State election officials say they are monitoring ‘potential threat’

ATLANTA — Georgia election officials say, for the most part, Election Day has gone smoothly, but they have their eyes on a “potential threat.”

Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Mark Winne spoke with top election officials on Tuesday.

“The counties that we’ve talked to, by and large, have been doing a phenomenal job. They’ve seen very few issues,” State Elections Director Blake Evans said.

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Interim Deputy Secretary of State Gabriel Sterling says the briefing of the state’s top elections officials, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, provided a snapshot of where the election stood from the perspective of those who oversee it.

“There’s one intelligence thing we don’t want to go into to much detail on we’re kind of keeping an eye on. There’s one potential threat out there,” Sterling said during the briefing.

After the meeting, Winne asked Sterling about that comment.

“There’s a potential of some discussions of potential threats to a judge who’s involved in a extension of some absentee ballots, but we don’t wanna get too deep into that right now,” Sterling further explained to Winne.

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Winne asked if Sterling thought foreign entities could be involved in that threat.

“There’s speculation, but again, it’s too early to know for certain,” he replied. “It’s more of an implication. It’s not a direct threat that we’ve seen yet.”

Deputy Chief of Investigations for the Secretary of State’s Office Michael Brunson said inspectors are checking out every complaint they receive.

“We’re sending out investigators and inspectors to those locations to check into those specific allegations just to look and see what the issues are, and trying to solve as many of those issues that we can,” he said.

Brunson said, as of 5 p.m., they had only seen about 40 issues come up.

He added that while they have not seen anything on the level of possible election fraud, their investigations do not include the matter involving the judge that Sterling mentioned. A federal agency, and possibly the GBI, are looking into that situation.

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