A Fulton County election worker removes absentee ballots for the U.S. Senate runoff elections from envelopes at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Ga., on Jan. 5, 2021. (Elijah Nouvelage) Regional News

By Jack Phillips July 1, 2021 Updated: July 1, 2021 biggersmallerPrint

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said he is pursuing taking over Fulton County’s elections operations, claiming the Atlanta-area county has habitually failed to count votes.

“I think people are saying, enough is enough,” Raffensperger told Just the News on Wednesday, adding: “I’m tired of it, but so is everyone else who lives in the other 158 counties” in Georgia.

Raffensperger, a Republican who was frequently criticized by former President Donald Trump after the 2020 election, added that he will invoke Georgia’s recent election integrity law that allows Georgia’s Elections Board to take over elections operations in localities that have issues with counting ballots.

The law, SB 202, was passed and signed into law earlier this year. The Department of Justice last week announced it would be filing a civil rights lawsuit against the measure.

When asked during the podcast about whether he would recommend the Elections Board to take over Fulton County by using the law, “Yes is the answer to your question,” Raffensperger responded.

“With SB 202, habitually failing counties can—actually the state election board can come in and replace the election director and really take over the governance of that,” he added, noting that he sought the ouster of a top Fulton County elections official but the county declined to do so.

During the podcast interview, Raffensperger cited a report released by an elections monitor, Carter Jones, in June that detailed alleged irregularities at a Fulton County vote-counting center in November.

“What [Jones] said was it’s all this mismanagement,” the secretary of state said, adding that county “mismanagement” and “dysfunction” erodes the public’s trust in the election system and “really lends itself to conspiracy theories.”

“So it needs to be fixed. It’s our largest county,” he said.

The Epoch Times has contacted Fulton County for comment.

His announcement comes in the midst of an investigation into Fulton County election forms regarding ballots’ chain of custody that allegedly went missing.

Amid claims that Fulton County can’t “produce all ballot drop box transfer documents,” Raffensperger said in a June 14 statement that his office is investigating. “Other counties that failed to follow Georgia rules and regulations regarding drop boxes” are also being reviewed, he added.

A spokesperson for Fulton County at the time appeared to dismiss the reports, telling The Epoch Times that officials “followed procedures for the collection of absentee ballots from Fulton County drop boxes.”

“We maintain a large quantity of documents and researching our files from last year to produce the ballot transfer forms. We have been in communication with the Secretary of State’s office to update them of our progress on this matter,” the spokesperson said.