Mass Destruction of Ballot Images – 374,000+ Fulton County; 1.7 Million Statewide; Court-Admitted (GA)

In response to a Request for Admissions filed in Curling v. Raffensperger, Fulton County expressly “Admitted” that it “did not preserve until the present time the majority of ballot images from in-person voting for the November 3, 2020 election original machine count.” The EOG Report documents the specific scope of destruction in Fulton County: 380,458 original in-person ballot images destroyed; all approximately 316,000 advance voting ballot images destroyed; and 132,286 of 148,318 absentee ballot SHA authentication files intentionally deleted. SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) files are cryptographic fingerprints that authenticate a digital ballot image against tampering – their deletion destroys the ability to verify that any surviving ballot image is unaltered. Statewide, VoterGA’s Open Records Act requests revealed that 74 of Georgia’s 159 counties failed to produce ballot images; 56 provided written admissions of non-preservation. The Secretary of State’s December 1, 2020 Official Elections Bulletin directed counties to preserve recount ballot images but conspicuously omitted any instruction to preserve original count ballot images – an asymmetric directive that is circumstantially consistent with intentional exclusion of the original count from preservation obligations.