The State Elections Board met recently behind closed doors to discuss pending litigation related to “ballot harvesting” in the 2020 General Election.
A political watchdog group claims to have evidence that volunteers delivered large stacks of absentee ballots in the election. The group says as many as 240 people may have been delivered ballots to polling places illegally. Georgia law expressly prohibits third parties from collecting, gathering or delivering absentee ballots, except in the case of immediate relatives.
Officials said the new subpoena powers will be used by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office to secure evidence from the election integrity group True the Vote, which filed a complaint in November saying it had acquired videotapes, a whistle blower’s admission and cell phone location records showing what appeared to be a widespread ballot harvesting operation in the November 2020 general election and January 2021 election runoff.
While the evidence would mean that the law had been broken, it is not clear that the outcome of the election would have been affected by the illegal ballots.
A famous Georgia case of alleged ballot harvesting was in the Chattooga County State Court Judge’s race in 2006. In that case, former State Court Judge Carlton Vines and local Attorney Albert Palmour were accused of being in possession of more than 300 absentee ballots and using a postal machine at Palmour’s office to mail the signed ballots. Vines agreed to step down from the bench to avoid further prosecution and Palmour agreed to pay $18,000 in fines to the state in that case.
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