On November 3, 2020, Georgia held an election to choose a slate of sixteen electors in the race for President of the United States. The major candidates were then-incumbent President Donald Trump (R) and then-former Vice President Joe Biden (D). There are 538 electors across the United States; a candidate must win an outright majority of at least 270 to win.
The result of the race certified by the Elections Division of the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office had Biden winning by a margin of 11,779 votes—about 0.24% of the total, the narrowest margin of any state. Biden probably won Georgia’s sixteen electors, but Off on a Tangent is unable to verify the result or determine the outcome beyond a reasonable doubt. The nationwide certified result was an electoral majority of 306-232 for Biden.
Suspicions about the election center on Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia and where most of the City of Atlanta is located.
In 2024 the Georgia State Election Board (SEB) reprimanded Fulton County for major missteps in 2020 that included double-counting 3,075 ballots and deleting more than 17,000 archived ballot images. The missing ballot images make it impossible to perform a comprehensive third-party election audit.
The next year, the Georgia SEB revealed that Fulton County officials did not sign a required “zero tape” verification at 32 of its 37 early voting sites (86%) in 2020, which was a violation of the Rules and Regulations of the State of Georgia (GA R&R), 183-1-12.10, 4-5. Officials did not sign the final tabulation report at 36 of those sites (97%), which was a violation of the GA R&R 183-1-12.12, a. 1. At an SEB hearing on December 9, 2025, a Fulton County attorney said she did “not dispute that the tapes were not signed.”
Voters cast 314,985 ballots at Fulton County’s early voting sites—about 60% of the total. We can estimate how many were affected by these violations by dividing the early voting total equally between the 37 early voting sites. By this methodology, about 272,420 ballots were counted without the required signed zero tapes and about 306,472 without the required signed tabulation.
It is suspicious that nearly all the county’s poll managers at early voting sites didn’t (or wouldn’t) sign their names to the tabulation to assert that the results were “true and correct.” Defenders of Georgia’s certified result say those tabulations were double- and triple-checked by a hand-count audit and a machine recount, but if the initial count wasn’t “true and correct” then, depending on why it wasn’t, recounts from the same piles of ballots wouldn’t necessarily be “true and correct” either.
Defenders have also characterized these missing signatures as innocuous “administrative errors.” It is true that they violated the state’s administrative code, not the law, but this is “splitting hairs.” In any case, why should we trust that the people who broke these rules did not break others? Widespread violations of any election rule undermines trust in the process and “poisons” the entire result. They violate the civil rights of Georgia’s citizens, who are entitled to free, fair elections with clearly defined rules.
The number of known violations in Fulton County affects about 309,547 ballots, and rendered at least 17,000 more un-auditable. This is twenty-eight times as many ballots as Biden’s alleged margin of victory. Fraud would have to affect only about 1.81% of them to have changed the outcome of the race.
If Trump had won Georgia’s sixteen electors it would not have changed the national result; Biden would have won a 290-248 electoral majority. If Trump had also won Pennsylvania’s twenty electors it still would not have changed the national result; Biden would have won a 270-268 majority. At the time of this writing, Off on a Tangent has no reasonable doubt about the 2020 results in any other state.