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WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 21: Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss (L), former Georgia election worker, testifies during the fourth hearing on the January 6th investigation as her mother Ruby Freeman (R) listens in the Cannon House Office Building on June 21, 2022 in Washington, DC.
Two Georgia poll workers targeted by former President Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani with conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election have been cleared by state authorities.
“There was no evidence of any type of fraud as alleged,” the 10-page report from the Georgia Board of Elections declared flatly.
‘No evidence was provided’
For many Trump supporters, two public servants — mother Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss — have been the face of a supposedly vast conspiracy to rob the former president of victory in the Peach State. In lawsuits and congressional testimony, Freeman said the smear campaign left her besieged by threats and harassment, through dozens of text messages, hundreds of emails and in-person mobs forming outside her house. She was forced to leave her house for months, starting on Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Since that time, Freeman and Moss have fought tenaciously to get back their names. Freeman delivered emotional testimony to Congress, introducing herself to the nation as “Lady Ruby,” and both women have filed defamation lawsuits against the far-right figures and media entities who allegedly smeared them.
On Thursday, Georgia election authorities delivered additional vindication in a report dispelling the paranoid theories surrounding them.
At the center of these were snippets of surveillance video of the absentee and military vote count at State Farm Arena.
After the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia on Nov. 20, 2020, Trump’s team disseminated footage they claimed showed them producing boxes with 18,000 fraudulent ballots — enough to surmount the former president’s 11,780-vote defeat. One America News, a pro-Trump broadcaster, aired the edited footage and entered into a settlement to resolve the poll workers’ defamation lawsuit a little more than a year ago.
After reviewing the footage in full, investigators from three law enforcement agencies uniformly found the clips in question innocuous.
“Fulton County Board of Elections and Registration put specific processes in place to store ballot boxes underneath tables and to have them in a certain order to monitor and track ballots during the tabulation process so election workers would know where to begin the next day,” the report states. “No evidence was provided to show that Freeman or Moss deviated from that established process. The initial tabulation, the statewide audit involving a manual hand count of every ballot, and the machine recount reveal there was no evidence to suggest fraudulent ballots were scanned and counted in the final tabulated results for the November 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”
‘Finally put this issue to rest’
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In an alternative theory, Giuliani claimed that Moss handed her mother “USB drives” full of votes “as if they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” Testifying before the Jan. 6 Committee, Moss revealed that the supposed flash drives were actually a “ginger mint.”
“All allegations made against Freeman and Moss were unsubstantiated and found to have no merit,” the report’s investigative findings conclude.
Social media posts also circulated purporting to show Freeman admitting a plot to corrupt the election. Investigators exposed the posts too as a sham, finding the actual content creators.
“Lastly, the FBI identified and interviewed the true creator of the Instagram account that reportedly contained a post by Freeman admitting she conspired to adversely affect the November 2020 election,” the report states. “The account creator admitted he created the fake account and confirmed the content that was posted on the account was fake.”
ATLANTA, GA – NOVEMBER 06: Georgia Secretary of State Ben Raffensperger holds a press conference on the status of ballot counting on Nov. 6, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), whom Trump pressured to “find” 11,780 votes in a since-published phone call, denounced the former president’s conspiracy theories and touted the report’s findings in a statement.
“We remain diligent and dedicated to looking into real claims of voter fraud,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “We are glad the state election board finally put this issue to rest. False claims and knowingly false allegations made against these election workers have done tremendous harm. Election workers deserve our praise for being on the front lines.”
The press release noted that the report found “no evidence of conspiracy, no fraud.”
Despite Raffensperger depicting the report as a coda, Moss and Freeman’s story will likely continue to generate headlines as their still-pending case against Giuliani progresses in federal court. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) also has been scrutinizing the poll workers’ story in her investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, which is widely expected to produce indictments later this year.
Read the full report here.
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