Fact Check: Georgia County Meant To Order 250,000 Individual Voter Applications, NOT 25 Million

Fact Check

  • by: Dana Ford
Fact Check: Georgia County Meant To Order 250,000 Individual Voter Applications, NOT 25 Million Input Error

Did a Georgia county mean to order 25 million voter applications after the 2020 election? No, that's not true: The order was the result of an input error. Officials meant to order 250,000 individual voter applications, not 250,000 packs of voter applications, each one of which contains 100 applications, according to an election official in DeKalb County.

The claim appeared in a Twitter post (archived here) published by "Jovan Hutton Pulitzer" on January 18, 2021. It read:

Why would any one Georgia County need to order enough voter registration packets AFTER the general election to allow EVERYONE in the state to register 2.6 times? Oh and remember they turned in their run off counts late! Oops BUSTED! SEE FOR YOURSELF

This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:

Twitter screenshot

(Source: Twitter screenshot taken on Tue Jan 19 15:40:57 2021 UTC)

The post included images of what looked to be order confirmations for voter applications from three Georgia counties: Chatham, Murray and DeKalb. All were dated after the 2020 general election, which is not at all unusual, despite what the post implies. County officials typically place orders for applications after any major election cycle. It's a standard restocking process.

According to the confirmations, Chatham County ordered 100 packs of voter applications, Murray ordered 10 and DeKalb ordered 250,000. Each pack contains 100 individual voter applications, which would mean that DeKalb's order was for 25 million applications. That number, for good reason, raised a red flag, as the total number of active voters in the whole state of Georgia, as of November 1, 2020, was around 7 million (7,233,584 to be exact).

Lead Stories reached out to elections officials in DeKalb County to ask about the apparent discrepancy. Erica Hamilton, director of DeKalb voter registration and elections, responded:

An input error resulted in 250,000 packs of voter applications initially being ordered as opposed to 250,000 individual voter applications. This order has not been filled and the input error, which was likely already flagged by the SOS [Secretary of State], will be corrected.
We reached out to the Georgia Secretary of State for comment. Spokesman Walter Jones confirmed that the office did not send 25 million forms. He wrote in an email:
Elections officials managed tens of millions of pieces of information. It's not entirely surprising that human beings, who are entering in data, occasionally make an error. DeKalb County identified the issue and addressed the error appropriately.

The office of the secretary of state has previously commented on the man responsible for the post, "J. Hutton Pulitzer", blasting his efforts to undermine confidence in the integrity of the 2020 election. Lead Stories has also debunked his activities before.

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:

This fact check is available at IFCN's 2020 US Elections #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here, for more.


  Dana Ford

Dana Ford is an Atlanta-based reporter and editor. She previously worked as a senior editor at Atlanta Magazine Custom Media and as a writer/ editor for CNN Digital. Ford has more than a decade of news experience, including several years spent working in Latin America.

Read more about or contact Dana Ford

Different viewpoints

Note: if reading this fact check makes you want to contact us to complain about bias, please check out our Red feed first.

About Us

International Fact-Checking Organization Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion