North Fulton Today

The founder of a nonpartisan voter integrity group VoterGA, which is appealing a dismissed election fraud lawsuit, said that he welcomed former Sen. David Perdue’s (R-Ga.) recently filed legal action to inspect absentee ballots in Fulton County.  

“We are glad that Sen. Perdue has joined us in the fight for election transparency,” Garland Favorito told North Fulton Today. “We fully expect to win our appeal of the Fulton County counterfeit ballot case.”

Perdue filed the legal action Dec. 10, only four days after announcing that he would challenge incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp in the Republican primary. The allegations in the lawsuit state that fraudulent or counterfeit ballots were counted in the county. 

Courthouse News reports that Perdue's 77-page suit alleges debunked claims regarding absentee ballots being scanned more than once and that thousands of counterfeit ballots were scanned and included. The website also reported that Georgia election officials have repeatedly stated no evidence of fraud was found during the election and following three ballot counts.

Perdue, 71, lost his Senate seat to Democrat John Ossoff in a January runoff election by 55,000 votes.

In October, Henry County Judge Brian Amero dismissed a lawsuit, of which VoterGA was a part, seeking to inspect absentee ballots for counterfeit votes. Amero ruled that the parties in the suit lacked standing, and they also failed to allege “a particularized injury” in their lawsuit that alleged fake ballots were counted in the county’s totals.

The ruling, said Favorito, “defied 100 years of Supreme Court precedents,” and his group filed an appeal with the Georgia Court of Common Pleas.

But Favorito said it could take months for the court to docket the appeal, and called for a multi-county election audit, citing a report by Gov. Kemp’s office detailing voting inconsistencies first revealed by VoterGA. The inconsistencies include 36 instances of duplicate or misidentified batches in a November 2020 hand count audit of the Fulton County results. Vote misallocations also identified by Kemp include seven falsified tally sheets that Favorito said VoterGA revealed in July.

Kemp sent a cover letter asking the State Election Board to investigate earlier audit reporting, and to review the methodology used in the audit.

“The Kemp report corroborates what we explained at the July 13 press conference,” Favorito said in an earlier press release reacting to the Kemp report. “It is not possible that the Fulton hand count audit could confirm the original election results. Time is running out. We must have a multi-county audit to determine what went wrong and how to fix it for 2022.”