GOP Congressman: IT Technician ‘Effectively Wiped’ Election Data From Servers in Fulton County

Georgia secretary of state spokesman: 'Nothing to do with servers being wiped'

A Fulton County employee moves voting machine transporters to be stored at the the Fulton County Election Preparation Center in Atlanta, Ga., on Nov. 4, 2020. Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) highlighted alleged election irregularities in Georgia’s Fulton County in recent days, saying that a county election employee wiped a server clean.

Loudermilk told Newsmax that a judge over the weekend “basically impounded certain voting machines” to make sure that data wasn’t wiped.

But Loudermilk noted that “Fulton County effectively wiped its data because an IT technician which appears to be a county employee used the wrong server for the recount after Dominion told him not to use that server.”

He appeared to be referring to a server crash during the second recount in Georgia. A spokesperson for Fulton County told The Epoch Times that a “newly purchased Dominion mobile server crashed” on Sunday, referring to a Dominion Voting Systems machine. “Technicians from Dominion have been dispatched to resolve the issue,” the spokesperson said.

The crash delayed the recount in Fulton County, which had processed 88 percent of the ballots that were cast at the time of the crash.

“And just in case there was a problem they backed up the data but they backed it up on the same server that crashed. Now we’re looking at do we even have the data on the Fulton County servers. We don’t know,” Loudermilk added.

Fulton County, which leans heavily Democratic, includes the state capitol and largest city, Atlanta. Loudermilk represents Georgia’s 11th Congressional District, including some of Atlanta’s northern suburbs.

Fulton County has not yet responded to a request for comment regarding Loudermilk’s claims.

Secretary of State spokesman Gabriel Sterling said that claims that the server was wiped clean are not accurate.

“It has nothing to do with servers being wiped. Nobody directed that. That’s just a lie. It’s made up out of whole cloth. And it is the kind of stuff we are having to deal with,” Sterling said on Monday. Sterling said that Fulton County did a poor job in informing the public, leading to what he termed as “rampant speculation.” He also said Fulton County only had one technician on hand.

“Every other county has managed to pull this off pretty well. Fulton County on this one particular thing didn’t get it right,” Sterling said.

In a press conference on Tuesday, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the crash happened because a county employee “backed up the election project on the server itself instead of on an external backup.”

“Because of that decision, they lost the ability to upload hundreds of thousands of scanned ballots,” he added.

Fulton County told The Epoch Times that the Dominion server was “operated in accordance with the Secretary of State’s published guidelines.” The county added that it expects the recount to be completed by the Dec. 3 deadline.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.