Welcome to my ongoing review of questions challenging my “journalistic integrity” (except I’m not a journalist), in which I use their challenge to challenge theirs right back. Part one addressed the first of five “concerns” the lovely people at NewsGuard (that’s not sarcasm) expressed over content published at GraniteGrok.com. The individuals I deal with are very professional; it is what the organization has them asking me, that’s just silly.
And while it has long been my practice to dismiss the request and ignore their pleas, this year, I chose to comment. You can read my post on response number one here. Today, we tackle the second one.
Part 2
First, their concern, the second of five, and then my response.
2) A December 2025 article, titled “IMANI: DOJ hammers Fulton County Over 315,000 ghost votes,” stated: “In a December 9, 2025, hearing before the Georgia State Election Board (SEB), Fulton County’s own legal counsel, Ann Brumbaugh, was forced to make a catastrophic admission: More than 130 tabulator tapes from the 2020 early voting period were never signed….These signatures are the only thing standing between a legitimate tally and a fabricated one. In Fulton County, those signatures simply aren’t there. We are talking about the ‘certification’ of 315,000 early in-person votes — the vast majority of the county’s early count — that lack the basic legal requirement for validity.”
The article went to suggest that the unsigned tabulator tapes in Fulton County, Georgia provided evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, stating, “If the records show what many suspect — that votes were manufactured or ‘certified’ through illegal means — then the ‘serious indictments’ the public has been waiting for are inevitable.”
In fact, the 315,000 ballots in the 130 tabulator tapes that were not signed by poll workers do not prove that votes were “invalid,” “manufactured or ‘certified’ through illegal means” in the 2020 election, as the article suggested. Georgia checks all votes against IDs or identification numbers, helping to ensure that these ballots were not fabricated, and a nonpartisan election monitor found no evidence of fraud in the county.
Despite the tapes being uncertified, Georgia votes are associated with legal, registered voters because voter registration laws in Georgia require registration with photo identification.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, a Republican who oversaw the state’s 2020 elections, said in a Dec. 20, 2025, statement: “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.”
David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, told LeadStories.com in a December 2025 fact-checking article that the failure to sign the tabulator tapes “would be a minor administrative issue.” He also noted that Fulton County, Georgia’s 2020 presidential ballots “were counted, statewide, three times, three different ways. Initially, and unofficially, through the tabulators. They were recounted again, at President Trump’s request, through different tabulators, confirming the result. Then every single presidential ballot in Georgia — all paper — were recounted by hand in every county, transparently observed by representatives of the campaigns, again confirming the results.”
Moreover, nonpartisan election monitor Seven Hills Strategies made no reference to the presence of election fraud in Fulton County in a January 2021 report. Although the report highlighted several chain-of-custody issues during the county’s elections, it stated, “I am confident that Fulton’s robust security architecture made it impossible to tamper with votes at ballot drop boxes.” The report also stated, “I witnessed neither ‘ballot stuffing’ nor ‘double-counting’ or any other fraudulent conduct that would undermine the validity, fairness, and accuracy of the results published and certified by Fulton County.”
Does Granite Grok have any comment on this apparently countervailing information and why it was not included in the article?
My Response:
From NewsGuard: A December 2025 article, titled “IMANI: DOJ hammers Fulton County Over 315,000 ghost votes,”
In the provided analysis, this presumption by NewsGuard strikes me as completely incorrect.
The article went to suggest that the unsigned tabulator tapes in Fulton County, Georgia, provided evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, stating, “If the records show what many suspect — that votes were manufactured or ‘certified’ through illegal means — then the ‘serious indictments’ the public has been waiting for are inevitable.”
Whether you agree with the author or the links or quotes he cites, this reads to me as all about Fulton County, Georgia.
“.. has launched a federal offensive that is sending shock-waves through the Georgia political establishment.”
“If those records (in Fulton County) were later “created” or back-filled to cover the gap, it isn’t a clerical error — it’s a federal felony.”
All references to records or concerns (in Mr. Imani’s article) are centered on Fulton County. There is no reference anywhere in the article to investigations in any other county or state.
While some points or paragraphs may seem hyperbolic, speculative hyperbole based on public comment is not in any way more misleading than NewsGuard inventing the notion that anything in the piece “provided evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.”
The word “fraud” doesn’t even appear in the piece, and the records, votes, tapes, and indictments he refers to throughout are all in Fulton County.
Absent this footing, every other little thing NewsGuard cites for my comment is simply contrary points better suited to our website comments section, which we encourage, because we do not police our authors. We expect commenters’ op-ed writers and others to do that – and happily publish opposing pieces when provided.
Best,
If you read the first response, you will begin to see a trend. They presume I have some sort of editorial obligation to provide all sides when, as we all know, most of the media that they score well do nothing of the sort. Unlike most, if not all of them, GraniteGrok.com does not pretend to be anything but partisan opinion, and we rarely contact anyone cited in an article for comment (the last time I did, they lied to me).
There is also a measurable bent to the approach NewsGuard takes. It assumes Amil means something based on its own bias, then goes to great lengths to prove how wrong what he never said was.
In a way, I ought to thank them. They made my job easy. I didn’t need to research, fisk, or examine most of their rebuttal because, even in a world where GraniteGrok pretended to be anything but a center-right news/opinion blog (as in, we offer our opinion about the news), none of it had any relevance because they undermined it with their own presumtive bias.
