Go figure [Federalist] A member of the State Election Board revealed that the ’tapes’ used to verify that ballot counters started their counts at zero may be missing.
A 2020 election scandal in Fulton County, Georgia’s most populous county, continues to grow with new details revealed in a State Election Board (SEB) meeting last Wednesday — and now, a week later, with an FBI raid seeking election documents from the county.
Fulton County was notoriously plagued with issues like long lines and voting machine malfunctions in the 2020 primary election, problems The New York Times described as "a full-scale meltdown." The problems continued through November’s Election Day and beyond, prompting concerns about votes being counted without proper supervision, among other things. The county’s repeated failures in 2020 so degraded trust in Fulton County’s ability to administer elections that the election director was forced to resign.
Now, members of the State Election Board have raised new concerns about the county’s administration of the 2020 election, revealing in last week’s meeting that the "tapes" used to verify that ballot counters started their counts at zero may be missing.
When a ballot scanner is used to count ballots, election officials must start the process by printing and signing a "zero tape," which confirms the count started at zero. After counting ballots on the ballot scanner, officials must print and sign a closing tape, which confirms the final vote tally from that machine. In December, an attorney for Fulton County admitted that the county failed to sign off on more than 100 "tabulator tapes" — equivalent to about 315,000 votes — from early voting in the 2020 election. That admission was prompted by a complaint that was investigated by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
But in the course of investigating that complaint about the "closing tapes," state investigators also looked for the "zero tapes," and were unable to find any from Fulton County’s early voting period in the 2020 general election, SEB member Jan Johnston said during the board meeting.
"The zero tape is like the beginning of a trip odometer," Johnston explained. "You’re gonna take a trip, you’re gonna open the polls, and you set your trip odometer to zero. You look in the ballot box, and there are no ballots in the ballot box. That’s the open zero tape. You have the election, and at the end of the day, you print out a closing tape. That is the end of the trip odometer."
The "zero tape" also helps ensure that there are no previous ballots left on the tabulator, such as votes from a previous election or a test run, that could be counted. It helps avoid situations like one that happened in a primary election in Montana in 2024, when officials discovered more votes were counted than voters physically cast. The county clerk said she believed the votes were leftover sample data that had not been cleared.
Fulton County’s admission in December came in response to a 2022 complaint by election integrity activist David Cross. Raffensperger’s office investigated the complaint, but did not present the completed investigation to the board until October, Johnston said during the meeting.
While reviewing the investigators’ report, the board became concerned that the investigators apparently were unable to find any of Fulton County’s 148 early voting "zero tapes."
To the board’s knowledge, Fulton County turned over "zero signed or unsigned opening tapes" from early voting, Johnston said last week.