THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY

[Rootilda]

You're like a sponge for any conspiracy that comes along, aren't you. You just thoughtlessly suck it all in.

Georgia election officials disputed a video promoted by President Donald Trump’s campaign as evidence of election fraud, saying the footage shows nothing but "normal ballot processing."

The surveillance video was introduced as proof of illegal activity by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his team during a Dec. 3 hearing with Georgia state legislators. The Trump campaign then circulated One America News Network’s live coverage of the event online.

Social media posts sharing the video were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

The posts claim the video footage shows election workers at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena telling election observers to leave, pulling suitcases filled with ballots from under a table, and illegally counting them with no observers present. "Smoking gun," one Facebook post said.

That interpretation is wrong, however. The footage doesn’t show any wrongdoing, said Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, in a Dec. 4 tweet.

"The 90 second video of election workers at State Farm arena, purporting to show fraud was watched in its entirety (hours) by @GaSecofState investigators," Sterling wrote, linking to a fact-check from Lead Stories. "Shows normal ballot processing."

Reporters for Lead Stories spoke with Sterling about the surveillance video. They also talked to Frances Watson, the Georgia secretary of state’s chief investigator, and an unidentified state election board monitor who was present in the room late on election night.

The ballots seen in the video were not in suitcases, the officials told Lead Stories. They were in standard ballot containers. And there was nothing illegal about the way they were processed.

In reality, the ballots had been removed from their envelopes and processed while news media personnel and observers were still in the room. Nobody was ever told to leave, Watson told Lead Stories. But some observers exited after the election workers responsible for opening the envelopes and verifying the ballots had finished their job and started taking off for the night.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/20...t-observe/