A member of the Fulton County Registration and Elections Board testified this week that he voted against certifying the county’s 2020 election results due to what he claimed were insufficient attempts by election officials to inform him of steps taken to mitigate voter fraud.
Mark Wingate, a Republican, testified at the disbarment hearing for former United States Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, one of 19 co-defendants charged by District Attorney Fani Willis with seeking to overturn Georgia’s presidential election results.
“The things that led me to initially have concern about everything was… I started looking at our voter rolls, and I did some fairly simplistic research on the population of Fulton County,” Wingate said during a remote meeting. “What I found out and started pressing with the Election Department [was]… we had more voters on the active voter rolls than we did of the population of the entirety of Fulton County.”
“There was nothing done to answer my questions on that,” he added. “Somebody may have come in and voted that frankly, legally, should not be able to.”
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Following the 2020 election, Wingate said he and other board members attempted to obtain chain of custody documents from the county’s election officials, which track where absentee ballots were transported and by whom they were handled. “None of that was delivered,” he said.
“How can I trust as a board member to certify this election when I cannot receive even a sampling, anything at all with regards to chain of custody documents?”
More than 30 drop boxes were placed throughout Fulton County, Wingate testified, allowing voters to submit their ballots during the pandemic without coming into contact with others at a polling location. When he and his colleagues asked to see surveillance tapes from cameras set up to monitor the drop boxes, “there was never an inch of footage that was ever delivered to the board,” Wingate said.
Prosecutors have charged former President Donald Trump and his co-defendants with pressuring Governor Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Ben Raffensperger, and local election officials to identify instances of voter fraud or “find” enough votes for Trump to make up the approximately 11,000 vote margin President Joe Biden carried following Election Day. The former president and most of his co-defendants have pleaded not guilty while several have reached agreements to testify for prosecutors, including former Trump attorney Sidney Powell and former bail bondsman Scott Hall.
Willis, the district attorney, was recently allowed to continue leading the case despite potentially perjuring herself when testifying about her personal relationship with former Trump prosecutor Nathan Wade. Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee has also ruled that attorneys for the Republican leader will be allowed to argue that Willis overstepped her authority by seeking election-related charges without receiving testimony from election officials typically required to inform a grand jury.
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