County vote certifications, a federal judge’s denial of a temporary restraining order to deny Georgia’s certification of the Nov. 3rd presidential election and more voter irregularities are part of the latest drama involving the Donald Trump-Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign.
Election numbers to be certified today are the totals from all 159 counties. Once the Secretary of State’s office certifies these election results, the losing Trump campaign has two business days to request a recount since the margin remains within 0.5%. That recount would be done using the controversial Dominion scanners that read and tally the votes– and all this would be paid for by the counties.
TRO loses; lawyers to bring new case next week
Federal Judge Steven Grimberg yesterday dismissed a lawsuit by attorney Lin Wood seeking a temporary restraining order (TRO) to halt the certification of Nov. 3rd election results and to compel another hand recount of Georgia’s 5 million-plus ballots. The judge said there was no proof that plaintiff Wood, a registered Fulton County voter, was “harmed” by irregularities within Georgia’s election system. “To halt the certification at literally the 11th hour would breed confusion,” Grimberg ruled. (Some attorneys contacted by InsiderAdvantage mused that Grimberg, while competent in some areas of the law, is a new, young judge weak in the area of constitutional law.)
Pro-Trump lawyers representing Wood alleged outside monitors trying to observe the recount were often kept at arms-length. They also attacked a legal settlement made last March by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger with Democrats making it harder to reject absentee ballots due to invalid signatures. That prompted the need, they argued, for a TRO to enable a new recount to scrutinize all signatures on absentee ballot envelopes.
Attorney Ray Smith, Wood and others who have been conferring with chief Trump lawyer Rudy Guiliani tell InsiderAdvantage they will be back in a Georgia federal courtroom next week with another lawsuit seeking to halt state certification due to irregularities and fraud.
Sandy Springs poll worker credible
Even though Grimberg ruled against the Wood restraining order, he admitted that testimony submitted via Zoom appearance by veteran Sandy Springs poll worker Suzi Voyles appeared credible. Voyles accepted the Fulton County Board of Elections’ request to carry out its hand recount and noticed a batch of ballots that were “pristine.” In other words, they were clean while at the same time noting “most of the ballots” she observed “had already been handled; they had been written on by people, and the edges were worn,” showing obvious signs of use.
The “pristine ballot” batch, she testified, showed “a difference in the texture of the paper— it was if they were intended for absentee use but had not been used for that purpose,” and there “was a difference in the feel.”
“These different ballots,” Voyles added, “included a slight depressed pre-fold so they could be easily folded and unfolded for use in scanning machines. There were no markings on the ballots to show where they had come from, or where they had been processed,” she said. “These stood out.”
“In my 20 years’ of experience of handling ballots,” she said, “I observed that the markings for the candidates on [the ‘pristine ballots’] were unusually uniform, perhaps even with a ballot-marking device. By my estimate in observing these ballots, approximately 98 percent constituted votes for Joseph Biden,” she said, adding that only about two ballots went for President Trump.
