Georgia counties accused of destroying evidence of illegal vote harvesting

 Monica Showalter:

Good luck investigating ballot-harvesting in Georgia's 2020 election.

Following credible reports from True The Vote, a clean-elections advocacy group, of the existence of ballot-harvesting, which is flamingly illegal in Georgia, several counties have destroyed their camera surveillance data.

According to John Solomon's JustTheNews, which broke the story:

But some of Georgia's largest counties tell Just the News that they no longer possess evidence that could be helpful to probing the harvesting allegations: video camera surveillance footage that monitored the drop boxes installed around Georgia to help voters cast ballots during the pandemic.

Election officials in several counties say the reason they discarded the footage is that the emergency rules issued by the State Elections Board said they only needed to keep the footage for 30 days after the election.

"We took direction from the Secretary of State and State Election Board, assuming they were not implementing a Rule contrary to law," said the Cobb County elections office, which acknowledged it deleted its video footage from 2020. "Drop boxes were established under an emergency order from the Governor."

The state is now conducting an investigation of the illegal ballot-harvesting, and the counties' camera footage could show ballot-harvesting done through unattended drop boxes for votes, which were all over in Georgia in the 2020 election. The one security measure that was taken to ensure that anyone and everyone didn't drop huge numbers of fraudulent and fraudulently obtained ballots into the unattended receptacles was the camera footage surveilling them. Funny how that's gone now. 

And why the hell were these videos not posted online like cat-cams or zoo-cams, in real-time, so that every citizen could become an election observer? Just having videos and then destroying them before anyone impartial could look at them is worse than useless as an election security plan, because not only is it useless in itself, it gives a false sense of security to voters that their vote won't be canceled by a fraudster stuffing ballots into unattended receptacle boxes in the dead of night. 

More suspicious still, it turns out it was key counties run by Democrats that destroyed that video footage, were blue-run counties with a strong interest in getting Democrats into office. They now claim that they were only following orders from the five-member Georgia State Elections Board at the time, which inexplicably was an order to retain the footage only for 30 days instead of the 22-month period mandated by Georgia law. Georgia's State Board of Elections at the time included Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger; David J. Worley; Rebecca N. Sullivan; Matthew Mashburn; and Anh Le, all of whom supposedly instructed states to retain their video footage a mere 30 days after it was taken, on those all-purpose COVID concerns. Perhaps the Board thought that COVID could be spread through camera footage. Otherwise, the order makes no sense whatsoever. I have yet to find a good reason for that clearly election-compromising order which now serves Georgia's illegal ballot-harvesters so well now.

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Georgia appears to have a poorly run election system and may need different supervision in the future.  Those responsible for ignoring the law and destroying evidence should be held accountable.