A top elections official in Georgia dismissed allegations that officials used secret "suitcases" of fraudulent votes to ensure that President-elect Joe Biden won the Peach State.
In particular, Gabriel Sterling, Georgia's voting system implementation manager, reacted to a state Senate hearing on Thursday in which election night surveillance video from State Farm Arena in Atlanta was introduced, and attorney Jacki Pick claimed that election officials waited until oversight staffers went home to uncover chests containing thousands of ballots for Biden.
Sterling told Newsmax on Friday that the video does not show what the Trump team claims.
“We’ve had our investigators watch all, many, several hours of it yesterday and what essentially happened is, and we knew about part of this on election night itself, around 10:15-10:20, ther's two groups of people in this room that are working," Sterling stated. "There are cutters, the people who are opening the envelopes, and there's the ones who are scanning.”
At that point, the cutters had finished their job and started to leave, he continued. Others, including the scanners, started to leave as well, but were then directed to stay.
The election monitors left, and they claim that they were told to do so by officials, although that cannot be ascertained because the video, which caught the interaction, did not record the audio, Sterling said.
Sterling said that there was an "82-minute" period where there was no election monitor in the room; however, there is footage of that entire time. He also dismissed the notion that the containers the ballots were in were suitcases.
“Those aren't 'suitcases,' those are regular absentee carriers used in dozens of counties across this state," he added. "That’s how they bring those in. Nothing was brought in without the monitors there. So everything was there. There was nothing new brought in. We didn’t see somebody wheeling stuff into the room.”
Rick Barron, the Fulton County elections director, gave a similar explanation during an interview with 11Alive, a local NBC affiliate, on Friday.
Despite Sterling and Barron's attempt to push back on the allegations surrounding the surveillance video, the president and his allies quickly promoted the video, claiming that it was proof of wrongdoing.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who has faced a backlash from the president and his allies for his handling of the election, reiterated how he wants a signature audit from his secretary of state after seeing the video.
Biden won 306 Electoral College votes and is set to be sworn in on Jan. 20. President Trump, who refuses to concede the race, claims the election was stolen due to widespread voter fraud and other issues. His legal team is relying on a patchwork of lawsuits and convincing GOP-led state legislatures to overturn the results of the contest, but so far, the team has seen little success.