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Voter analyst claims thousands of Georgians voted in the wrong county

By WSBTV.com News Staff
By WSBTV.com News Staff

There are new claims of election fraud in Georgia again. The latest complaints involve allegations of illegal voters and mistakes in tabulating votes.

Channel 2 Investigative reporter Justin Gray took a close look at both.

The first concern brought to the secretary of state’s office alleges that people voted in the wrong counties. The second involves continued allegations about how Fulton County counted its votes.

Election officials at both the state and county level continue to maintain none of this would have affected the ultimate outcome of the presidential election.

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Gray filed a Georgia Open Records Law request to get the list of more than 10,000 names sent to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger by voter data analyst Mark Davis.

Davis said his data shows that thousands of Georgians voted illegally in the wrong county in 2020.

“It literally could have called into doubt the election. And I know it sounds like a technicality but it’s actually not it’s a whole lot of laws that were broken,” Davis said.

“I can’t fathom why I would be on that list,” said Fulton County resident Mark Buerkle.

Buerkle was shocked when Gray showed him his name on the list.

He said he did move from Gwinnett County to Fulton but turned in his Fulton ballot at a Fulton drop box.

“The fact is I live here, I voted here, I voted in this county. It should be legit and there shouldn’t be any questions,” Buerkle said.

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Jon Stout is also on the list and admits he did vote in the wrong county after moving just a few houses down the street but crossing the DeKalb County line and not being able to update his driver’s license during the pandemic.

“Just a few blocks we can walk to our old house,” Stoudt said.

Gray asked Stoudt if he felt like he did anything wrong in the process.

“No, I don’t. I figured it was a statewide election and crossing over in the counties it didn’t occur to me I did something wrong,” Stoudt said.

Gabriel Sterling, the chief operations officer of the secretary of state’s office said federal laws limiting election list maintenance in an election year means this happens.

“The reality is these are normal, everyday Georgians who are just trying to exercise their right to vote in a very weird year,” Sterling said.

“If you think through the reason the law exists, it’s to keep people from voting for candidates who don’t represent them,” Davis said.

Former president Trump this week also pushed separate new allegations about Fulton County election problems.

The plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging Fulton’s absentee ballot count claim some ballots were double scanned in the original count and they said these tally sheets show evidence of miscounts in the hand recount.

But election officials said the double counts were corrected in the certified results and that the hand recount was also not used for the certified election results, the computer count was.

“The frustrating thing is you have people that are intentionally conflating and obscuring things and ginning people over things that are regular elections processes,” Sterling said.

Still Sterling’s boss, Raffensperger, tweeted “Fulton County’s continued failures have gone on long enough with no accountability.”

Fulton County Chairman Robb Pitts said in a statement: “Allegations of intentional wrongdoing or fraud remain untrue and baseless. The votes have been counted three times.”

Fulton County told Gray there’s only so much they can say about those allegations because this is being litigated in court.

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Raffensperger backs new voter law despite it stripping his office of some of its power The new law gives the state Election Board added power to take over any county election office for underperforming.

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