ATLANTA — The Fulton County Board of Elections is conducting a meeting this morning, at which they are expected to go over preparations for the January Senate runoff races and may further explain the State Farm Arena video that has become a thorny point of contention for the county.
The meeting began at 10 a.m., and 11Alive will stream it in the video player above and on our YouTube channel.
Officials have offered explanations for the surveillance video, which showed election workers counting votes late on election night after observers and media had left.
The video went wildly viral among those supporters of President Donald Trump, who believe he has actually won the 2020 election after it was presented at a Georgia state Senate hearing last week by Rudy Giuliani.
Two main points of contention emerged from it - whether Republican election observers had been told to leave before the counting resumed, and why "suitcases" of ballots were removed from under a table to be counted after they left.
State officials, as well as Fulton Elections Director Rick Barron, have said the Republican observers were not made to leave. By Barron's account, workers who were responsible for opening envelopes and done with their work began leaving that evening, and other workers doing the counting thought it was time for them to leave, as well. He has said when he learned the counters were cleaning up, he asked them to resume their work.
Both 11Alive journalists on site that night independently confirmed that they were not told to leave, but they were told counting was done for the night.
Barron has said ballot-scanning fully resumed by 11:15 p.m. on election night after work stopped around 10 p.m., and that a State Election Board monitor was back on-site by about a half-hour later, and an investigator from the Secretary of State's Office on-site about an hour later.
As for the ballots under the table, state officials have said those were normal ballot containers and that the counting seen in the video was "normal ballot processing."
Fulton County ultimately voted to certify their results last week narrowly, 3-2. The board's two Republican members, who had expressed more concern in last week's meeting about the video, voted against certifying.
A Democratic member of the board, Aaron Johnson, suggested that at this week's meeting, the people from State Farm Arena that night could be brought on to more fully explain what happened. It's not clear if that will happen today.