A 2020 election scandal in Fulton County, Georgia’s most populous county, continues to grow with new details revealed in a State Election Board (SEB) meeting last Wednesday — and now, a week later, with an FBI raid seeking election documents from the county.
Fulton County was notoriously plagued with issues like long lines and voting machine malfunctions in the 2020 primary election, problems The New York Times described as “a full-scale meltdown.” The problems continued through November’s Election Day and beyond, prompting concerns about votes being counted without proper supervision, among other things. The county’s repeated failures in 2020 so degraded trust in Fulton County’s ability to administer elections that the election director was forced to resign.
Now, members of the State Election Board have raised new concerns about the county’s administration of the 2020 election, revealing in last week’s meeting that the “tapes” used to verify that ballot counters started their counts at zero may be missing.
When a ballot scanner is used to count ballots, election officials must start the process by printing and signing a “zero tape,” which confirms the count started at zero. After counting ballots on the ballot scanner, officials must print and sign a closing tape, which confirms the final vote tally from that machine. In December, an attorney for Fulton County admitted that the county failed to sign off on more than 100 “tabulator tapes” — equivalent to about 315,000 votes — from early voting in the 2020 election. That admission was prompted by a complaint that was investigated by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
But in the course of investigating that complaint about the “closing tapes,” state investigators also looked for the “zero tapes,” and were unable to find any from Fulton County’s early voting period in the 2020 general election, SEB member Jan Johnston said during the board meeting.
“The zero tape is like the beginning of a trip odometer,” Johnston explained. “You’re gonna take a trip, you’re gonna open the polls, and you set your trip odometer to zero. You look in the ballot box, and there are no ballots in the ballot box. That’s the open zero tape. You have the election, and at the end of the day, you print out a closing tape. That is the end of the trip odometer.”
The “zero tape” also helps ensure that there are no previous ballots left on the tabulator, such as votes from a previous election or a test run, that could be counted. It helps avoid situations like one that happened in a primary election in Montana in 2024, when officials discovered more votes were counted than voters physically cast. The county clerk said she believed the votes were leftover sample data that had not been cleared.
Fulton County’s admission in December came in response to a 2022 complaint by election integrity activist David Cross. Raffensperger’s office investigated the complaint, but did not present the completed investigation to the board until October, Johnston said during the meeting.
While reviewing the investigators’ report, the board became concerned that the investigators apparently were unable to find any of Fulton County’s 148 early voting “zero tapes.”
To the board’s knowledge, Fulton County turned over “zero signed or unsigned opening tapes” from early voting, Johnston said last week.
Part of the problem is a lack of clarity on whom Fulton County was supposed to deliver the original “zero tapes” to during the 2020 election. Some members of the board are under the impression that the “zero tapes” should have been delivered to the secretary of state, but Georgia regulations are unclear.
According to Johnston, the secretary of state’s investigators even “sought the zero tapes from the secretary of state’s office” — where there would presumably be a paper trail if the office had ever received them from Fulton County — but the secretary of state’s office was “unable to produce” them.
The Federalist asked Raffensperger’s office if Fulton County ever gave his office the “zero tapes” from early voting, either at the time of the 2020 election or later in response to the Secretary of State’s investigation. A spokesman for Raffensperger said he was “not finding anything even close to” a requirement that Fulton County send the “zero tapes” to the secretary of state’s office as part of the normal election administration process, but did not respond to follow-up inquiries about whether the county sent them or not.
The regulation governing early voting says election workers shall attach the zero tape to a form that “shall be returned to the election superintendent at the close of the advance voting period.” (In Fulton County, the Fulton County Elections Board operates as the elections superintendent.) But the forms used in 2020, which are designed to be used with carbonless paper to create multiple copies in various coded colors, instruct election workers to “attach zero tapes.”
“You Are Making Three Copies,” the form instructs. “WHITE sheet to Secretary of State … PINK sheet to Clerk of Superior Court/City Clerk … YELLOW sheet to Superintendent … GOLDENROD sheet to Registrar.”
The Federalist asked Nadine Williams, the Fulton County elections director who chairs the Fulton County Elections Board, whether the county possesses any or all of the “zero tapes” from early voting or whether the county ever provided the secretary of state or his investigators with those “zero tapes,” either in November 2020 or since then. Fulton County acknowledged receipt of The Federalist’s comment request and promised to “provide an update if one becomes available” but did not answer the question. The Federalist also reached out to the clerk of Fulton County Superior Court to ask whether the Superior Court received the tapes, but did not receive a response.
State law only requires the secretary of state to retain election documents for 24 months past the election, and local governments only retain “records related to the process of computing, tallying, and canvassing the vote” for two years, according to the Georgia Archives.
But, as Johnston noted in last week’s meeting, the complaint was submitted in early 2022, “well within the 24-month period.”
On Wednesday, a week after the SEB meeting, the FBI executed a search warrant at the Fulton County election office. According to election attorney Cleta Mitchell, the search warrant included “zero tapes” from the 2020 general election.
Meanwhile, the board is left with few answers. It’s unclear whether the tapes ever made it out of Fulton County, if they were signed, or even if they exist at all. If they do exist, they may have been handled properly but thrown away in the years since 2020. They could even still be filed away somewhere, where investigators have been unable to track them down. No one seems able to provide a paper trail.
