After five years of trying, a citizen investigator has finally uncovered proof of widespread irregularities in the 2020 election results for Fulton County, Ga., and he wants accountability. After obtaining nearly all the county’s election records through an open records request, David Cross discovered that signatures were missing on no less than 134 tabulator tapes, representing some 315,000 votes.

“This is not partisan. This is statutory,” Cross argued in a hearing earlier this month before the Georgia State Election Board (SEB). “When the law demands three signatures on tabulator tapes and the county fails to follow the rules, those 315,000 votes are, by definition, uncertified.”

Cross said that the signature block was blank on every single tabulator tape the county produced for early voting (some tabulator tapes appear to be missing entirely, which is its own issue). These tapes account for just over 60% of the votes cast in 2020 in Georgia’s most populous county.

Even besides the missing signatures, Cross found multiple other red flags in the records he reviewed. “We found identical protective counters across several different polling places, polls that were opened eight days late, polls closed at impossibly late hours, like 2:09 a.m. in the morning, and poll closing times that do not match the tapes,” he listed. “We found duplicated scanner serial numbers where the memory devices were removed from one scanner and printed on an alternate scanner.”

To these challenges, Ann Brumbaugh, attorney for the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, effectively pleaded “no contest.”

“I’ve not seen the tapes myself,” she responded, “but we do not dispute that the tapes were not signed. It was a violation of the rule. … We don’t dispute the allegation from the 2020 election.”

When Cross presented his findings to the SEB, even more irregularities came to light. “I tried to match it up, the opening and the closing [tapes] together, and I couldn’t find it,” said SEB Vice Chair Janice Johnston. “It’s not there. So, I go back to the report, and I read the report. And the investigator says, we asked for all of the opening and closing tapes, and the county reported back, ‘This is all they have,’ which is woefully incomplete.”

Georgia’s election regulations require each polling location to produce two transcription tapes, one before polls open and the other after they close. The first tape verifies that the polling machines started at a ballot count of zero (meaning any data from a previous election or sample data from a test had been erased). The second tape includes the final count of ballots cast, as well as the tally of the votes. Georgia requires each tape to be certified by the signatures of three poll workers.

“I just don’t understand how one could even provide a canvas document to say, here are the tabulators, and here are the votes, and these add up to X numbers for the election,” Johnston added.

The best defense Fulton County can offer is that they once had all the records, and then subsequently lost them, in which case their only fault is abysmal record-keeping. But, since they lost the records, it’s impossible to say for certain whether the missing records were tampered with, falsified, or — as Cross’s evidence suggests — full of errors.

Brumbaugh protested that “Fulton County has spent hours and hours, probably days and weeks searching [for] this stuff. They’ve provided what they can.” In fact, Fulton County spent so much time tracking down information that should have been stored in one convenient place that Cross’s public records request cost him more than $15,000.

“These are not clerical errors,” insisted Cross. “They are catastrophic breaks in chain of custody and verification. Because no tape was ever legally certified, Fulton County had no lawful authority to certify its advanced voting results to the Secretary of State. Yet, it did. And Secretary Raffensperger accepted and folded those uncertified numbers into Georgia’s official total without questioning them.”

“This case is one of the most egregious things I’ve seen,” exclaimed SEB executive director James Mills. “It’s this kind of junk — and that’s a nice word — that violates our whole system. How can anybody believe that something is legit, when you have this many breaks in the chain of custody?”

The lack of integrity in Fulton County’s record-keeping was rendered all the more serious by the razor-thin margins of victory in Georgia’s statewide elections. According to the final tally, Joe Biden edged out Donald Trump by less than 12,000 votes (out of nearly five million cast) to snag the state’s 16 electoral votes. Meanwhile, Senator David Perdue (R-Ga.) fell 13,000 votes short of an absolute victory over Democrat challenger Jon Ossoff, leading to a run-off election in which Perdue lost.

Of the 520,000 ballots cast in Fulton County, Biden won more than 72%, while Ossoff won nearly 70%. The data uncovered by Cross places an asterisk on 60% of the ballots cast in Fulton County. An error in the Democrats’ favor of only 3% would have changed the outcome of the election.

Not that Cross sees any point in relitigating the past in this way. President Biden’s disastrous term is already in the rearview mirror, and Senator Ossoff is up for reelection in next year’s midterm contest. “The only honest remedy,” he proposed, “five years later, is for the state election board to impose sanctions on Fulton County, have them publicly acknowledge their violations, and for the state to decertify Fulton County’s 2020 advanced voting results.”

Brumbaugh countered that Fulton County has made significant changes since the 2020 election, with “new leadership and a new building and a new board and new standard operating procedures,” she listed. “The poll watchers are trained specifically. They’ve got to sign the tapes in the morning, and they’ve got to sign the tapes when they’re run at the end of the day. When the tapes come back to the hub with all the documentation, they are checked again. And, if somebody forgot to sign a tape, then Fulton initiates an investigation.”

These changes are likely calculated to bring the county into compliance with Georgia’s 2021 election integrity law, which Democrats decried as Jim Crow 2.0.

At the close of the board’s discussion on the topic (of unsigned tabulation tapes), board member Janelle King moved to “send a request to the AG’s office to issue a fine in the amount of $5,000 per tape.” Across 134 tapes, this comes out to a fine of $670,000. The State Election Board (with its nonpartisan member and Democratic member absent) approved the motion in a 3-0 vote.