The FBI’s investigation of Fulton records is a trip down memory lane

The claims outlined in the document are nothing new and have already been investigated by state officials. Here’s what prior investigations have found, which allegations are true and which are false, and what outstanding questions remain.

Missing ballot images

Ballot images are digital pictures of ballots. Election officials, concerned citizens and candidates often analyze them to confirm results and identify voting patterns.

The FBI affidavit says Fulton County is missing ballot images from both the original count and the machine recount. This is true — the county has admitted it’s missing images from both counts. About 3% of the 524,000 images from the presidential recount are missing.

State investigators found that Fulton failed to back up the digital images.

However, the county has said it still has the physical paper ballots cast in the 2020 election. At the time, state and federal law did not require counties to preserve ballot images. But a State Election Board rule required them to be kept.

Ryan Macias, an election technology and cybersecurity expert who observed Fulton County’s 2020 election operations, said the FBI affidavit gives a “misleading impression” of the situation.

Double-scanned ballots

The FBI affidavit says Fulton County election workers scanned some ballots multiple times. This is true. But state officials could not say if those ballots were counted more than once.

Officials with the Secretary of State’s Office confirmed that Fulton County likely double-scanned more than 3,000 ballots during a machine recount of the 2020 presidential election, leading to a reprimand in 2024 by the State Election Board.

Conservative researchers say that those double-scanned ballots were counted twice in the 2020 recount. One analysis from data expert Philip Davis found that Fulton double-counted nearly 4,000 ballots in the recount and more than 1,500 ballots appeared in the recount that had not been in the original count.

Davis’ analysis also found about 6,000 ballots in the count on election night that were not counted in the recount.

Although Trump narrowed his gap with Joe Biden in the recount by hundreds of votes, it did not change the outcome of Trump’s narrow loss.

The federal government could potentially confirm the totals by counting the physical ballots again.

The hand count

The FBI affidavit noted inconsistencies in a hand count of ballots.

Fulton election workers made mistakes counting ballots by hand during an audit in November 2020 of the 5 million ballots cast statewide in the presidential election.

Among the mistakes made were votes that were counted twice or misallocated.

Investigators with the Secretary of State’s Office attributed Fulton’s inconsistencies to “human error,” such as mistakes made when entering data into the software used during the hand count.

But the investigators’ findings did not change the outcome of the audit, confirming Biden’s victory. The hand count supported the initial election night machine count and a machine recount. It found more than 340 additional net votes for Trump in Fulton.

Credit: NYT

Credit: NYT

Pristine ballots

The FBI affidavit mentions “pristine ballots.” Absentee ballots are usually creased after voters fold them to put in envelopes and mail back to their county election offices.

But four Republican auditors told election officials they noticed some absentee ballots during a hand count that did not appear to be creased. They said these “pristine ballots” also appeared to have been marked by a computer rather than by hand. One auditor identified specific box and batch numbers that contained the suspicious ballots.

Investigators for the secretary of state searched those batches but found no ballots matching that description. The auditor then suggested other batches. But another search found those batches didn’t exist.

In all, investigators reviewed 1,000 absentee ballots — all of which appeared to be legitimate.

Election skeptics believe the state’s investigation was incomplete. The FBI affidavit cited the claim of pristine ballots, and the agency could conduct its own search for supposed counterfeit ballots.

Recount reporting

The FBI noted that Fulton County reported about 17,000 fewer ballots in a recount on Dec. 2, 2020, than it reported on election night. But the county made up for that difference in a report the following day.

The county never officially reported results from Dec. 2. County election officials explained that they learned they hadn’t accounted for all ballots. The officials said some ballot batches had been unintentionally given the same batch numbers, which prevented those ballots from loading. According to a state investigation, those ballots were rescanned and reported to the Secretary of State’s Office on Dec. 3.

Then-Fulton Elections Director Richard Barron said some of the discrepancies between the three counts were because of counting votes in different locations, including absentee ballots at State Farm Arena and a hand-count audit at Georgia World Congress Center.

“They’re just completely different ways that you count these ballots over different periods of time and it’s very hard to come out exactly the same,” he said in December 2020.

Tabulator tapes

In December, a Fulton County attorney acknowledged poll workers did not sign tabulator tapes from voting machines that counted hundreds of thousands of votes cast by early voters. The tapes are the receipt-like papers that contain vote tabulation information for a voting machine.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called it a “clerical error.”

A witness who analyzed images of the tapes and other documents believed someone “manipulated” the times on the reports. That belief was relied on to obtain the search warrant.

While State Election Board Member Janelle King claimed in the affidavit that tabulator tapes are the “holy grail” for the final vote count — they play no role in tabulating votes.

Tapes are created after the polls close and are a paper backup to the memory cards in voting machines.