A video of an election worker during the Georgia machine recount that allegedly revealed fraud in the 2020 election is being debunked. Gwinnett County Election spokesperson, Joe Sorenson, claims that all it shows is an election worker performing a routine part of the process, according to election officials.
“It has all gone too far. All of it,” Gabriel Sterling, who oversees Georgia’s voting system, said at a press conference on Dec. 1 in which he called on President Donald Trump and other elected officials to condemn violent rhetoric aimed at election workers. “A 20-something tech in Gwinnett County today has death threats and a noose put out today saying he should be hung for treason. … It has to stop,” Sterling said.
Sterling was referring to an employee of Dominion Voting Systems who is seen in the viral video.
Just eviscerating words from Sterling.
A QAnon-affiliated conspiracy targeted a young Dominion tech who was transferring data on a flash drive as part of the recount process that President Trump requested. https://t.co/sh13uQ6o5D pic.twitter.com/kTZPxaFj5S
— stephen fowler covers Georgia’s election! (@stphnfwlr) December 1, 2020
The video appears to have been recorded by a recount observer and was shared on Nov. 30 by Ron Watkins, who has been peddling election fraud claims related to Dominion to his 328,000 Twitter followers.
Watch Dominion Representatives at Gwinnett County Election Central tabulation room suspiciously operate the batch adjudication system.
They are highlighting adjudication batches up for review and either deleting or accepting batches WITHOUT REVIEWING.https://t.co/A6o0FY82XU— Ron (@CodeMonkeyZ) December 3, 2020
But the video shows no such thing according to Sorenson who spoke with FactCheck.org.
First of all, the person in the video wasn’t responsible for certifying election results. “Certification can only be done by the election board,” explains Sorenson. The Dominion contractor was there to help with the tabulating process.
As for what the video shows him doing, the worker was conducting a routine check of the number of ballots that had been recounted, Sterling, the voting system implementation manager in Georgia, explained in a phone interview with FactCheck.org. He was using a USB drive to transfer a report about a recently counted batch of ballots to a computer equipped with a program to read it.
“This is just part of the recount process,” Sterling said, estimating that the procedure shown in the video might be done every hour or two.
We don’t know exactly when the video was recorded or by whom, but it appears to have been during the state’s recent recount. The cordoned-off section of the room where the recording was made was open to the public, Sorenson said.
Also, Sterling noted that the video appears to have been taken during the recount of the votes, not the original tabulation. So, if a worker manipulated the vote count at that point, there would have been a discrepancy in the numbers.