Fulton County Spending $600 an Hour to Avoid Independent Monitor Over Its Elections

Voting just began in Georgia, and the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections is busy paying an attorney $600 an hour to try to block independent monitors from getting to observe the count. The Fulton Election Board filed a lawsuit against the State Election Board for their proposal to add two additional – and actually independent – monitors to observe the 2024 voting and counting process.

The only problem: the Fulton Elections Board never voted to hire the attorney, Michael W. Tyler, or file a lawsuit against the State Election Board. This decision was made unilaterally by Sherri Allen, the chair of the elections board.

Wow!

Commissioner Bridget Thorne says Fulton Board of Elections filed a lawsuit against the State Election Board WITHOUT a vote!

Fulton County refuses to discuss why a lawyer was hired (at $600 an hour!) to sue SEB to block additional monitors for 2024

What are they trying to… pic.twitter.com/fZ6ba7yhMR

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) October 16, 2024

Fulton County Commissioner Bridget Thorne attempted to have the matter discussed at the commissioners meeting on Wednesday, but failed to secure a supermajority to add the item to the agenda. Thorne said the lawsuit was filed "without approval by the actual Board of Elections members.”

"We basically have an unelected official making the decision to spend $600 per hour for outside counsel that we did not approve,” she said.

Why does Fulton County have a monitoring team in the first place? The historic State Election Board case SEB2023-025, which proved over 20,000 unsubstantiated votes were inserted into the machine recount in 2020. The Secretary of State’s office attempted to brush the complaint aside at the May 7 State Election Board meeting, but admitted there were thousands of duplicate ballots in the recount, while trying to avoid the fact that they were counted. In trying to brush the fraud from 2020 aside, former State Election Board Member Ed Lindsey made plans with the Secretary of State’s office and Fulton County to resolve the case before its findings were even presented to the board. The plan was to have a "mutually agreeable” monitoring team and a letter of reprimand, however, the agreement was contingent on the State Election Board voting on a team at its July meeting. This never happened. Fulton County unilaterally appointed its own team – led by none other than Brad Raffensperger’s general counsel during 2020, Ryan Germany, an election fraud denier who threw his own hat into the monitoring ring to make sure what happens in Fulton County stays in Fulton County.

To recap: one of the most corrupt election offices in the country appointed its own team to monitor its elections led by the same people who deny proven election fraud happened in 2020, which is why there is a monitoring team in the first place. The fake monitoring team is already refusing to monitor things like test ballots. The one silver lining is because Fulton County refused to cooperate on a real monitoring team, the State Election Board voted to subpoena all the election records from 2020 to finish its investigation into SEB2023-025.

Dr. Janice Johnson, now the vice chair of the Georgia State Election Board, had sought to add real outside observers to Fulton County, including Heather Honey, an independent expert on elections who has uncovered irrefutable evidence of law violations in multiple states affecting the counting of hundreds of thousands of votes during the 2020 Election.

Fulton County is staunchly opposed to real observers, going so far to break their own rules to hire a high-priced taxpayer-funded attorney to stop it from happening.

If Georgia elections are so safe, so secure, and so accurate, why are they so terrified of anyone seeing the results?

This includes blocking its own election board members like Julie Adams, who had to sue to get access to her own county’s records. Of course, Judge Robert McBurney, the same judge who presided over the bogus grand jury investigation into President Trump, just recently ruled she can have access, but she has to certify no matter what, even in the event of "fraud or systemic error.”

McBurney (are there only two judges in Georgia?) also ruled against a critical State Election Board rule requiring the hand counting of ballots after the polls close on Election Day, a basic reconciliation process that should be done in every jurisdiction in America.

They don’t want you to hand count, they don’t want you to see the results, they don’t want any objective observer to watch them…it’s almost as if they’re going to cheat.