “credible claims of illegal voting and violation of state election law”:

At a press conference, Raffensperger was careful to qualify his statements, noting that “dishonest actors” were pumping “massive amounts of misinformation” into the media ecosystem. Raffensperger appeared to slam Trump’s legal team without directly naming them, saying they were “exploiting the emotions of many Trump supporters with fantastic claims, half truths, misinformation, and frankly, they are misleading the president as well.”

“There are currently over 250 open cases from 2020 and we have 23 investigators to follow up on that,” Raffensperger said, adding, “We have multiple investigations underway surrounding absentee ballots in Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, and many others. We continue our investigations into potential dead, double voters, and non-resident voters.”

“That is why I’m announcing an investigation into third party groups working to register people in other states to vote here in Georgia,” he added. “We have opened an investigation into a group called America Votes who is sending absentee ballot applications to people at addresses where they have not lived since 1994; Vote Forward, who attempted to register a dead Alabama voter, a woman, to vote here in Georgia; The New Georgia Project, who sent voter registration applications to New York City, at Operation New Voter Registration Georgia, who is telling college students in Georgia that they can change their residency to Georgia and then change it back after the election.”

Georgia is closing in on 50 counties completed of the 159 counties for the recount, according to Fox.

Related: Georgia Investigating Group, Previously Led By Democrat Senate Candidate Warnock, For Voter Registration Activities

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