The disbarment trial of former President Donald Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar, John Eastman, continued on Tuesday into its fifth week. Eastman’s attorney, Randy Miller, questioned expert witness Garland Favorito, co-founder of Voters Organized for Trusted Election Results in Georgia (VoterGA), who has extensive experience with electronic voting machines and investigating election fraud in Georgia.
Miller first discussed Favorito’s background with electronic voting machines, which goes back to 2002 and includes advising the Georgia General Assembly on them from 2006 to 2019. But much of the day was spent dealing with California bar attorney Duncan Carling objecting to his testimony and documents he was speaking about, Judge Yvette Roland immediately sustaining the objections and frequently objecting herself.
At one point, when Miller asked Favorito (pictured above) to discuss a report authored by the Georgia Legislature, which merely discussed testimony and evidence the officials had received, she asked Carling if he was going to object. Favorito said he relied upon it for his investigative work, but Carling still objected, stating that it could contain hearsay.
Roland refused to allow a report authored by the government’s own witness, Professor Alex Halderman, into evidence. Favorito said he’d relied on it for his own work and reports, but Roland said that wasn’t enough. The report is titled “Security Analysis of Georgia’s ImageCast X Ballot Marking Devices” and was submitted as an exhibit in the lawsuit Curling v. Raffensperger. That lawsuit was based on concerns about the use of electronic voting machines.
A former trial lawyer and evidence professor told The Arizona Sun Times that he thinks California Bar Disciplinary Judge Yvette Roland’s actions in the trial are so egregious that even the California Supreme Court — which is composed of all Democrats — may not uphold a disbarment. Instead, he thinks the court might issue a reprimand or some smaller amount of discipline. While serving on the bench, Roland donated to Democrats, including California Governor Gavin Newsom.
During the trial, Miller had Favorito discuss a report he prepared for the Georgia Legislature called “Refutation of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s False Election Claims.” The summary stated, “On January 6, 2021, Georgia Secretary of State (SOS) Brad Raffensperger wrote to Georgia Congressional members, Vice President Pence and leaders in U. S. Senate and House claiming that false allegations about the November 3, 2020 General Election in Georgia were being made by ‘the President and his allies.’ The contents of his letter dramatically contradicted findings by the Georgia General Assembly based on extensive first-hand testimony from three hearings.”
Favorito said he found that counties had destroyed 1.7 million ballot images in violation of the law, and the surveillance video of drop boxes for 181,000 ballots was deleted, violating the law.
The election fraud expert said he found extensive problems with the chain-of-custody record for ballots, such as the times and places didn’t make sense or were contradictory, and in some instances, the documentation was missing. He said this affected 106,000 ballots. He added that the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office (GASOS) didn’t bother requiring separate chain-of-custody records for ballots mailed in versus deposited in drop boxes.
Favorito said the GASOS “lied to the court” and “wiped servers” that had been “connected to the internet” to hide evidence. His report said, “The oral testimonies of witnesses on December 3, 2020, and subsequently, the written testimonies submitted by many others, provide ample evidence that the 2020 Georgia General Election was so compromised by systemic irregularities and voter fraud that it should not be certified.” That section went on, “[T]he August, 2019 U.S. District Court order in the Curling v. Raffensperger case found the SOS office to be ‘not credible.’”
Discussing an audit his group worked on, Favorito said he discovered 60 percent of the time the tally sheets were out of sync with ballot images, which he described as an “extremely high error rate.” Favorito said there was “flat-out fraud” where he found “7 falsified tally sheets with 850 Biden votes to 0 Trump votes” in his election audit.
When asked about the recount, also known as a canvass, that Georgia conducted, Favorito said it was not a real recount since it merely repeated what the machines did. “A machine recount reproduces the original result. It doesn’t recount the entire scope of the voting process, just the machine part,” he said.
Favorito said Georgia didn’t perform a real audit either; what they performed was what he called a “health check” since it merely verified that the software hadn’t been changed. He said the GASOS’s claim that it was an audit was a “blatantly false statement.” He criticized the GASOS for using the audit of Cobb County absentee ballot signatures to claim that the other counties had no problems. His report stated that “some other counties had many more instances of questionable ballots.” He said that “[t]he dramatic, inappropriate, statewide reduction in signature rejection rates from 3.47% in 2018 to .34 % in 2020 is evidence that the signature verification process was not properly done in many counties.”
Favorito said election officials started comparing the signatures of voters submitted with absentee ballots to signatures other than their voter registration signatures. In Arizona, a lawsuit has been allowed to proceed over this issue, with a judge denying a motion to dismiss and declaring that the law was violated.
Another section of Favorito’s report refuted the GASOS’s assertion that the agency was working with law enforcement “diligently investigating all claims of fraud or irregularities and continue to investigate.” Favorito said the agency declined to investigate despite the evidence turned over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation by True the Vote regarding “teams of 242 ballot harvesters” stuffing ballot drop boxes.
Favorito said Fulton County hired criminal attorneys to keep his team from looking at ballots. They sued, and a judge held they didn’t have standing. Eventually, he said the Georgia Supreme Court ruled they did have standing. But meanwhile, his team has been denied access to the ballots for two and a half years and still is.
He said there were more “counterfeit ballots” than the margin Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by in Georgia, 11,779 votes. Favorito said one affidavit suggested it could be tens of thousands of votes, and the ballot harvesting could have affected hundreds of thousands. Some of the specifics he cited were “17,724 certified votes in Fulton County that have no ballot images at all,” “18,325 voters who voted from a vacant address based on U.S. Postal Service records,” “[i]mproper chain of custody forms for over 100,000 drop box ballots statewide,” and “[d]estroyed or lost original ballot images totaling over 1.7 million statewide.”
His report refuted a GASOS claim that just like congressional elections were “valid and accurate,” so was the presidential election. Favorito said congressional elections are “never audited,” so there is no way to know that.
As Roland continued to disallow much of Favorito’s testimony, a constitutional attorney messaged The Sun Times, “She’s JUST trying to dismiss ALL of his testimony because ‘Eastman didn’t know about it at the time.’ Well Eastman was doing his own research ON THE SAME SUBJECTS. It doesn’t matter if he knew about this specific research. Also, Garland already testified that they were on a lengthy conference call at the time.” In contrast, the California bar’s star witness, Matthew Seligman, was permitted to discuss issues Eastman didn’t know about.
Next, Favorito discussed the portion of his report refuting the GASOS’s claim that machines did not flip votes from Trump to Biden. The report said, “Certified Ware County election results from the SOS office reported that Donald Trump received 9865 votes, Joe Biden received 4211 votes and Jo Jorgenson received 136 votes in the 2020 General election. Published audit results for Ware County confirmed that Donald Trump actually received 9902 votes, Joe Biden received 4174 votes and Jo Jorgenson received 117 votes.”
It added, “Thus, the hand count audit revealed the Dominion voting system recorded 37 more votes for Joe Biden and 37 less votes for Donald Trump than the actual, verifiable audit totals. The rate is about .25% or almost exactly the victory margin rate that Joe Biden received over Donald Trump. The SOS office admitted in a press release that the audit found 37 more votes for Donald Trump than the voting system originally reported but did not acknowledge that the audit found that the system originally attributed those 37 extra votes to Joe Biden.”
The GASOS asserted that electronic voting machines could not be hacked, but Favorito said in his report this was false. “Expert witness testimony in the Curling v. Raffensperger case from Professor Alex Halderman and cybersecurity expert Harry Hursti did show that it is possible to manipulate the vote via various types of hacking,” he said. “In fact, Georgia’s Dominion voting system is so vulnerable that a comprehensive hacking study produced by Prof. Alex Halderman is still under seal by the U.S. District court.”.
Roland discussed with the parties generally when Eastman’s other witnesses would be testifying. His team would like Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers (R-Flagstaff) and former legislator Mark Finchem to testify as rebuttal witnesses to refute earlier testimony from the California bar’s witnesses, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer and former Secretary of State Elections Director Bo Dul. Roland said she would consider allowing them to testify after Eastman’s team concludes putting on his case, which is a few days or possibly weeks away since the parties need to coordinate their schedules to figure out remaining trial dates.
Other witnesses the team will be putting on include character witnesses. Two of them will be former D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Janice Rogers Brown and former Attorney General Ed Meese, who are expected to testify in person.
The trial is being livestreamed and is expected to continue through next week as well as several more scattered days after that due to coordinating schedules, including in October, unless interrupted by the Georgia prosecution of Eastman.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Garland Favorito” by Garland Favorito.
