Article: Statement Regarding Absentee Ballot Tabulation at State Farm Arena
NOV 3, 2020
At approximately 6:07 a.m., the staff at State Farm Arena notified Fulton County Registration & Elections of a water leak affecting the room where absentee ballots were being tabulated. The State Farm Arena team acted swiftly to remediate the issue. Within 2 hours, repairs were complete. No ballots were damaged, nor was any equipment affected. There was a brief delay in tabulating absentee ballots while the repairs were being conducted.
Tonight Fulton County will report results for approximately 86,000 absentee ballots, as well as Election Day and Early Voting results. These represent the vast majority of ballots cast within Fulton County.
The above statement was posted on the State Farm Arena web site on Oct 3, but it's actually from Jessica Corbitt-Dominguez, director of external affairs for the Fulton County Government. It was reported by various local media outlets like 10 WBNS.
Just to be clear, the leak happened early morning on election day, Nov 3rd. It was resolved in about two hours.
The conspiracy theory speculation started in earnest with a claim by Donald Trump on Thursday, November 5th, 2020 (two days after the election)
Again this was explained by local media.
Article: Trump: "In Georgia there was a pipe burst – in a faraway location that was unrelated to the location of what was happening and they stopped counting for four hours. And, a lot of things happened"
This claim is FALSE.
The pipe that burst in Georgia created a water leak that affected the room where absentee ballots were being tabulated. No ballots or equipment were damaged and repairs were completed in two hours.
The theory has gradually evolved into this, from a frequent promoter of Conspiracy Theories, the Gateway Pundit
Article: By Joe Hoft
Published November 11, 2020 at 9:26am
On election night in Georgia President Trump was running away with the Presidential election, then suddenly it was reported that vote counting had stopped in Fulton County due to a water main break in Atlanta.
...
What really happened on election night in Atlanta and what was the real reason they stopped counting tens of thousands of absentee votes until the next day?
The theory is that the counting was paused at night in order to rig the election somehow, presumably by adding in a bunch of Biden ballots. The water leak was supposedly cover for this.
However, this theory fails for two reasons.
Firstly, the water leak happened at 6AM, not in the evening. The counting of the ballots in the State Farm Arena began at 11AM.
Secondly, the overnight pause was planned in advance, and was not the result of the water leak.
Article: By 5 p.m., Fulton had scanned 86,191 of the 130,517 absentee-by-mail ballots received, which doesn't include the ballots received in today's mail.
Elections board member Mark Wingate told reporters he believes the county won't have definitive results until later this week. Fulton County Director of Registration and Elections Richard Barron said they will stop counting absentee ballots at 10:30 p.m. Nov. 3, and resume in the morning.
As planned, Fulton County will continue to tabulate the remainder of absentee ballots over the next two days. Absentee ballot processing requires that each ballots is opened, signatures verified, and ballots scanned.
So the delay was always a planned delay, simply to allow election workers to sleep.
It's also useful context to compare this with the 2016 election where Trump won Georgia against Hilary Clinton.
Soruce: https://www.fultoncountyga.gov/services/voting-and-elections/search-elections?query=2016 general election&filters={5D0925DE-7C70-40DA-8E3E-05E516D2225A}&sortBy=relevance&page=1
Fulton was 117,783 Trump to 297,051 Clinton.
Not unexpectedly different, they were numbers that were confirmed by the hand recount quality audit, and will almost certainly be confirmed by the current machine recount.
Why both with this burst pipe story? These things have a way of becoming accepted mythology in conspiracy circles. The idea of a burst pipe being faked to delay election results is much easier to understand than some of the statistical claims, and so it's an easy thing to share on social media. Years from now I expect this story to be repeated in the same way the false "magic bullet" JFK theory is repeated.
So I think it's valuable to gather the relevant information now, as it may be harder to find years from now.
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