The fifth week of the disbarment trial of former President Donald Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar, John Eastman, is winding down with direct and cross-examination of 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. The State Bar of Georgia is trying to prove that Eastman gave Trump advice when he suggested that one option after the 2020 presidential election would be to have Vice President Mike Pence refuse to accept electoral slates from states suspected of election fraud or delay the certification.
Favorito (pictured above) testified all day on Wednesday and Thursday. Much of his testimony is being excluded due to the California bar prosecutor Duncan Carling and California Bar Disciplinary Judge Yvette Roland frequently objecting after he speaks. On Thursday, Favorito said his election integrity team discovered that all Fulton County ballot images of mail-in ballots (voting in person doesn’t generate a ballot image since a machine marks those ballots) from the 2020 election totaling 148,000 were routed to be adjudicated in the adjudication suspense folder. He said only ballots where the voters’ intent was questionable due to how they marked the ballot were supposed to be routed there, not all of them.
He continued discussing parts of his report titled “Refutation of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s False Election Claims,” which his team prepared for the Georgia Legislature about the 2020 election. Eastman’s attorney, Randy Miller, asked him about his findings that underage people registered to vote since the Georgia Secretary of State (GASOS) claimed only four of them had voted. Favorito found that 2,047 people registered to vote before they turned 17, and he didn’t address whether they had voted or not.
Next, Favorito discussed his findings that votes were cast for individuals who have “false voter registration dates.” He said, “You don’t have this due to clerical errors. This is electronic tampering.” His team found that there were “4,502 registration numbers in the voter history file, which lists voters who were credited with voting in the November 2020 election, who did not appear in the voter registration file, which lists voters who are eligible to vote in the election.”
Favorito’s team discovered at least 873 votes in the names of dead people, contrary to the GASOS’s finding of two. He compared the voter history file from November 28, 2020, to the deceased individual file from Georgia’s Public Health Department.
The GASOS claimed that around 1,000 voters who allegedly put down P.O. Boxes for their addresses had put down apartment addresses. Favorito said that wasn’t true, and he told Miller he personally went to some of the addresses to refute that. His report said, “If the SOS did a simple search he would have determined that there are at least 907 voters who are registered to vote at Post Office Boxes in locations that are clearly not apartments. These Post Office Boxes are in U.S. Postal Service locations, UPS stores, Fed Ex locations, and other stores such as PAK mail, Anytime Mail and Postnet.”
Favorito disputed the GASOS’s assertion that 4,000 people registered to vote in other states did not vote in the election. His report said, “The allegations are based on the SOS’s Statewide Voter Database obtained in early November of 2020, the SOS’s 2020 Voter History file, and U.S. Postal Service national change of address processing.”
The GASOS said that even though thousands of people filed a change of address with the United States Postal Service prior to the election to leave their county, it wasn’t enough votes to swing the election. Trump lost to Joe Biden in Georgia by 11,779 votes. Favorito’s report said, “Nearly 35,000 people who voted in the November 2020 election based on the 2020 Voter History file had submitted a change of address to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) showing they moved to another county and gave the USPS a ‘Move Effective Date’ more than 30 days prior to the election.”
Favorito said many of the poll tapes he asked for with public records requests —the printouts from each voting machine tabulator — were not signed by the polling manager as required by law. There were 12,024 ballots cast without this sign off. He added that he believed they weren’t signed because ” manipulation ” occurred, and the California bar’s attorney Carling objected as speculation, and the judge sustained it.
Favorito said his entire team determined that “tampering” occurred on the ballot images in Fulton County — the only county they investigated — before certification. However, they weren’t sure where in the process it occurred. Carling objected to his testimony, and the judge sustained it.
Miller tried to question him about it differently to get around the objection. Favorito said many anomalies in the metadata led to the “obvious conclusion” that there was tampering. He cited finding “impossible timestamps”, such as 10 ballots adjudicated in one minute and duplicate timestamps. Carling objected again and the judge sustained it.
Miller again tried to ask Favorito about the ballot images, and Favorito responded and said his team found that as many as 148,000 mail-in ballots in Fulton County were tampered with due to the “wholesale replacement of ballot images.” Carling objected, and the judge sustained it.
Favorito discussed the difference between “anomalies” and “tampering.” He said anomalies are when metadata reflects something that’s not technically possible if abiding by the laws and rules, whereas tampering is an anomaly that’s not only technically impossible but no other reasonable conclusion can be made regarding how it occurred. Carling objected and said he wanted an ongoing objection to his continued testimony.
Miller tried to get Favorito recognized by the judge as an expert due to his extensive experience investigating election anomalies, 40 years working in IT, significant experience testifying as an expert in trials, and experience with electronic voting machines going back to 2002. As an expert, it would be easier to get his testimony admitted. Roland refused, claiming it was too late into the trial.
Discussing the audit conducted on November 14-15, 2020, Favorito said they found about 6,000 duplicate ballots, resulting in a net addition for Biden of 4,081 votes. He said it was enough to swing the election when combined with the around 9,000 votes that had no ballot images.
Miller attempted to question Favorito about a complaint that two election integrity researchers Favorito knows sent to the GASOS and Georgia State Election Board, which went over similar election issues, but the judge refused to allow it since Favorito wasn’t involved with the letter.
Miller asked Favorito about Raffensperger’s admission that Fulton County made mistakes in tabulating ballots, citing an article about it. Favorito responded and said that Raffensperger won’t admit that in an actual press release.
The last part of the afternoon consisted of Carling cross-examining Favorito. He began by asking him if finding dead voters using the fields he did, such as first name, last name, address, etc. was as good as using other fields. Favorito refused to answer, stating that he would be giving his opinion, and since the judge would not designate him as an expert, it was not appropriate for him to express his opinion.
Miller agreed with Favorito and objected, but Roland overruled his objection and told Favorito he must give his opinion. Carling got Favorito to admit that his report erroneously stated that he discovered the dead voters by looking up their birthdates when it should have said their birth years.
Much of Carling’s cross-examination consisted of asking about other typos and small technical issues. He started asking him about the opinions of one of the government’s witnesses, and Favorito dismissed the expert as “not credible” based on his research.
Carling spent a lengthy amount of time analyzing a mistaken extra word Favorito had in his report. Discussing the problems with signature verification on mail-in ballots, Favorite wrote, “This resulted in a statewide decrease in the signature rejection rate from 3.47% in 2018 to .34% in 2020.” Favorito said he’d meant to say “rejection rate,” not “signature rejection rate.” He told Carling that the signature rejection rate was lower, but he said the percentage it changed from 2018 to 2020 was still similar. He also said, “Fulton County did not perform any signature matching at all, circumvented the entire process.”
Another typo Carling spent a long time discussing was from a report that Favorito didn’t author, and the mistake didn’t appear in Favorito’s own report. Expert Bryan Geels said in an affidavit in a lawsuit that around 66,000 people registered to vote who were underage. Favorito said he believed Geels meant to put around 2,000 and must have confused the 66,000 number with another category.
Roland said during the trial that she’d heard someone was live streaming the trial, which was not allowed. She also forbade viewers from taking screenshots of the trial over the internet. The trial is not available to view anywhere except on the disciplinary court’s website when it is live streaming. It is expected to continue through next week and 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 X. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Garland Favorito” by Garland Favorito.
