Report: Georgia Poll Workers Who Reported Irregularities Have Been Terminated
Two Georgia poll workers who came forward with separate credible claims of voting irregularities during last month’s election have been terminated, and will not be permitted to participate in next month’s Senate runoff elections, according to a report.
Bridget Thorne and Susan Voyles each told stories of bizarre happenings in Fulton County, which is now the epicenter for voting fraud and irregularity allegations in the Peach State. According to Epoch Media Group, they’ve been rewarded for telling those stories by being fired without much of an explanation.
One would think that Fulton County’s election officials would be toeing the line at this point, considering they’re already being scrutinized by many voters who aren’t buying the election results.
One would also be wrong.
Dwight Brower, an elections consultant for the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections, has created a larger public relations nightmare by apparently letting both women go, just weeks before a pair of Senate runoff elections that will decide which party controls the U.S. Senate.
Brower reportedly informed both whistleblowers in letters that they won’t be around to see any funny business — or anything at all — at the polls next month.
“There are many factors (management skills, performance, actions, behavior, etc.) considered prior to making reappointments for each primary or election. Unfortunately, a decision has been made to not reappoint you in a poll management or other poll positions in Fulton County,” Brower wrote, according to Epoch Media Group.
Oddly, Voyles seems like exactly the kind of person you’d want handling ballots, as she has been doing so for 20 years. Likewise with Thorne, who is a trained voting technician.
Could their firings be in any way related to their accounts of what they said they saw in Georgia’s most populated, heavily Democratic county during the election? We can only speculate, but it looks bad.
Thorne said she was working at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, the site of that mysterious water pipe break which halted vote counting on Nov. 3 and was later reported to be nothing more than a leaky toilet, Fox News reported.
Thorne was in that arena on the night of the election and said she saw mail-in ballots being handed “haphazardly.”
“When [the mail-in ballots] came in from the warehouse, they were haphazardly treated by anybody who wanted to dump the ballots out of the scanner tabulators,” Thorne told Fox News earlier this month, “and there was no oath administered. There weren’t two people present. People were just dumping them in suitcases and then leaving the suitcases on the floor and taking a break for dinner or just quitting the job.”
“I know how precious a ballot is. It’s someone’s vote and it was very disturbing for me to see that,” she also said.
Voyles, like Thorne, had her own story to tell about how disturbed she felt by what she saw. The woman recalled coming across “pristine” and irregular ballots that went almost entirely to Biden in the Fulton County city of Sandy Springs.
Those ballots had “a difference in the texture of the paper — it was if they were intended for absentee use but had not been used for that purposes,” she has said, claiming there “was a difference in the feel.”
Voyles, according to The Epoch Times, also said the ballots in question “included a slight depressed pre-fold so they could be easily folded and unfolded for use in scanning machines.”
“There were no markings on the ballots to show where they had come from, or where they had been processed,” she said. “These stood out.”
“By my estimate in observing these ballots, approximately 98 percent constituted votes for Joseph Biden.”
Georgia recount worker with 20 years of experience handling ballots described an odd batch that stood out. Pristine sheets with no markings and 98% for Biden.
Source: https://t.co/w9H3llLwJ8 pic.twitter.com/GBUjAvHdNS
— Ivan Pentchoukov (@IvanPentchoukov) November 18, 2020
Both women are now out of a job with very little by way of explanation. The optics of it are of course terrible for Fulton County. So bad, in fact, that even Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger felt compelled to say something about it.
“I condemn in the strongest terms the decision by Fulton County elections officials to fire two poll managers purely for raising concerns about the November elections,” he said in a statement.
“Though we have found no credible evidence of widespread fraud, it is important that individuals can raise their voice when they believe they have seen wrongdoing. Retribution against whistle blowers poses a threat to the continued strength and vibrancy of our democracy.”
Election officials in Fulton County had arguably already lost the confidence of many voters thanks to a complete lack of transparency concerning vote tabulating.
Now, it’s fair to ask whether two veteran poll workers-turned-whistleblowers were fired by the county for daring to question what they perceived as corruption.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
