Claim:
Georgia election officials admitted they certified ballots in the 2020 presidential election with tabulator tapes — akin to receipts — that weren’t signed by poll workers in violation of Georgia state election rules.
Rating:
Context
Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger issued a statement saying the incident did not impact the outcome of the election.
In December 2025, a rumor circulated online that election officials in the state of Georgia’s Fulton County admitted to certifying early votes that did not follow proper tracking procedures in the 2020 U.S. presidential election that pitted Democrat Joe Biden against Republican Donald Trump.
Users across social media sites like X (archived) and Facebook (archived, archived) shared the claim, some alleging that the error in protocol made the votes “fraudulent” and therefore impacted the reported results.
According to Fulton County’s Election Day results, Biden received a total of 381,144 votes, or 72% of the county, compared to Trump’s 137,240 from a total tally of 524,659 votes cast. The remaining 6,275 votes from Fulton County were cast for Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen. Biden initially won the state by 11,779 votes, a lead that increased following a recount (we come back to this later).
The spread of the certification rumor online led many Snopes readers to send emails asking for clarification on the matter:
Well well well…
Here’s the latest from STOLEN Georgia.
Biden: 2,473,633
Trump: 2,461,854
Biden “won” by 11,779 votes.
Fulton County admits certifying 315,000 fraudulent early votes without poll worker signatures.
Crime of the century.
People should already be in prison.
— C3 (@C_3C_3) December 19, 2025
The claim that Georgia election officials admitted to an error while verifying votes in the 2020 election was true.
Specifically, an attorney for Fulton County told the Georgia State Elections Board in a Dec. 9, 2025, meeting that the county acknowledged the error of not signing some ballot tabulator tapes. Tabulator tapes are akin to a receipt that helps match the number of votes tabulated to the number of voters at the polls.
A full recording of the meeting is available to view on the Georgia State Elections Board YouTube channel.
According to Atlanta News First, a regional news outlet, the error amounted to about 315,000 votes — or “almost every ballot cast before Election Day” — being certified despite the lack of proper procedure. That figure matched Fulton County’s own reporting of 314,985 advanced voting ballots cast.
A May 2024 report from Nadine Williams, director of the Fulton County Department of Registration & Elections, addressed a variety of complaints filed to the George Election Board regarding the 2020 election. While there was no mention of unsigned tapes in the initial complaint, it did cite “missing tapes,” a complaint similarly invoked during the Elections Board meeting.
The complaint regarding the missing tapes read, “The original tabulation includes results for ten (10) advance voting tabulators for which Fulton County does not have the tabulator tapes.”
The report addressed the “missing tapes” complaint and stated:
Missing tabulator tapes may have been misfiled. Standard Operation Procedures for filing and securing tabulator tapes have been revised to avoid a reoccurrence.
To refute the allegation in this complaint, our Department contacted the 2020 Advance Voting Managers assigned to the location of the scanners in question. Per a signed affidavit, the 2020 Advance Voting Managers assigned to the locations for the scanners in question, have confirmed that the scanner in question existed and were utilize day voters to scan their ballots during the course of Advance Voting for the November 3, 2020 Election.
Despite the acknowledgement from the county in 2024, some supporters of Trump continued to claim it was proof that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” in favor of Biden, which ultimately helped bring attention to the rumor that county officials admitted to further error following the December 2025 meeting.
However, claims insisting Biden won the presidency thanks to how Fulton County certified the early votes in question was misleading.
Following a recount requested by Trump following the 2020 election, Fulton County recertified the results with slight adjustments that did not alter the outcome: “137,247 (26.20%) for Donald J. Trump (a net gain of 7 votes), 380,212 (72.59%) votes for Joseph Biden (a net loss of 932 votes), and 6,320 (1.21%) votes for Jo Jorgensen (a net gain of 45 votes).”
Further, the county’s results pointed out that Trump received 29,479 votes specifically from Advance Voting, the target of the complaint, while Biden received 224,688.
Following the recount, Biden’s margin of victory statewide increased slightly to 12,670 votes, up from the Election Day tally of 11,779. If the votes were discounted entirely, it’s possible Trump could have claimed victory in Georgia. However, Biden would still have ultimately won the election with an electoral college vote of 290 compared to Trump’s 248 (the actual total was 306 – 232).
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a statement he shared on X that the issue was merely a “clerical error” and did not impact the results of the election.
Atlanta News First reported on Dec. 22 that “the State Election Board eventually voted 3-0 to refer the case to the State Attorney General’s Office, where Fulton County could be fined as much as $5,000 for each missing or unsigned tape.”
In the Dec. 9 meeting, county attorney Ann Brumbaugh first addressed the issue around the 06:31:58 marker, where she stated, “We do not dispute that the tapes were not signed. It was a violation of the rule.”
Brumbaugh further explained the ways in which the county had addressed the issue since the 2020 election. She said:
Since 2020, again, we have new leadership and a new building and a new board and new standard operating procedures. Since then, the training has been enhanced, the poll watchers are trained specifically [that] they’ve got to sign the tapes in the morning and they’ve got to sign the tapes when they’re run at the end of the day. When the tapes come back to the hub with all the documentation, they are checked again, and if somebody forgot to sign a tape, then Fulton initiates an investigation. But we don’t dispute the allegation from the 2020 election.
Brumbaugh continued to speak at the 06:46:00 mark and admitted to other documentation from the election that was missing entirely.
Brumbaugh said:
Fulton County has spent hours and hours, probably days and weeks, searching this stuff. They’ve provided what they can. Like I said, I’m not disputing the allegations here.
I think that in [20]23-[20]25, which is not here, yes, there were ten tapes from ten scanners that were never recovered.
This case is about tapes that are not signed, which is a violation of a rule. Not a statute, but it’s a violation of a rule. They should have done it.
I haven’t been able to go through and look at the tapes and compare what is there and what isn’t there, but I can tell you from SEB 23-25, there are 10 scanner tapes that were not found. But my understanding is that everything else was turned over, and this is about tapes that weren’t signed. If they weren’t signed, they weren’t signed.
Procedures have been updated, people are taking this very seriously now.
“SEB 23-25” referred to a previous memo from the county addressing the complaints about the 2020 ballots, which concluded:
Please note these numerous inquiries regarding the November 3, 2020 Election, over a 3 year time span, have only served as a distraction to the electoral processes being conducted for current Elections. Our department has not willfully lost or destroyed any records that It may not be able to locate as of this date. Nor has any of these complaints discredited the outcome of the November 3, 2020 election.
The “rule” Brumbaugh mentioned was Georgia’s Preparation for and Conduct of Primaries and Elections, which asserted that poll workers must witness and sign the tabulator tapes at multiple points throughout the electoral process.
In response to the media coverage the dispute in Georgia received, the X account of Raffensperger posted a statement (archived) on Dec. 20, 2025, that said, “Georgia has the most secure elections in the country and all voters were verified with photo ID and lawfully cast their ballots. A clerical error at the end of the day does not erase valid, legal votes.”
