Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is pursuing the taking over of Fulton County’s elections operations, claiming that the Atlanta-area county has habitually failed to count votes.
Raffensperger, a Republican who has been frequently criticized by former President Donald Trump after the 2020 election, stated that he will invoke Georgia’s recent election integrity law that allows Georgia’s Elections Board to take over elections operations in localities that have issues with counting ballots.
The law, SB 202, was approved by the Georgia state Legislature and signed into law earlier this year. The Department of Justice announced last week that it will file a civil rights lawsuit against the measure.
Raffensperger was asked during the podcast about whether he would recommend that the Elections Board take over Fulton County by using the law.
“Yes is the answer to your question,” he said.
“With SB 202, habitually failing counties can—actually the state election board can come in and replace the election director and really take over the governance of that.”
Raffensperger also noted that he sought the ouster of a top Fulton County elections official, but the county declined to do so.
During the podcast interview, Raffensperger cited a report released by elections monitor Carter Jones in June that detailed alleged irregularities at a Fulton County vote-counting center in November 2020.
“What [Jones] said was it’s all this mismanagement,” he said, noting that county “mismanagement” and “dysfunction” erodes the public’s trust in the election system and “really lends itself to conspiracy theories.”
“So it needs to be fixed. It’s our largest county.”
Representatives from Fulton County didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
His announcement comes in the midst of an investigation into Fulton County election forms regarding ballots’ chain of custody that allegedly went missing.
Amid claims that Fulton County can’t “produce all ballot drop box transfer documents,” Raffensperger said in a June 14 statement that his office is investigating the matter.
Other counties that have failed to follow the state’s rules and regulations regarding drop boxes are also being reviewed, he said.
“We maintain a large quantity of documents and researching our files from last year to produce the ballot transfer forms. We have been in communication with the secretary of state’s office to update them of our progress on this matter.”
