Cobb Reporter

A local elections authority is being questioned after employees were filmed shredding documents. 

“None of these items are relevant to the election or the re-tally,” said Elections Director Janine Eveler.  “Everything of consequence, including the ballots, absentee ballot applications with signatures, and anything else used in the count or re-tally remains on file.  After an out-of-context video was shared on social media we contacted state officials to reassure them this was a routine clean-up operation and they could come to inspect our stored materials if they wished.”

The county listed all documents being destroyed on its website. 

Lin Wood, a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the election, shared the video, which was shot by a witness who identified herself as Susan Knox.

“Nov. the 20th Friday morning. I am watching all of these ballots being shredded now. Unbelievable. I’ll just move up and see what else is going out. Yep. Here we go. What are they shredding? Massive amounts of ballots right there going out,” she said in the video.  

Wood accompanied the video with a tweet. 

“Looks to me like they may be destroying election documents in Cobb County, GA. What do you think? #FightBack Against Election Crimes,” Wood said in the tweet. 

Wood is an attorney based in Atlanta. He filed a lawsuit on behalf of President Donald Trump alleging that Joe Biden’s victory was because of fraud.

Wood filed a subpoena to produce documents and information in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on Nov. 23 against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. 

Wood is asking for any recordings of the State Farm Arena in Atlanta from midnight on Nov. 3 until midnight on Nov. 5, as well as storage media, deleted versions of recordings, any documents related to plumbing issues during those times.

The Cobb County government issued a news release regarding the allegations of shredding, saying the shredding was mailing labels with voter information that was incorrect or had been printed too many times; regular and third party envelopes with voter information; copies of outdated or changed procedures; copies of applications printed from OnBase; reports used for check-off lists; sticky notes; printouts of old emails; applications copied for an upcoming local election that was moved to a different day; duplicates of faxed applications; and white privacy envelopes. 

Douglas Jones, an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Iowa, has mentioned his dislike for how the ballots were done for this election. He noted to Peach Tree Times that the ballot-marking devices that were used for the election were known to be problematic last year. 

Jones told the news media he worried about the ballot-marking devices, saying that the ballots have QR codes and that those can’t be read by the human eye. He believes the United States also needs minimal standards for federal elections that are across the board.

Harri Hursti, a Finnish hacking expert, has shown that it is possible to hack Diebold Optical Scan voting machines in the past. He calls his test the Hursti Hack.  

One previous candidate for Jefferson Parish Council in Jefferson Parish, La., in 1995 participated in the Hursti Hack, where it was shown that the machines could be hacked.

Susan Bernecker didn’t win in her race, and when she and others went to tour the voting machines, she discovered that when she would select her name on the voting machine, it didn’t always select her name.