A new investigation has been launched in Georgia after allegations of systematic ballot harvesting during the state's 2020 general election and U.S. Senate runoff arose. Investigators are expected to issue subpoenas to secure evidence, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said.
According to Just the News, state law in Georgia bans third-party activists from "harvesting" ballots, or picking up and delivering ballots on behalf of voters. Liberal organizers have been known to push for the legalization of "harvesting" in many battleground states. But during summer, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Democratic efforts to overturn an Arizona law that outlawed harvesting in the battleground state.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who hopes to get reelected this year, was at the forefront of an effort in 2019 to boost Georgia's prohibition against harvesting right before the 2020 Presidential Election. His team even defeated an effort by prominent Democrat lawyer Marc Elias to overturn the harvesting ban.
Raffensperger was also responsible for reviewing and rejecting claims made by former President Donald Trump, who said that there was widespread fraud during the 2020 election in several contacts that are under investigation by a local district attorney in Atlanta and the January 6 select committee in Congress.
Raffensperger's office on November 30 received a detailed complaint from True the Vote, a conservative voter integrity group that said through evidence presented that "scores of activists worked with nonprofit groups to collect and deliver thousands of absentee ballots, often during wee-hour operations, to temporary voting drop boxes distributed around the state during the pandemic."
Evidence presented by True the Vote included video footage from surveillance cameras that were strategically placed outside drop boxes, geolocation data for the cell phones of more than 200 activists who were seen on the tapes, and an interview with a Georgia man who admitted he was paid thousands of dollars to harvest ballots in Atlanta for both the presidential election and the Senate run off.
According to The Gateway Pundit, the Georgia ballot trafficking whistleblower admitted to earning $45,000 for stuffing ballot boxes between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. in the morning. If there were 240 people assigned to do the same thing, there may have been "about a million" ballots that were stuffed into the ballot boxes, the outlet noted.
"Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger confirmed in an interview aired Tuesday on the John Solomon Reports podcast that his office has deemed the allegations credible enough to open an investigation and possibly seek subpoenas from the State Election Board to secure evidence," the National Pulse reported.
Raffensperger said during the interview, "That will be one of the processes we're looking at if we have people that don't want to come forward for whatever concern, because we really need to get to the bottom of it. We just can't let it sit there and lie. So if it comes to that, then that's probably the next step that we'd be looking at."
