Georgia election officials on Friday rebuffed claims by Trump’s legal team that surveillance video out of Fulton County showed voter fraud.
“The Secretary of State’s Office was aware that Fulton County scanning had continued during the period captured in the video presented at the Senate hearing," a spokesperson for the secretary of state's office said Friday afternoon. "This office dispatched an investigator and notified the independent monitor appointed by the State Election Board who both observed scanning until it was halted for the night around midnight."
Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, at a hearing before Georgia’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee Thursday, showed video surveillance footage of election workers in Fulton County rolling containers from underneath a table at the State Farm Arena where ballot-counting took place on Nov. 3.
Fox News challenged the claim as well.
"I just got off the phone with a senior source in the Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office, a Republican, who tells me that they had a designated observer at that spot all night, the entire time, and they've seen this video, they're familiar with the claims, and they said that they're simply not true," journalist Griff Jenkins said in a report on Friday morning. "The suggestion that Georgia vote counters were sent home and ballots were brought in in suitcases, also not true.”
Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling said the clip shows “normal ballot processing.”
"The 90-second video of election workers at State Farm arena, purporting to show fraud was watched in its entirety (hours) by [Georgia Secretary of State] investigators. Shows normal ballot processing," Sterling tweeted, along with a link to a "fact check" from the website Lead Stories.
The footage was immediately impactful.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp called Friday for a signature audit after the footage surfaced along with the allegation that it proved election fraud.
Trump and his legal surrogate have filed several lawsuits in key battleground states alleging voter fraud and looking to upend tallies that show the president losing to Joe Biden.
Indeed, on Friday Trump filed suit in Georgia claiming the election process was filled with “significant systemic misconduct, fraud and other irregularities” resulting in “many thousands of illegal votes” being cast and counted.
The suit was filed in Georgia on behalf of Trump and David Shafer, a presidential elector pledged to the president. The suit named Raffensperger and a slew of local elections officials.