An attorney representing Georgia citizens who secured the right to review over 145,000 absentee ballots cast in Fulton County in November told the judge overseeing the case that a top county election official could not say how many absentee ballots were printed.
Plaintiffâs attorney Bob Cheeley told Judge Brian Amero on Friday that Fulton County Registration Chief Ralph Jones, during a pretrial deposition, estimated the county printed 20,000 absentee ballots through a vendor in the 10 days leading up to the election.
Jones could not give the attorney a precise number.
âSo I asked for the invoice, during the deposition, for those ballots. ⌠As of now, I donât have the invoice yet, so we still donât know if itâs 20,000 or some other number,â Cheeley told Amero.
âI asked Mr. Jones questions about chain of custody of those papers and who was limited access to those papers because thatâs very, very important that you keep that under close scrutiny,â the attorney continued.
âAnd I asked him also how many of those papers were actually printed and sent out to voters, and he didnât know.â
Cheeley further recounted that he queried Jones about whether any of the ballots were left over, but the official could not say.
The attorney told Amero he still doesnât have answers to those questions from the county.
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Cheeley told The Western Journal via email Wednesday that he had yet to receive those figures from the county concerning the ballots printed and used, or a copy of the printing invoice, despite the deposition of Jones taking place back on May 17.
âI have served a Request for Production of Documents for these in order to force the county to do so,â the lawyer wrote.
An independent report contracted by the Georgia State Election Board and released on Jan. 12 determined that there were many abnormalities in Fulton Countyâs November election, including some matters that involved Jones himself.
âThere were persistent chain of custody issues throughout the entire absentee ballot processing system,â the report said.
It added that âthe fact that ballots were delivered to State Farm Arena in unsecured mail carts is very concerning.â
âProtocol for securing ballots exists not only in securing the ballots themselves but also ensuring no ballot stuffing occurred,â it said.
âThe problem was exacerbated by poor managerial processes by Ralph Jones, who failed to do intake counts for provisional ballots.â
The report also noted that some staff seemed to not understand that absentee ballots needed to be verified before they were counted.
While standing with election observers, âJones had to intervene to stop a temporary staffer from moving a pile of recently-accepted but unverified absentee ballots into the stack going straight to State Farm Arena for scanning and counting.â
âHad Jones not been there with me to catch the mistake, it is safe to assume that those ballots wouldâve been counted as if they had been verified.â
State Farm Arena in Atlanta is the location where poll watchers were told by election officials that counting had stopped for the day, only for surveillance video to reveal it resumed later in the night.
The report concluded that âthe truth about what happened on the night of November 3rd between 10:30 PM and 11:52 PM continues to be elusive ⌠but if the poll watchers are correct, then there is a serious problem.â
Amero has set a hearing for Friday to determine what protocols will be followed for the absentee ballot review and scanning.
He reaffirmed that petitioners will be able to both âinspect and scan absentee ballots.â
In the official results, President Joe Biden carried Georgia over former President Donald Trump by 11,779 votes, or 0.24 percent.
The Western Journal reached out to Jones and the Georgia Secretary of Stateâs Office for comment for this story but did not receive an immediate response.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.