"None of that is true": Georgia election official debunks claims about voter fraud

[Music] we want to take you now to atlanta georgia where election official gabriel sterling is speaking to reporters this comes on the eve of the senate runoffs as well as on the heels of the controversial phone call between president trump and brad rothensberger let's listen in 963 pull pads they finished the final loading of of their data today before lunch we had about 21 counties with the last ones to go most of them completed over the weekend a total of six thousand nine sorry two thousand six hundred and forty eight polling locations open on election day we have a couple of them closed due to some shortages and some other code related items but the total we have right now is two thousand six hundred and forty eight we don't anticipate changes but that always may happen we have shared those locations with georgia power and the emcs in case there's power issues or any other issues might come up from that and we've seen a few shortages of poll workers so i think it specifically saw morgan county they're going to lose two locations because of that now what we've seen also is a difference in the turnout models depending on congressional district and county in the state so far in large part driven by the continuing misinformation and disinformation concerning the value of people's votes in this state the secretary wants me to make clear that everybody's vote is going to count everybody's vote did count i want to make that abundantly clear if you care about you know the values and directions nation you want to see it is your obligation to turn out and vote tomorrow be you democrat or republican however right now given the nature of the president's um statements and several other people who have been aligned with him previously have literally had a rally saying protest and don't vote we are specifically asking you and telling you please turn out and vote tomorrow one of the things specifically i've had to argue with people whom i've known for 20 years they say well we feel like our election was stolen we feel like our votes don't count and i said okay i'm not acknowledging the election with someone because it wasn't i'm not valentino there was massive voter fraud because there was somebody but if you believe in your heart of hearts that there was the best thing for you to do is to turn out and vote and make it harder for them to steal if that's what you genuinely in your heart of hearts believe turn out and vote there are people who fought and died and marched and prayed and voted to get the right to vote throwing it away because you have some feeling that it may not matter is self-destructive ultimately and a self-fulfilling prophecy in the end so everybody who cares about the future of this nation should turn out and vote it's vitally important it's absolutely important and the reason i'm having to stand here today is because there are people in positions of authority and respect who have said their votes didn't count and it's not true and i'm going to do it again i'm going to go through all this anti-disinformation monday it's it's guacamole again it is groundhog day again i'm going to get to talk about things that i've talked about repeatedly for two months but i'm going to do it again one last time i'm hoping because at the end of the day we want to make sure people understand their votes count every person every voice matters and i know that there's people who fought for that for years about this so let's let's start again and yes some of this is going to come out of the um continuing statements from the president and so his supporters state farm all right this has been one that's been conflated over several different things we have multiple scan ballots we have ruby freeman we have the leak that it says water main break which wasn't a water main break so in order to be fully transparent i mean one of the things we did we had a local media organization wsb just justin over here we went through it for hours and hours walked through frame by frame and showed what happened so let's start if you go to securevotega.com we have posted all the videos from state farm for that day to cover the relevant periods 5 23 a.m they they walk in and they discover what is essentially a pond on the floor where you can see water coming out of the sky so they say okay we can't do our work here this morning they call in the state farm people it's not fulton county people which is one of the other things they said there's no fulton county work order to fix the water leak and guess what it wasn't in a fulton county facility it was a state farm so they were the ones who fixed the leak and it was a urinal that was overflowed because they were turned off because guess what nobody's in state farm because of covet other than this particular usage so they turn off all those things and it went over the edge of the relief valve and that's what caused the leak so they come in then you go to another one about seven in the morning or so where you have essentially the i don't know what to call it the drying zamboni that's driving around on the carpet cleaning it all up then at about seven or eight twenty three you see a woman bringing in the table in question that has been the point of mr giuliani's 90 second clip she's pulling it with one hand and she sets it down there's nothing underneath it okay then you can fast forward to later in the day about 9 45 or so everybody there there are two groups of people there there's cutters and there are scanners what happened was the cutters began putting their stuff away because everybody's under the impression they were going to get home we have discovered this so they start putting covers over the cutting machines and everything so then we see also while the monitors in the press are still in the room they bring out the carriers which are normal absentee ballot carriers and i will admit when i listened to the audio of the phone call and the president brought that up again and i heard it on radio ad again today i wanted to scream well i did scream to the computer and i screamed in my car at the radio talking about this because this has been thoroughly debunked they bring out the normal absentee ballot carriers there are monitors in the room there is press in the room they take the ballots that have been opened put them in carrier trays and put them in there and then put them in the boxes put the lid onto the lid matches the box and then you see at one point during the video a woman crawling on the floor putting the numbered seals on him so they can keep the chain of custody approximately 10 25 10 30 the secretary in our office receives word that fulton county is shutting down for the night of a state farm arena so as some of y'all who are there on election i'd recall the secretary got a little irritated with this and made his feelings quite known they said some of us will be working through the night we're glad to see that fulton county sees the need to just go ahead and knock off for the evening so chris harvey our elections director ben calls rick baron the elections director fulton county who was at the other location which was their english street warehouse because he was doing election day activities chris calls rick rick says we're not shutting down well chris says it looks like you are so then you can go back to the videotape and see ralph jones take a phone call approximately almost 11 o'clock and you can see his shoulders kind of shrug he takes the phone call he's being told that point by his boss rick baron you need to stay and continue to scam so he hangs to the phone he goes over to some boxes put some more seals on him because obviously if you watch the videotape many of the people that are there have been there since seven in the morning it's already 11 o'clock at night they were all under the impression they were going to get to go home so you see him spend about 30 seconds going heck what am i going to say to these people so he walks back over to the corner of a desk and says i got the word we got to keep on scanning so they go back to the boxes that they you see them put under the table at the approximately 10 o'clock hour there is videotape of this and this is what's really frustrating the president's legal team had the entire tape they watched the entire tape and then from our point of view intentionally misled the state senate voters and the people united states about this it was intentional it was obvious and anybody watching this knows that anyone watching it knows that that's why we released the entire take for people to watch so there's this claim that that was done so they pull those out and begin to scan then the other claim comes from about a one named ruby freeman and multiple scanning one of the things you need to understand is a normal ballot processing if there is a problem with a ballot what it does is it stops but before that four or five will get through so they say delete that last batch and rescan it so they scan properly that is the normal process that is done secondarily to that everybody might be familiar with the fact the president wanted us to do a hand recount hand re-tally which we ended up doing under our audit that audit showed that there was no problems with machine scanning if somebody took a stack of ballots and scanned them multiple times you would have a lot of votes with no corresponding ballots so let's go over the numbers one more time statewide it was a for the sheer number of ballots they were off by point one zero five three percent for the margin they were off by point zero zero nine nine percent which shows that the machine scanned properly our counties did a great job of following these batches and doing the hand count properly appropriately with scrutiny and with observers so let's put that to bed right now and one of the other things we we did as part of our transparency is we have put all of those tally sheets online for every county so you can go through and look at them all and it's at again the securevotega.com uh let's see let's go over the numbers the president's team is claiming we have a little chart over here they're claiming there were 2056 felons that voted um our research and we have better data because we are directly tied to the state government on this department of corrections and um uh the other department which the camera is called right now basically attracts when people are on probation there we go uh we know exactly how many people voted for this we have a outward bound of 74 potential people who are felons voted what that means is that's the biggest number it could be we will investigate and find out some of these people completed their sentences some of these people have the same name and birth date so there'll be some cross over there so 74 is the outward bound it's going to be lower than that so let's be clear about that then there's the claim that 66 248 people below the age of 18 voted the actual number is zero let me be clear 66 000 versus zero and the reason we know that is because the dates are on the voter registration there are four cases four where people requested their absentee ballot before they turned 18 but they turned 18 by the election day that means that is a legally cast ballot so again 66 000 which is the biggest single number they have on these kind of votes versus zero they say that there's 2 423 people who voted without being registered let's just be clear about this you can't do it there cannot be a ballot issue to you there's no way to tie it back to you there's no way for them to have a name to correspond back to unless they are registered voters so that number is zero then we've got 1043 illegally voted using a po box again we're going through the investigation on this so far everyone we've seen has been when there is a mailboxes etc or something like that in a multi-uh family building like an apartment so it will have what looks like p.o boxes listed in the system but they're actually the residential address of record for people who live in multi-family housing like apartments so that's everything we've seen so we haven't seen anybody actually registering to vote at a at a usps po box um next one is 4926 voted past the legal registration deadline again it's zero do we have zero record of anybody doing that because the voter registration cut off is a voter registration cut off so there's there's no corresponding way to do that they couldn't be issued a ballot because they are not legally within the system of that to have ballots issued ten thousand three and fifteen who died before the election again our information from the department of vital records we go through county by county shows potentially two so far two it could change could go but it's not ten thousand um 395 cast ballots in two states we're investigating that but again then we got double voters which we're investigating but again we're talking handfuls not tens of thousands let's remember i think we're all very clear on the number now that it was eleven thousand seven hundred seventy nine we've seen nothing in our investigations of any of these data claims that shows nearly enough ballots to change the outcome and the secretary and i at this podium have said since november third there is illegal voting in every single election in the history of mankind because there are human beings involved in the process it's going to happen it's a question of limiting it and putting as many safeguards as you can in place to make sure it doesn't happen all right oh yeah we had part of the hand tally be discussed in relation to the potential double scanning let's just go to the other ridiculous claims that dominion voting machines are somehow using fractional voting or flipping votes again by doing the hand tally it shows none of that is true not a wit and let's go back to the overall claims about dominion voting systems in general if you look in wisconsin they're claiming it was constantly stolen through dominion voting machines in the 14 counties in which dominion voting machines were used in wisconsin the president got 59 percent of the vote and the in the counties in pennsylvania where dominion voting machines were used he got 52 and a half percent of the vote he made a claim at one point that over 900 000 votes were deleted by dominion machines and the 14 counties where they were that happened they had 1.3 million people vote that was um 70 some odd percent plus a 76 turnout in order for 900 000 to have been deleted they would have had to have a hundred and sixty percent or 130 turnout that did not happen because it cannot happen again this is all easily provably false yet the president persists and by doing so undermines georgian's faith in the election system especially republican george in this case which is important because we have a big election coming up tomorrow and everybody deserves to have their vote counted if they want it to be republican and democrat alike now let's move on to signature matching there were claims about signature matching being not being done they were and they were based on feelings we believe no specific evidence was ever brought up until in one of the trump filings there was a specific allegation the signature verification was not being done on the absolute ballot request form properly in cobb county during the june primary so that's the first time we had a specific actionable claim of signature match not being done so with that in mind the governor graciously offered after the secretary and he discussed potentially using gbi resources so we got gbi to come alongside secretary of state investigators multiple teams vic reynolds stood here last week to announce the outcome of that and of the 15 118 absentee ballot envelopes that they investigated they found two with potential problems two 99.99 was was properly done and of those two the actual voter who was intended to be marked as voting was the actual voter they could have been done through a cure period which would have a better way to do that um another thing they want to talk about is the vast difference in rejection rates well what we've seen is there was not a vast difference in rejection rates what's happening in order to confuse people because they don't understand election systems is they're conflating the entirety of absentee ballots that were rejected versus those that were rejected for signature mismatch or missing signature now we're also comparing apples to oranges in 16 i've done this so long i can't i don't script these numbers but i'm gonna give the general don't hold me this exact number i think it was point two six percent and eighteen it was point one six percent and in 2020 so far 0.15 we've got some updated numbers on this now and the difference is in 2019 hb 316 was passed which allowed there to be curing of ballots so there are teams republicans and democrats young people running around the state as we speak finding people who have signature issues to cure their ballots that's going on right now and the democrats did a much better job of that during the general election the republicans were not prepared the democrats had their own form set up they had team set up they were ready to go it was sort of a late entry on the republican side to do some of those um and about 5 000 total ballots were rejected for some purpose and about 2600 of those were cured so that means the final rejection number was around 2 400 ballots around the total of 5 million or a percentage of the 1.3 million that we saw that were voted absentee um let's go into some of the more new things um there is no shredding of balance going on that's not real it's not happening um there's no there's shredding of envelopes that were the non-used ones or there's also shredding of the secrecy envelopes that came through we saw some of those in the senate hearing and it's obvious that they are the secret symbols which have no evidentiary value because there's no signature on it there's a way to match it back they're just basically trash um the the law requires you keep the signature and oath envelopes and the ballots themselves 22 months those are all being kept um let's see this is what i don't fully understand no one is changing parts or pieces out of dominion voting machines that is that's that's not a real i don't even know what that means it's not a real thing um that's not happening the president mentioned on the call yesterday or from two days ago that's again not real i don't even know how exactly to explain that um let's see secretary raffensberger does not have a brother named ron raffensberger that is also not real the president tweeted that that out as well um it's let's see that's such a long list oh yes the other really fantastical thing we saw the other day was um a potential hacking of dominion equipment during a senate hearing last week that did not happen either let's go over a couple of reasons why first of all ballot marking devices and scanners neither one have modems it's very hard to hack things without modems there's nothing to talk to so let's get that clear um the pole pads which is a no ink device does have the ability to connect to wi-fi which we use in it for loading purposes and in case there's an issue on election day but they are not hooked up live all the time and if they saw anything they could see traffic back and forth but it would basically be like watching a river go by you couldn't get in it's essentially if they did this which we have no proof of we have claim after claim after claim with zero proof zero and signed affidavits are part of an evidentiary trail but they have to be investigated and let's remember everybody who came and gave testimony was public comment at the state senate hearing this office was never asked to come and discuss those items with that state senate here state senate subcommittee that didn't happen either which i find interesting because obviously they're making wild claims that again undermine people's faith in the system um let's see oh yeah this is another one that came over the weekend from the former from the founder of overstock.com that they had found thousands and thousands of fake ballots in fulton county warehouse for any of you all in the press who have been to the fulton county warehouse these are the emergency ballots that have been sitting in that warehouse since before the november election very much in plain view of everybody to see and what happened the reason they had a high number first of all every county has to have those emergency ballots by by rule the state election board rule says you have to have 10 percent of the available ones for each polling location and they have to be printed for that polling location for the ballot style so they can track it properly in fulton county's case y'all may remember that there was a covet outbreak in their warehouse not long before the logic and accuracy testing period was happening for the general election in a very wild abundance of caution they had what they referred to as not plan a not plan b referred to as plan c which was if we can't get people in to do the logic and accuracy testing on all of our equipment we're going to print up a hundred percent of our ballots we need to let hand market ballots be what we have to do if we cannot get the machines done they did that out of an abundance of caution given the unknowable unknowns surrounding covet and their ability to get employees in to do that they were thankfully able to get the employees in dominion staff came in to help them make sure they got the logic and actually test done so they were able to deploy all of their bmds and bmd carriers and scanners so they didn't have to use those ballots but that's why those ballots existed they are not fake ballots they are real ballots they are unused ballots and what i find really interesting about this is they were in shrink wrapped items in boxes that are sealed what can you do with things they're sitting right there everybody saw them um let's see trying to think what what other here's part of the problem y'all i sit down and try to write down every thing that we see that comes over the internet as a as a potential thing of disinformation it gets exploded we all look at these things we know there's lots of bots that are doing it we have foreign powers that are pushing some of these things at the same time so here's the takeaway from all this this office has been open and transparent we are continuing investigations there are questions about pristine ballots that's one last thing the pristine ballot thing there are three reasons you can have the quote-unquote pristine ballot which is essentially the absentee emergency slash provisional ballot there's first one military and overseas voters oftentimes will get what they call an electronic ballot what happens is once we get the ballot built starting the 49th of the 45th day we will send emails out to those people who who want to have electronic ballot delivery which is many of our military service men and women so they take that they print it and they bubble in their choices now obviously that's on eight and a half by eleven piece of paper or 11 by 14 or they can print it on so it's not sized properly to go through a scanner so when that comes back to the county they will duplicate that on a flat unfolded piece of paper on the absentee ballot emergency ballot that's a normal process for many of the military and overseas voters that are electronically delivered the other situation you might see that in is an emergency balance situation if a ballot marking device goes down or wasn't used which is the case we saw in the morning in spaulding county on election day they will use the emergency ballots as backup and those will just be scanned directly in the machine and not folded and the the final place you would see that is on a damaged or adjudicated ballot that was not adjudicated through the electronic system or in fulton's case what you saw was they were putting so many of the absentee ballots through their cutters that occasionally would catch the ballot itself and slice it in fulton county's case they did the vast majority i think 100 of their duplication on a bmd and cobb county's location i think they did all those on hand marked paper ballots so there's a difference of use and processes within each one of the counties so that's why you would see quote unquote pristine ballots um wednesday we've all heard the reports that there's going to be several senators and congressmen who will be objecting to the electors being seated we anticipate that each time they do that they're going to go they'll separate out they'll have the debate for two hours the state of georgia's electors will get seated they will look at this evidence as best they can in such a way and it will be voted on by the house and senate we anticipate that and that will prove our certification was proper at the end of the day and then we followed the process properly and i give you back to senator tom cotton's statement from earlier today that says this is the process that we follow is the appropriate step under the constitution of the law the state of georgia that laws united states so with that i want to say if you're a georgia voter if you want your values reflected by your elected officials i strongly beg and encourage you go vote tomorrow do not let anybody discourage you do not self-suppress your own vote do not make a self-fulfilling prophecy out of doing this don't let anybody steal your vote that way and that's what's happening if you self-suppress you're you're taking away your important voice from this election

Channel: CBS News

Views: 426,832

Keywords: cbsn, CBS News, Georgia, election, voter fraud, donald trump, Politics, presidential election, 2020 presidential election

Id: dEYvOTvqlFs

Length: 24min 42sec (1482 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021