Post spreads misleading claim about 'missing' ballot images in Fulton County | Fact check

Hannah Hudnall, USA TODAY
Updated ·4 min read

The claim: More than 380,000 ballot images missing from 2020 presidential election in Fulton County

A May 12 Instagram video (direct link, archive link) shows a Georgia election board member asking in a meeting why 380,761 ballot images from Election Day are not available.

"Over 380,000 ballot images missing in Fulton County," reads the on-screen text.

The post garnered more than 6,000 likes in 10 days. Other versions of the claim were shared on Instagram, Facebook and X, formerly Twitter.

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Our rating: False

It's inaccurate to describe ballot images as "missing" since ballot images weren't required to be kept under state law at the time. Ballot images scanned on Election Day were indeed not retained, but the state retained ballot images from a recount in addition to the original hard-copy ballots. The ballots from the 2020 election have been recounted several times in Georgia, and the results have been confirmed to be accurate.

Wrong to describe 380,000 ballots as 'missing'

The clip shown in the post is from a May 7 Georgia Election Board meeting, in which Board Member Janice Johnston asked about more than 380,000 supposedly missing ballot images from Election Day 2020 in Fulton County. The Instagram post in question echoes her claim but refers more broadly to ballot images being missing, rather than narrowing the claim to Election Day.

But election officials said there are no such "missing" ballot images.

The Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections acknowledged in a February 2022 court filing that the majority of the ballot images captured during the initial machine count of votes on Election Day were not retained. Ballot images are captured as the machine scans and counts each ballot.

But that doesn't mean the ballot images are "missing" as the post asserts. They simply weren't kept because the law at the time didn't require them to be kept.

"In 2020, ballot images were unaddressed in state law," said Robert Sinners, a spokesperson for the Georgia Secretary of State. "Ballot images were added to records retention by law in 2021, but claims of missing or deleted 'ballots' remain false."

The presence or absence of images doesn't affect the count since the county retained the original ballots.

"We have the paper ballots," Charlene McGowan, general counsel under Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, noted during the election board meeting where ballot images were questioned. "There are no missing ballots. ... We have hand-counted every single ballot."

Sinners said the accuracy of the state's election results was confirmed by several previous recounts.

"Two additional reviews of the statewide tallies confirmed that the 2020 election results in Georgia were fair and accurate," Sinners said. "Administrative errors in a county conducting that review do not invalidate an election, despite the baseless claims from election deniers."

And the county still has ballot images in addition to the physical ballots. McGowan noted in the meeting that images from the machine recount of the 2020 Fulton County vote were subpoenaed, and 518,000 were received. That is nearly 99% of the roughly 525,000 total votes cast in Fulton County, according to the state's hand-counted audit.

The Georgia Election Board voted at the meeting to reprimand Fulton County "for violating state law while conducting a recount of the 2020 presidential election" and to appoint an independent monitor for the 2024 election, according to Georgia Public Broadcasting.

State election officials also determined that mistakes made by election workers in 2020 would not have changed the election's outcome.

Fact check: Post falsely compares time to count votes in Georgia primaries, 2020 election

USA TODAY has previously debunked numerous false claims about election fraud in Georgia during the 2020 presidential election.

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: No, 380,000 ballot images not 'missing' in Fulton County | Fact check