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Notes -
You can track this back it appears, to a single story which had two separate pieces of information. 1) That a water leak delayed counting and 2) That counting was going to stop at 10.30pm. Notably however the leak is not cited as the reason why the counting is going to stop at 10.30PM rather:
"They planned to stop scanning absentee ballots at 10:30 p.m. and pick it up back in the morning. No official could explain before press time why Fulton was stopping its count of absentee ballots at that time, only saying that was the procedure.
“As planned, Fulton County will continue to tabulate the remainder of absentee ballots over the next two days. Absentee ballot processing requires that each ballot is opened, signatures verified, and ballots scanned. This is a labor-intensive process that takes longer to tabulate than other forms of voting. Fulton County did not anticipate having all absentee ballots processed on Election Day,” the county spokeswoman wrote in a statement."
and for the leak:
"Fulton Commission Chairman Robb Pitts told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday evening that the pipe burst at 6:07 a.m. and was repaired within two hours. The burst pipe wasn’t mentioned by county officials during a 10 a.m. press conference."
https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/fulton-election-results-delayed-after-pipe-bursts-in-room-with-ballots/4T3KPQV7PBEX3JVAIGJBNBSVJY/
Note that the statement was written before the counting actually stopped at 10.30PM but after the leak at 6AM which is why the vote stop part is in future tense it appears.
The headline they used was quoted heavily to show that the leak caused the count pause:
Fulton County election results delayed after pipe bursts in room with ballots
But it is simply saying the count was delayed by the leak. Not that the overnight vote pause was anything to do with the leak. Two separate delays for two separate reasons. Many stories about the leak stopping the count that night link back to this story, or link back to a story which links to this one as far as I can tell.
Interestingly though, focusing on the water leak is a red herring because there was actually a gap with no Republican observers after vote processing was resumed after midnight. However the official observer was there which is all Georgia law technically required. While there was no legal breach, that is actually a breach of the protocol put in place. And is verifiable from watching the video footage (as is the clean up of the water leak in the AM). Whether you believe the statement that they never told the Republican poll watchers to leave, just that they chose to do so when one section of the team was leaving for the night. And that the work was being divided up so no actual counting took place, just opening and preparing, doesn't really matter, the election team should have ensured Republicans had a presence.
The water leak is the big splashy (heh) distraction from the actual issue that occurred. As someone that has run elections before a lot of the "fraud" stuff was focused on big things like that, not on boring minutiae which is where (in my experience) it would be easier to hide actual issues. What Trumps team needed was an army of experienced people poring through the relevant rules and protocols and listing out the breaches, and on an election that scale there would have been hundreds, probably thousands of breaches. Mostly benign, I myself committed two breaches in two separate elections for example and my constituency was considered well run in the reviews. But you could come up with some large numbers of actual breaches. Rather than weird things that happened. But I don't think he had or was willing to spend the money to get (maybe?) the people that would have required.
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