After the 2020 presidential election, there were many news stories alleging possible election fraud. These reports were countered by assertions that no fraud had occurred on a scale large enough to change the outcome, and that most of the fraud claims had no basis in the first place. Because I’ve never been a poll worker, I didn’t know how to judge which issues might be valid. Recently it occurred to me that I’d never seen an interview of experienced election workers, getting their opinions on whether some of these allegations really are suspicious, knowing what they know about how elections are done.
I called the Fannin County Board of Elections and asked Chairman Sonia Smith if I could meet with her and ask some questions about the reported 2020 election irregularities. On Tuesday, September 28, 2021, Sonia and Vice Chairman Mary Ann Conner met with me, and we spoke for almost two hours. Here is Part 1 of a summary of my questions and their answers. This was very informative!
The State Farm Arena camera footage late on election night – News reports with videos taken inside Atlanta, Georgia’s State Farm Arena in Fulton County on the night of November 3, 2020 showed that a few people waited until all the election observers and some of the poll workers had left the area, and then boxes of election ballots were taken out from underneath a table, and ballots were scanned on machines. A closeup of one camera’s footage showed a stack of ballots being run through a scanner three times. In the transcript of a phone call between President Trump and GA Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger after the election, Raffensperger told Trump, “we proved conclusively they were not scanned three times.”
I asked Sonia and Mary Ann what they thought of the video and whether there could be a reason to run a stack of ballots through repeatedly. Their response was to ask these questions: Why were ballots under a table, covered with a tablecloth? Here we do everything out in the open. Why were the other workers and observers sent home? Observers are supposed to be present. A stack of ballots can be run through a scanner a second time if need be, but the first run must be cleared first, or the ballots will be counted twice. What we do here is to put the ballots that have gone through the scanner into boxes labeled “Scanned”.