Georgia official fires back at Trump's election conspiracies
by Gabriel Sterling
Jan 4, 2021
Gabriel Sterling, the Republican in charge of Georgia's voting system, pleaded with Georgians to go out and vote in the Senate run off while also debunking each of President Trump's and his supporters baseless election claims.
TRANSCRIPT:
[Gabriel Sterling] 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 the values and the direction of the nation you want to see, it is your OBLIGATION to turn out and vote tomorrow, whether you are Democrat or Republicans. However, given right now the nature of the President’s statements, and several other people who have been aligned with him previously, literally at 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 believe our election was stolen; we feel like our votes don’t count,” and I said, “Okay, I’m not acknowledging that the election was stolen, because it wasn’t; I’m not acknowledging that there was massive voter fraud because there wasn’t,” but I said, “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, and I’m going to go through all of this Anti-Disinformation Monday. It’s whack a mole 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 be sure that people understand their votes count. Every person, every voice matters. And I know there are people who have fought for that for years about this.
So let’s start again, and yes, some of this is going to come out of the continuing statements from the President and some of his supporters.
1. State Farm. [Sigh] This has been one that has been conflated over several different things. We have (a) multiple scanned ballots; (b) we have Ruby Freeman; (c) we have the leak, they say “the water main break”, which wasn’t a water main break. So, in order to be fully transparent, one of the things we did, we had a local media organization, WSB, 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 of the videos from State Farm for that day, that cover the relevant periods. 5:23 a.m. 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 is not Fulton County work order to fix the water leak because guess what? It wasn’t in a Fulton County facility, it was in State Farm. So they were the ones who fixed the leak. And it was a urinal that overflowed, because it was turned off, because guess what? No one is in State Farm because of COVID other than this particular usage. So they turned off all of these 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 about 7:00 in the morning, or so where you have essentially the – I don’t know what to call it – “the drying zamboni” driving around on the carpet cleaning it all up.
Then about 8:23, you see a woman bringing in the “table in question” which has been the point of Mr. Giuliani’s 90-second clip. She’s pulling it with one hand, and she sets it down, and there is 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 are cutters and there are scanners. What happens is the cutters began putting their stuff away because everybody is under the impression that they were going to go home. We have discovered this. So they start putting covers over the cutting machines and everything. So then we see also, while the monitors and 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 it up again, and I heard it on the radio 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, they put them in there, and then put them in the boxes, put the lid on, and 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 them so that can keep the chain of custody.
At approximately 10:25, 10:30, the Secretary in our office receives word that Fulton County is shutting down for the night ahead of the State Farm arena. So, as some of you who were there on election night recall, the Secretary got a little irritated with this, and made his feelings quite known. he said, “Some of us are 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, then calls Rick Baron, the Election Director of Fulton County, who was at the other location, which was their [inaudible] warehouse, because he was doing election day activities. So Chris calls Rick. Rick ways, “We’re not shutting down.” Then Chris says, “Looks like you are.” So then you can go back to the video tape and see Ralph Jones take a phone call at approximately almost 11:00, and you can see his shoulders kind of shrug. He takes the phone call. He’s being told, at this point, by his boss Rick Baron, “You need to stay and continue to scan.” So he hangs up the phone, he goes over to some boxes, he puts some more seals on them because obviously, if you watch the videotape, many of the people who are there have been there since 7:00 in the morning, and now it’s already 11:00 at night. They are all under the impression they are 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 gotta keep on scanning.” So they go back to the boxes that you see them put under the table at the approximately 10:00 hour. There is videotape of this.
AND THIS IS WHAT IS 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, THE VOTERS, AND THE PEOPLE OF THE 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 tape for people to watch. So they pull those out and begin to scan.
Then the other claim comes about a woman named Ruby Freeman, and multiple scanning. One of the things you need to understand is that it is a normal ballot processing that 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 it scans 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, a hand retally, which we ended up doing under our audit. That audit showed that there was NO PROBLEM WITH THE 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, for the sheer number of ballots, they were off by .1053%. For the margin they were off by .0099%. 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 did as part of our transparency is we have put all of those tally sheets online, for every county, so you can go through them and look at them all. And again, it’s at securevotega.com.
Let’s go over the numbers that the President’s team is claiming. We have a little chart over here. They are claiming there were 2,056 felons that voted. Our research, and we have better data, because we are directly tied to the state government on this, the Department of Corrections, and the head of the department, and I can’t remember what it’s called right now, but basically it tracks when people are on probation. There we go. We know exactly how many people voted for this because we have an 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 that some of these people completed their sentences; some of these people have the same name and birth date, so there’s 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 is the claim that 66,248 people below the age of 18 voted. The actual number is ZERO. Let me be clear: 66,000 VS. ZERO. And the reason that 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 election day. That means that is a legally cast ballot. So again, 66,000, which is the biggest single number they have, versus zero.
They say there is 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 issued to you; there’s no way to tie back to you; there’s nowhere to have a name to correspond back to unless they are a registered voter. So that number is ZERO.
Then we’ve got 1,043 illegally voted using a P.O. box. Again, when we’re going through the investigation of this, so far, every one we’ve seen has been where there’s a mailbox, etcetera, something like that, in a multi-family building, like an apartment. So you’ll have what look like P.O. boxes listed in the system, but actually there are residential addresses of record for people who live in multi-family housing, like apartments. So that’s everything we’ve seen so far. We haven’t seen anybody actually registering to vote at a USPS P.O. box.
The next one is 4,926 voted past the legal registration deadline. Again, it’s ZERO. We have ZERO record of anyone doing that because the voter registration cutoff is the voter registration cutoff. So 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.
10,315 who died before the election. Again, our information from the Department of Auto records we go through, county by county, shows POTENTIALLY TWO. So far, two. It could change, it could go, but it’s not 10,000.
395 cast ballots in two states. We’re investigating that, but again, we got double voters, which we are investigating, but again we’re talking handfuls, not tens of thousands. Let’s remember, and we’re all very clear on the number now, that it was 11,779 – we’ve seen nothing in our investigations of any of these data claims that shows there’s near enough ballots to change the outcome. And the Secretary, and I at this podium, have said since November 3rd, “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.
Alright. 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 for flipping votes. Again, by doing the hand-tally, it shows that none of that is true. Not a whit.
And let’s go back to the overall claims about Dominion Voting Systems in general. If you look in Wisconsin they are claiming, that Wisconsin was stolen through Dominion Voting machines. In the 14 counties in which Dominion Voting machines were used in Wisconsin, the President got 59% of the vote. In the counties in Pennsylvania where Dominion Voting machines were used, he got 52-1/2% of the vote. He made a claim at one point that over 900,000 votes were deleted by Dominion Voting machines, and the 14 counties where that happened they had 1.3 million vote, that was 76% turnout, and in order for 900,00 to have been deleted, they would have had to have 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 GEORGIANS’ FAITH IN THE ELECTION SYSTEM. ESPECIALLY REPUBLICAN GEORGIANS 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 not being done, 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 that signature verification was not being done on the absentee 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 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 been a better way to do that.
Another thing that 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 the election systems, is they are conflating THE ENTIRETY OF ABSENTEE BALLOTS REJECTED VERSUS THOSE REJECTED FOR SIGNATURE MISMATCH OR MISSING SIGNATURE. Now, we’re also comparing apples to oranges. In 16 – I’ve done this so long I don’t want to screw up these numbers, but I’m going to give the general, I think it was .26%, in 18 it was .16%, and in 2020 so far .15%, and we’ve got some updated numbers on this now, and the difference is that in 2019 HB316 was passed which allowed there to be curing of ballots. So there are teams of 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 forms set up; they had teams set up; they were ready to go. It was sort of a late entry on the Republican side to do some of those.
And about 5,000 total ballots were rejected for some purpose, and about 2,600 of those were cured. So that means the final rejection was around 2,400 ballots around the total of 5 million, or a percentage of 1.3 million that we saw that were voted absentee.
Let’s go into some of the more “new” things. There is no shredding of ballots going on. THAT’S NOT REAL. THAT’S NOT HAPPENING. There is shredding of envelopes, the non-used ones, or there is also shredding of the secrecy envelopes that came through, and we saw some of those in the Senate hearing, and it’s obvious that they are the secrecy envelopes which have NO EVIDENTIARY VALUE because there’s no signature on it, there’s no way to match it back. They are just basically trash. The law requires you keep the signature and oath envelopes, and the ballots themselves for two months. Those are all being kept!
This is one I don’t fully understand. “No one is changing parts or pieces out of Dominion Voting machines.” I don’t even know what that means. That’s not a real thing. That’s not happening. The President mentioned it on the call yesterday, or from two days ago, that’s again, NOT REAL. I don’t even know how exactly to explain that.
Secretary Raffesperger DOES NOT HAVE A BROTHER NAMED RON RAFFENSPERGER. That is also not real. The President tweeted out that as well.
Let’s see – it’s such a long list! Oh, yes. The other really fantastical thing we saw the other day was “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 is nothing to talk to. So let’s get that clear. The poll pads, which is a no-link device, does have the ability to connect to WIFI which we use for loading purposes and in case there is 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 be basically 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 HEARING, STATE SUBCOMMITTEE. THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN EITHER. Which I find interesting, because obviously they are making WILD CLAIMS THAT AGAIN UNDERMINE PEOPLE’S FAITH IN THE SYSTEM.
Oh yeah, this is another one that came over the weekend from the founder of Overstock.com, that they had found thousands and thousands of fake ballots in Fulton County warehouse. For any of y’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 rule. The State Election Board rule says you have to have 10% 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, you all may remember that there was a COVID outbreak in their warehouse not long before the Logic & Accuracy testing period was happening for the general election. In a very wild abundance of caution, they had what they referred to was not Plan A, not Plan B, but they referred to as Plan C which was if we can’t get people in to do the Logic & Accuracy testing on all of our equipment, we’re going to print up 100% of our ballots we need to let [inaudible] if we cannot get the machines done. They did that out of an abundance of caution given the unknowable unknowns surrounding COVID 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 and make sure they got a Logic & Accuracy 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 these? They are sitting right there. Everyone saw them.
Let’s see. I’m trying to think 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 potential 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 take-away from all this. This office has been open and transparent. We are continuing investigation. There are questions about “pristine” ballots. That’s one last thing. The “pristine” ballot thing. There are three reasons you can have the “pristine” ballot, which is essentially the absentee/emergency/ provisional ballot. 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 from the 49th to the 45th day, we will send emails out to those people who want to have an electronic ballot delivery, which is many of our military servicemen and women. So they take that and print it, and they bubble-in their choice. Now obviously that’s on 8-1/2 x 11 piece of paper, or 11 x 14, or whatever 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 ballot situation. If a ballot-marking device goes down, or wasn’t used, which is the case we saw in the morning in Spalding County on election day, they will use the emergency ballots as backup. And those will be scanned directly into the machine and not folded. And 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, we just 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. In Cobb County location, I think they did all of those on hand-marked paper ballots. So there’s a difference of use and process within each of the counties. So that’s why you would see “pristine” ballots.
Uh, Wednesday. We’ve all heard the reports there is 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’ll separate out, they’ll have their 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 by the end of the day, and that we followed the process properly. And I give you back to Senator Tom Cotton’s statement of earlier today, that this is the process that we follow. This is the appropriate step under the Constitution, under the laws of the State of Georgia and the laws of the United States.
So [sigh] 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 are taking away your important voice from this election.
So with that, I’ll go ahead and take any questions y’all got.
Q: Yeah, is the Secretary of State, or the State Election Board, considering asking for the Fulton D.A., or the Georgia Attorney General, to investigate the call with the President over the weekend?
A: I do not know that.
Q: Any discussions of that?
A: Not that I am aware of.
Q: From all that you said there, do you believe, as some have said, that what happened in that phone call was an attack on democracy?
A: I’ll leave other people to make the decision on that. I personally found that to be something that was not normal, out-of-place, and nobody I know who would be President would do something like that to a Secretary of State.
Q: Have you heard about any threats or security problems or anything that could interfere with people voting? And also, what do you expect turnout to be like tomorrow?
A: Well, I anticipate there will be a high turnout, and there’s a large bucket of voters in many, many congressional districts that could potentially show up. We anticipate there could be any number of potential threats out there that could be attempting to encourage or discourage turnout. We encourage everybody to please turn out and be safe, be smart, and don’t let anybody get in the way of you casting your vote.
Q: And have you heard about any threats? Will there be extra security?
A: We’ve discussed with GBI, FBI and Sheriff’s Departments potentially there being threats, and we’ve seen some of that nature potentially out there that are under investigation.
Q: Following up very quickly on Justin’s question, two members of the State Board of Elections have called upon the Secretary of State office to investigate that phone call. How is the Secretary’s office responding? Is there any plan to investigate, or will they block that investigation in any way?
A: I’m not aware of any discussion specifically on that yet, but I’m sure it will be taken under advisement.
Q: I’ll ask you very quickly about the Secretary’s desire to have that phone call recorded. Why did he want to that phone call recorded? Was he concerned about anything improper being said, or that he may need to release it later?
A: I think given the environment we’re in right now, and the political situation we’re in, and the history of the President, knowing that he sometimes doesn’t necessarily characterize things as they might actually have occurred. It was out of an abundance of caution. And I’m sure even the President’s side recorded it too, so they might have been the ones that leaked part of that as well.
Q: How do you interpret the President asking the Secretary of State to “find votes” on that phone call? Is it fair to say the President was asking the Secretary of State to fraudulently “find” or “flip” votes?
A: I don’t know if he was asking to fraudulently “find” the votes, but things we have certified this election say there are no more votes to find. We’ll continue investigations, and he has an election challenge. And one of the things they were discussing on that phone call was they have sued the State of Georgia and Secretary of State. There are rules of evidence to follow once you do that. Trying to go outside of that is an issue. And I believe our lawyers have sent their lawyers a letter saying “If you want to dismiss your challenge, we’re more than happy to share this data with you to show that your data is incorrect, and you have in fact lost the State of Georgia.
Q: The Bureau of Investigation says there is an unprecedented number of threats that have come in state-wide regarding the election. We’re not sure the nature of those threats. Are you aware of what type of threats you guys might face?
A: We’re aware of some, but we’re trying to not discuss in too much detail about that while we try to investigate and find out what the actual nature of those threats may be.
Q: This is now the second sort of conversation that the Secretary of State that has been reported out on this topic. First it was Lindsay Graham earlier in November, and now the President. Has the Secretary of State’s office been contacted by any other members of the Trump administration or GOP officials?
A: Our office is contacted by Democrats, Republicans pretty consistently discussing election issues. So yes. That has occurred. Specifically, it’s a little bit of a broad question I think. But we get contacted by members of the Administration; we get contacted by Democrats and Republicans.
Q: Have you been contacted on the topic of some of these conspiracy theories that you’ve outlined today?
A: No more than my normal of having to explain the ridiculousness of many of these pieces of disinformation. Thank you very much.