Month: June 2021

This Thursday, a solar eclipse is set to cast a shadow over most of Europe, resulting in a plunge in solar power output. 

According to Reuters, citing Amprion GmbH, which is one of four transmission system operators for electricity in Germany, the solar eclipse could result in a plunge of about 1 gigawatt (GW) in the country. 

Amprion said the solar power generation is expected to dip between 0920 GMT and 1140 GMT on Thursday as the solar eclipse event occurs. During this period, Germany’s four high-voltage grid operators, or TSOs, will have to draw from alternative energy sources such as coal, gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric energy to keep the grid balanced. 

“The network frequency has to be stable, and swings in production must be balanced,” said an Amprion spokeswoman.

While the impact of this particular eclipse may be insignificant, all four TSOs are preparing to mitigate any effects of grid destabilization. These market players will issue an analysis on Wednesday of the likely grid situation.

Germany can produce about 40 GW of solar power, but output depends on the sunlight intensity and cloud cover. Much of the darkness will be seen in northern Germany, with an estimated 20% covered skies by the eclipse, while in southern Germany, the rate will likely be 2.5%. The country doesn’t have enough power storage capacity. 

In Belgium, the generation of solar electricity will plummet by 15% during the solar eclipse. Also, Greenland, Iceland, the Arctic, some of North America and Asia will experience the celestial event. 

The rapid loss of solar radiation from an eclipse should be a humbling reminder to those pushing a green energy transition that energy diversification is essential for grid stabilization. 

Authored by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

Around 6 million barrels of crude of North Sea’s key grades have been kept in tankers offshore Europe for up to three weeks, which could be a sign that demand in the world’s top oil importing region, Asia, could be softer than the paper market suggests, Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing ship tracking data it had compiled.

Five oil tankers with 6 million barrels of North Sea crude are sitting off the shores of Europe, including two supertankers chartered by the world’s largest independent crude oil trader, Vitol Group, according to the data compiled by Bloomberg.

Considering that the current crude oil futures structure is in backwardation, the state where the prices of the nearer futures contracts are higher than those further out in time, this sure isn’t an incentive for traders to keep oil in floating storage.

Therefore, Bloomberg notes, the possible reason for tankers sitting loaded with North Sea crude off Europe could be a sign of weaker demand from Asia. Independent Chinese refiners, the so-called “teapots” and typically eager buyers of the Forties crude grade, have scaled down purchases in recent weeks, waiting for the government to issue its second batch of allowed crude oil import quotas for this year, according to Bloomberg.

Another reason for potentially weaker demand for North Sea crude in Asia could be the low refining margins in the region amid a fuel glut, as the COVID resurgence have resulted in restrictions not only in India, but also in Malaysia.

Rallying oil prices could also be a reason for price-sensitive buyers to stay away from purchases.

In March this year, traders and market sources told Bloomberg that the rising premium of North Sea’s benchmark Brent over Dubai crude was making shipment of Brent-linked oil to Asia more expensive and likely to reduce in the coming months.

The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China published a new survey titled “European Business in China Business Confidence Survey 2021,” which stated European businesses are onshoring some of their supply chains and investing more in China. 

Out of the 585 European Chamber member companies operating in China, about 60% were expected to expand operations in the country, up from 51% last year. Half of the respondents reported profit margins in China were higher than their global average, increasing from 38% a year prior. 

“As 2020 progressed, the resilience of China’s market provided much-needed shelter for European companies amidst the storm of the COVID-19 pandemic. Revenue trended only slightly downward, with 75% of respondents either maintaining or increasing revenue y-o-y, and profitability remained steady. On that foundation, optimism about near-term growth in China surged by 20 percentage points, and the number of European companies either expanding or looking to expand their business in China has increased,” the chamber said. 

A quarter of respondents are onshoring some of their supply chains to China, with 4% attempting to entirely onshore. About 10% are diversifying future investment into other countries but will leave operations in China untouched. Only 4% are shifting investments out of China, with 1% fully divesting. “In other words, five times as many companies are onshoring as there is offshoring,” the chamber said. 

Perhaps the European business community has concluded that it doesn’t have the industrial strength to compete with the Chinese economic powerhouse. This is terrible news for President Joe Biden, who continues to follow down the path of former President Trump’s decoupling movement of the US and Western allies against rising China. 

But unlike the Cold War of the last century, this confrontation will be significantly intertwined with economics.

While the US attempts to decouple from China, its allies, mainly in Europe, are bowing down to China and have decided to join as they can’t compete. This will complicate Biden’s vision of the US and its Western allies in leading the world economically and militarily in the 21st century.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

A Norwegian public health professional received a massive official backlash after he suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic was “nearly over” judging by the country’s plummeting case numbers.

Norwegian Institute of Public Health chief physician Preben Aavistland tweeted a graph showing rapidly declining hospital admissions along with the words, “Well, there goes the pandemic.”

Aavistland then made the fatal error of being upbeat about the end of the pandemic when speaking to a newspaper, saying things “are going very well” and that Norway is “in the final sprint” against the pandemic.

Det var den pandemien pic.twitter.com/qEKNaubgkr

— Preben Aavitsland (@Prebens) June 6, 2021

“Here in Norway, the pandemic is almost over. We can start preparing for an everyday life where the corona has very little place in our lives,” Aavitsland told Verdens Gang.

The physician also compared the situation to a forest fire where very few pockets of flames were left to be extinguished.

“Very few are hospitalised and only several thousand cases of infection are discovered every week,” he said.

“The numbers are declining rapidly at the same time as more and more people are being vaccinated. We will see some small outbreaks here and there, but we know how to stop them within three to four weeks.”

For the sin of being optimistic, Aavistland was verbally crucified by the government and the medical establishment.

Mads Gilbert, the head of the emergency medicine department at the University Hospital of North Norway, accused Aavistland of “sabotaging” the fight against the pandemic.

“High-level role conflicts are very destructive. It sparks uncertainty, ambiguity and confusion. It must be extremely frustrating for the hard-working local health teams to get this type of double communication from the national top management,” Gilbert told NRK.

Espen Rostrup Nakstad, Deputy Director of Health at the Norwegian Directorate for Health and Social Affairs, said there was “no reason to rejoice” because of the existence of variants and the fact that not everyone has been vaccinated yet.

Prime Minister Erna Solberg also asserted that people should keep complying with what they are ordered to do by authorities.

“It is important not to revel in joy in advance. People may start thinking that they don’t need to be vaccinated, or that we stop doing as the authorities do,” she said.

Frode Forland, director of infection control at the National Institute of Public Health, said Norwegians couldn’t begin to think about life returning to normal until after the end of the summer.

The backlash Aavistland received yet again emphasizes how scientific and government elites literally never want the pandemic to end because it has enriched them with so much power.

Now that the precedent has been set in terms of the public’s cowering response, expect authorities to re-impose rolling lockdowns at the drop of a hat by merely pointing to new variants of COVID-19 or new viruses entirely.

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When last month it became clear that the Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin face to face summit would happen – now set for June 16 in Geneva – Kiev made its anger clear, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urging Biden to meet with him prior to any direct Putin talks. Zelensky further recently went on the attack slamming the White House for cutting Kiev out of key decisions on Nord Stream 2, particularly after weeks ago Biden agreed to drop existing sanctions against the German company overseeing the natural gas pipeline which bypasses Ukraine – and with it badly needed transit fees.

In an interview this past weekend with Axios, Zelensky said he was blindsided by Biden’s U-turn on the Russia to Germany pipeline after Biden gave him “direct signals” that the US was preparing to block the pipeline. The Ukrainian leader further called it “a weapon, a real weapon in the hands of the Russian Federation,” and that he doesn’t understand how “the bullets to this weapon can possibly be provided by such a great country as the US” – as he described it.

Just after giving the interview, on Monday Biden belatedly phoned Zelensky, also amid widespread anger within his Democratic base over “caving” to Putin, especially over Nord Stream 2, which is said to be a mere month or two away from completion, according to recent statements from Putin. 

In this call Zelensky finally scored the desired meeting with Biden, but it looks like it will take place after the US president first meets with Putin, with White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan subsequently telling reporters:

“They had the opportunity to talk at some length about all of the issues in the U.S.-Ukraine relationship and President Biden was able to tell president Zelensky that he will stand up firmly for Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and its aspirations as we go forward.”

And significantly: “He also told President Zelensky that he looks forward to welcoming him to the White House in Washington this summer after he returns from Europe,” according to Sullivan’s statement.

The Hill noted additionally that “Despite Zelensky’s appeal for a meeting, Sullivan did not say that Biden would meet with him before the summit with Putin.”

Thank you @POTUS @JoeBiden for inviting me to visit the @WhiteHouse in July during our phone conversation. I look forward to this meeting to discuss ways to expand strategic cooperation between Ukraine and #USA

— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) June 7, 2021

It is indeed looking like that meeting, which will mark Zelensky’s first White House visit since being elected to office in 2019, will come significantly after the Biden-Putin summit – in July according to follow-up confirmation by Zelensky.  

Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

The Danish Parliament has passed a new law that will allow the government to deport asylum seekers to countries outside of the European Union to have their cases considered abroad. The legislation is widely seen as a first step toward moving the country’s asylum screening process beyond Danish borders.

The law, proposed by the Social Democrat-led government, is aimed at discouraging frivolous asylum applications. It has been greeted with fury by those who favor mass migration, presumably out of fear that other EU countries may now follow Denmark’s lead.

Denmark, which already has some of the most restrictive immigration policies in Europe, is at the vanguard of European efforts to preserve local traditions and values in the face of mass migration, runaway multiculturalism, and the systematic encroachment of political Islam.

An amendment to the Aliens Act, approved on June 3 by 70 votes to 24, authorizes the government to enter into agreements with non-EU countries (so-called third countries) to allow it to “transfer third-country nationals and stateless persons who apply for asylum in Denmark to the third country in question for the purpose of substantive processing of asylum applications.”

Danish Immigration Minister Mattias Tesfaye, a Social Democrat and the son of an Ethiopian immigrant, told the Financial Times that Denmark had “identified a handful of countries,” mostly in Africa, that might be open to hosting migrant reception centers.

In April, Tesfaye signed a “Memorandum of Understanding” with Rwanda regarding “cooperation on asylum and migration issues.” The document raised speculation that Denmark wants to transfer migrants to the East African country, which has a tradition of hosting refugees. The memorandum spelled out the Danish government’s long-term objective:

“Denmark is committed to finding new and sustainable solutions to the present migration and refugee challenges that affect countries of origin, transit and destination. The current asylum system is unfair and unethical by incentivizing children, women and men to embark on dangerous journeys along the migratory routes, while human traffickers earn fortunes.

“There is a need to finding new ways of addressing the migration challenges by promoting a fairer and more humane asylum system based on a comprehensive approach. This includes addressing the root causes of irregular migration, providing more and better protection of refugees in the regions of conflict and increasing assistance to host nations, countries of origin and transit — along the migratory routes — in order to improve border management, strengthen asylum systems and fight human smuggling.

“It is also the vision of the Danish Government that the processing of asylum applications should take place outside of the EU in order to break the negative incentive structure of the present asylum system.”

Advocates of mass migration have criticized Denmark’s new law. The European Commission, the EU’s powerful administrative arm, said that it had “fundamental concerns” about deporting asylum seekers to countries outside of Europe:

“External processing of asylum claims raises fundamental questions about both the access to asylum procedures and effective access to protection. It is not possible under existing EU rules or proposals under the new pact for migration and asylum.”

Others have accused Denmark of seeking to “export” the asylum process. Gillian Triggs, assistant high commissioner of UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency, warned that “such practices undermine the rights of those seeking safety and protection, demonize and punish them and may put their lives at risk.”

UNHCR global spokesperson Shabia Mantoo added that the agency “remains firmly opposed to national initiatives that forcibly transfer asylum-seekers to other countries and undermine the principles of international refugee protection.”

In an interview with Euronews, Nikolas Feith Tan, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, said that Denmark’s plan to house asylum seekers outside its borders represents “a fundamental shift” in how the international protection system functions:

“Up until now, refugee protection has been primarily territorial. If you reach Denmark, then Denmark is responsible for both assessing whether you are a refugee or not, and if you are a refugee, then for granting you protection. The new legislation shifts that idea of territorial asylum.”

Tan said that transferring asylum seekers abroad in principle does not violate international law, but that the government should still expect be sued in Danish courts and at the European Court of Human Rights.

Tesfaye said that “a key aim” was to reduce the number of “spontaneous” asylum seekers to Denmark:

“The current asylum system has failed. It is inefficient and unfair. Children, women and men are drowning in the Mediterranean or are abused along the migratory routes, while human traffickers earn fortunes.”

Other Measures to Curb Mass Migration

Since assuming power in June 2019, the government of Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has introduced a raft of measures aimed at curbing mass migration. The measures build on those implemented by previous governments.

June 3, 2021. The Danish Parliament approved by 78 votes to 16 a new law that authorizes the government to revoke Danish citizenship from immigrants who are members of criminal gangs. The law is aimed at tackling a surge in migration-linked violent crime. The amendment to the Citizenship Act allows for the “denial of citizenship for certain forms of serious gang crimes considered detrimental to the vital interests of the State.” The law applies only to dual nationals and not to gang members who, by losing their Danish citizenship, would become stateless. The new law, which is not retroactive, enters into force on July 1, 2021.

Minister of Justice Nick Hækkerup said:

“Gang crime in no way belongs in Denmark. When foreigners or persons to whom we in Denmark have granted Danish citizenship participate in the gangs’ ruthless crime, it is a fundamental expression of contempt for the society of which they are a part. Therefore, it is good news that Parliament has today passed the government’s bill to provide the opportunity to revoke citizenship in the event of serious gang crime to the serious detriment of the state’s vital interests. It is a goal for the government to ensure that Danes can be safe in their everyday lives. When the gangs challenge that security, it must have noticeable consequences.”

May 26, 2021. The Danish Parliament approved by 67 votes to 26 a first-ever Repatriation Law which authorizes the government to deport failed asylum seekers and other migrants illegally in the country. The law allows the government to monitor foreigners’ mobile phones in order to more easily identify and deport them.

The law was approved amid reports that migrants who had been paid between 100,000 and 225,000 Danish kroner ($16,000 and $37,000) by the Danish government to leave the country took the money but then disappeared without actually leaving. Others took the money and left the country and later returned.

Minister for Foreign Affairs and Integration Mattias Tesfaye said:

“We have too many foreigners without legal residence in Denmark who do not return home. It is unsustainable. Both for the individual and for the Danish state, which must spend money on accommodating these people…. The penalties have been increased for those with deportation orders who do not comply with their control obligations. Now we have taken the next step towards a coherent repatriation policy. It is intended to help more foreigners without legal residence to return to their home countries. I am glad that there is broad support for this in the parliament.”

May 6, 2021. The Danish government tightened citizenship rules. In future, individuals with criminal records will be excluded from obtaining Danish citizenship. Individuals found guilty of committing immigration or social security fraud must wait for six years for their citizenship application to be considered. The new rules also introduced an employment requirement. Applicants must have been in full-time employment or have been self-employed for at least three years and six months within the previous four years. Five questions about Danish values ​​have been added to the citizenship test. Applicants will be required to correctly answer four out of the five questions. “There is great agreement among the parties to the agreement that it is crucial that an applicant has adopted Danish values,” the government said in a statement.

Minister for Foreign Affairs and Integration Mattias Tesfaye said:

“We have to draw a line in the sand. People who have been imprisoned must not have Danish citizenship.”

Spokesman for the Liberal Party, Morten Dahlin, added:

“Danish citizenship is a gift to be earned. Therefore, we must make an effort when handing out passports. Those we welcome in the Danish family must have embraced Denmark and stayed on the right side of the law. That is why we in the Liberal Party are happy that there is now a greater focus on Danish values ​​and that there is a crackdown on foreigners who have committed crimes. These have been important demands on our part.”

Conservative Rapporteur Marcus Knuth said:

“The Conservatives have been fighting for new rules for Danish citizenship for over a year. It is especially important to us that criminal foreigners with a prison sentence can never apply for Danish citizenship, and it is important to us that there is now an employment requirement, so one must now have worked the last 3½ out of four years. We also worked on a ceiling on the number of citizenships for applicants outside the EU and the Nordic countries, but unfortunately the government would not. In return, we now have an audit provision, so the government shall call for discussions if there is a significant increase in the number of applicants.”

Liberal Alliance Rapporteur Henrik Dahl said:

“I am first and foremost happy that, as something new, we demand that new citizens have worked for some years before they can get a Danish passport. It is only reasonable that one has contributed to the Danish economy before one gets full rights in Denmark.”

March 17, 2021. The Danish government announced a package of new proposals aimed at fighting “religious and cultural parallel societies” in Denmark. A cornerstone of the plan includes capping the percentage of “non-Western” immigrants and their descendants dwelling in any given residential neighborhood. The aim is to preserve social cohesion in the country by encouraging integration and discouraging ethnic and social self-segregation.

March 9, 2021. The Danish Parliament approved a new law that bans foreign governments from financing mosques in Denmark. The measure is aimed at preventing Muslim countries, particularly Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, from promoting Islamic extremism in Danish mosques and prayer facilities.

March 9, 2021. The Danish Parliament approved by 96 votes to 0 a new law that bans religious marriages of minors and forced marriages. Islamic preachers and others who conduct such marriages now face up to two years in prison and deportation from Denmark. The same goes for parents who allow their children enter into a Sharia marriage. The penalty for detaining a person in a forced marriage was increased to four years in prison. The law also authorizes the government to withdraw the passports of children if there is reason to believe that they are being sent abroad to be married, regardless of whether the marriage is legally valid. The law bans the use of Islamic nikah marriage contracts which often make it difficult for Muslim women to seek a divorce. The new law entered into force on March 15, 2021.

February 18, 2021. The Danish government announced that it would review the residency status of 350 Syrian migrants from Syria. The move came after the Danish Refugee Board decided that the Rif Damascus region of Syria is now safe and that there is no longer a basis for granting or extending temporary residence permits.

Minister for Foreign Affairs and Integration Mattias Tesfaye said:

“Denmark has been open and honest from day one. We have made it clear to the Syrian refugees that their residence permit is temporary. It can be withdrawn if protection is no longer needed. With the Refugee Board’s decisions this week, the authorities will now review the pile of cases from the same province. This is good. We must give people protection for as long as it is needed. But when conditions in the home country improve, a former refugee should return home and re-establish a life there.”

October 3, 2020. The government proposed a new Repatriation Law to ensure that more rejected asylum seekers were sent home. At least 1,100 rejected asylum seekers in Denmark do not have the right to reside in the country, and more than 200 rejected asylum seekers have remained Denmark for a more than five years. The measures include paying failed asylum seekers 20,000 Danish kroner (€2,700; $3,600) to leave the country.

September 11, 2020. The government proposed an amendment to the Foreigners’ Citizenship Act that would deny Danish citizenship to Danish jihadists — so-called foreign fighters. Cabinet Minister Kaare Dybvad said:

“The government will go to great lengths to prevent foreign fighters who have turned their backs on Denmark from returning to Denmark. We are talking about men and women who have committed or supported outrageous crimes. Therefore, it must also be possible in the future to deprive them of their citizenship.”

September 10, 2020. The government created a new ambassadorial post and a task force to work to establish migrant reception centers in third countries outside of the European Union — in Libya, Tunisia or Morocco.

May 31, 2018. The Danish Parliament approved a ban on Islamic full-face veils in public spaces. The law, sponsored by the center-right government in power at the time, and backed by the Social Democrats and the Danish People’s Party, passed by 75 votes to 30. Anyone found wearing a burka (which covers the entire face) or a niqab (which covers the entire face except for the eyes) in public in Denmark is subject to a fine of 1,000 Danish kroner (€134; $163); repeat offenders could be fined 10,000 Danish kroner. In addition, anyone found to be requiring a person through force or threats to wear garments that cover the face could be fined or face up to two years in prison.

January 26, 2016. The Danish Parliament adopted several measures aimed at reducing the number of asylum seekers arriving in Denmark: The reintroduction of the requirement that only refugees with the highest potential for integration into Danish society be accepted; an increase in time requirement to three years for family reunifications for asylum seekers; an increase in time requirement before the awarding of permanent residency status; additional integration requirements, including the ability to prove language skills, before permanent residency can be attained; permanent and temporary residency status were made easier to lose; the introduction of fees to apply for family reunification and to convert temporary residence permit to permanent residence permit; a 10% reduction in economic aid to asylum seekers; police were given power to confiscate from asylum seekers items of value to support the cost of their stay; asylum seekers were required to live in special housing centers.

Changing Demographics

Denmark, which has a population of 5.8 million, received approximately 40,000 asylum applications during the past five years, according to data compiled by Statista. Most of the applications received by Denmark, a predominately Lutheran country, were from migrants from Muslim countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

In recent years, Denmark has also permitted significant non-asylum immigration, especially from non-Western countries. Denmark is now home to sizeable immigrant communities from Syria (35,536); Turkey (33,111); Iraq (21,840); Iran (17,195); Pakistan (14,471); Afghanistan (13,864); Lebanon (12,990) and Somalia (11,282), according to Statista.

Muslims currently comprise approximately 5.5% of the Danish population, according to the Pew Research Center. Under a “zero migration scenario,” the Muslim population is projected to reach 7.6% by 2050; with a “medium migration scenario,” it is forecast to hit 11.9% by 2050; and under a “high migration scenario,” Muslims are expected to comprise 16% of the Danish population by 2050, according to Pew.

As in other European countries, mass migration has resulted in increased crime and social tension. Danish cities have been plagued by shootings, car burnings and gang violence.

During a recent EU review of the Schengen Agreement, the treaty that regulates the EU’s system of open borders, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Integration Mattias Tesfaye said:

“The possibility of reintroducing temporary border control is crucial for the security of Danes. This was shown by the refugee and migrant crisis in 2015. And the corona crisis has recently reaffirmed this. There is a need for changes to the Schengen rules so that member states have more flexibility to decide. We in Denmark know best when there is a need for control of Denmark’s borders.”

On January 22, during a parliamentary hearing on Danish immigration policy, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that she was determined to reduce the number of asylum approvals:

“Our goal is zero asylum seekers. We cannot promise zero asylum seekers, but we can establish the vision for a new asylum system, and then do what we can to implement it. We must be careful that not too many people come to our country, otherwise our social cohesion cannot exist. It is already being challenged.”

In an interview with Danish broadcaster DR on June 3, MP Rasmus Stoklund said that if someone seeks refuge in Denmark in the future, he or she must expect to be deported to a third country: “Therefore, we hope that people will stop seeking asylum in Denmark.”

Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearInvestigations.com,

When Fulton County, Ga., poll manager Suzi Voyles sorted through a large stack of mail-in ballots last November, she noticed an alarmingly odd pattern of uniformity in the markings for Joseph R. Biden. One after another, the absentee votes contained perfectly filled-in ovals for Biden — except that each of the darkened bubbles featured an identical white void inside them in the shape of a tiny crescent, indicating they’d been marked with toner ink instead of a pen or pencil.

Adding to suspicions, she noticed that all of the ballots were printed on different stock paper than the others she handled as part of a statewide hand recount of the razor-thin Nov. 3 presidential election. And none was folded or creased, as she typically observed in mail-in ballots that had been removed from envelopes.

In short, the Biden votes looked like they’d been duplicated by a copying machine.

“All of them were strangely pristine,” said Voyles, who said she’d never seen anything like it in her 20 years monitoring elections in Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta.

She wasn’t alone.

At least three other poll workers observed the same thing in stacks of absentee ballots for Biden processed by the county, and they have joined Voyles in swearing under penalty of perjury that they looked fake.

Now election watchdogs have used their affidavits to help convince a state judge to unseal all of the 147,000 mail-in ballots counted in Fulton and allow a closer inspection of the suspicious Biden ballots for evidence of counterfeiting. They argue that potentially tens of thousands may have been manufactured in a race that Biden won by just 12,000 votes thanks to a late surge of mail-in ballots counted after election monitors were shooed from State Farm Arena in Atlanta.

“We have what is almost surely major absentee-ballot fraud in Fulton County involving 10,000 to 20,000 probably false ballots,” said Garland Favorito, the lead petitioner in the case and a certified poll watcher who runs VoterGa.org, one of the leading advocates for election integrity in the state.

He said the suspect ballots remain in the custody of the election officials and inaccessible from public view.

“We have confirmed that there are five pallets of shrink-wrapped ballots in a county warehouse,” Favorito said in an interview with RealClearInvestigations.

He and other petitioners were ordered to meet at the warehouse May 28 to settle the terms of the inspection of the absentee ballots. But the day before the scheduled meeting, the county filed a flurry of motions to dismiss the case, delaying the inspection indefinitely.

“We will be in court on June 21 to resolve these motions,” said Favorito, calling them another “roadblock” the county has tried to throw in their way. He expects talks over the logistics of the inspection to resume after the Fourth of July holiday.

As part of his May 21 order, Superior Court Judge Brian Amero requested officials guard the warehouse around the clock until an inspection date can be set. But just eight days later, a breach in security was reported after sheriff’s deputies left their post for a couple of hours.

“The front door was [found] unlocked and wide open in violation of the court order,” Favorito said.

County officials confirmed that a motion-detection alarm was triggered Saturday, May 29, shortly after the deputies drove away from the building in their patrol cars around 4 p.m. But they said a locked room where the ballots are kept “was never breached or compromised.”

Favorito is not convinced, and his lawyer is seeking to obtain the video footage from building security cameras. “How do we know for certain there was no tampering with the ballots?” asked Favorito, who said he did not vote for Trump. News of the security lapse caught the attention of former President Trump, who has claimed his loss to Biden was marred by fraud. In a statement, he implied election officials in the Democratic-controlled county are trying to hide evidence of fraud.

“They are afraid of what might be found,” he asserted.

Trump is also closely monitoring the ongoing election audit in Arizona, another red state that turned blue in 2020. If evidence of fraud is found in these key swing states, it might help confirm suspicions the election was “stolen” from Trump and the 74 million who voted for him — as a recent poll found 61% of Republicans believe — as well as provide the proof of voter fraud that Democrats and major media have long claimed doesn’t exist.

The cases could potentially give other battleground states incentive to take steps to tighten election security and root out fraud, including passing legislation to limit the use of controversial mail-in drop boxes and require the verification of signatures on such ballots. In Georgia, relatively few mail-in ballots were rejected for invalid signatures in the November general election, even though several thousand had been disqualified for signature issues in the primary election.

In a move that inspired national boycotts alleging voter “suppression,” Georgia recently passed a law limiting, but not removing, the drop boxes. The state had installed them for the first time in 2020 under pressure from Democratic groups, who argued officials needed to make voting easier for minorities who didn’t trust the mail and feared going to the polls during the COVID scare.

The 38 drop boxes Fulton distributed throughout the county in the November election will be cut to eight in the future. The boxes had been largely unregulated and unattended — located outdoors, open 24 hours a day and available for drop-offs until the evening of Election Day, prompting complaints of ballot stuffing and double voting. But now they have to be located inside election offices or early voting locations, and can only be available during the hours when early voting is permitted. The new law also requires ballots be printed on special security paper.

Voting by mail traditionally was limited to voters who had clearly defined and well-documented reasons to be absent from the polls. But Democrats in key swing states lobbied to relax the rules in the middle of the election and amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Mail-in or drop-off ballots create opportunities for voter error and fraud. In a typical election, one in 20 mailed ballots are rejected, according to recent studies. More than 534,000 mail-in ballots were rejected during the 2020 Democratic primaries alone.

Still, both Republican and Democratic officials in Georgia say they have found no credible evidence of widespread fraud in the general election. Democrats, as well as many major media outlets, have written off Favorito’s group’s allegations of fraud as “conspiracy theories.”

“This is nothing more than a circus that’s being put on by those who promote the ‘big lie’ ” that Trump won the election, said Robb Pitts, the Democratic chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners.

“Where does it end? The votes have been counted. The elections have been certified. It’s over.”

Pitts effectively controls the county elections board through his Democratic appointee Mary Carole Cooney, who runs the board. They are in charge of securing the pallets of disputed Biden mail-in ballots awaiting inspection in the county warehouse.

But Judge Amero, who federal elections records show is a Democratic donor, felt compelled to unseal the ballots for a forensics review after reading the sworn affidavits submitted by election monitors. Here are key witnesses in the case:

Suzi Voyles, a veteran Fulton poll manager who audited the Nov. 14 recount at Georgia World Congress Center, testified she examined several stacks of ballots of about 100 ballots each from a cardboard box marked “Box No. 5 — Absentee — Batch Numbers 28-36.” She said these ballots “came from the ballot [drop] boxes that had been placed throughout Fulton County.”

“Most of the ballots had already been handled; they had been written on by people, and the edges were worn. They showed obvious use,” she wrote in her Nov. 17 affidavit. “However, one batch stood out. It was pristine. There was a difference in the texture of the paper,” and these mail-in ballots hadn’t been folded even though they ostensibly had been removed from envelopes.

All but three of the 110 ballots in the bundle — which had been labeled “State Farm Arena” — were marked for Biden and appeared to be “identical ballots.”

The most “alarming peculiarity” was the identically marked ovals next to Biden’s name. In every ballot, “The bubble next to ‘Joseph R. Biden’ had a slight white eclipse in the bubble,” she said, leading her to believe that the batch of 107 Biden ballots had been “copied” from a single ballot.

Voyles speculated that “additional absentee ballots had been added [for Biden] in a fraudulent manner” at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta on election night.

The void she and other auditors witnessed in the exact same spot of the oval filled in on 107 ballots for Biden “was alarming to us,” Voyles said in an RCI interview. “Every single bubble was precisely alike. I had never seen that before in 20 years” of election monitoring.

But when she and other recount workers raised concerns with county election officials, “we were told not to worry about it,” she said. “They seemed uninterested in the [integrity of the] ballots.”

After Voyles later blew the whistle in affidavits and state election hearings, she was fired as a poll manager by the Fulton County Department of Elections. “I got the boot for speaking the truth,” she told RCI.

Robin Hall, a certified Fulton County recount observer, also testified she witnessed a number of boxes of absentee ballots marked “100% for Biden” that appeared to be “perfectly filled out as if they were pre-printed with the presidential candidate selected.” She stated: “They did not look like a person had filled this out at home.  All of them looked alike.”

Judy Aube also worked at the World Congress Center on Nov. 14 where she observed the same thing: “suspicious batches” of mail-in ballots for Biden whose markings appeared identical, as if they had been duplicated by a machine and not filled out by a voter at home.

Barbara Hartman, another election official auditor, also doubted the authenticity of absentee ballots she handled that she said were never folded, as would normally be the case for ballots returned in an envelope by mail or dropped in a box. “The absentee ballots looked as though they had just come from a fresh stack,” she swore in her affidavit. “I could not observe any creases in the ballots and [it] did not seem like they were folded and put into envelopes or mailed out.”  Also, “The majority of the mail-in ballots that I reviewed contained suspicious black perfectly bubbled markings for Biden,” Hartman stated, adding that “they looked as if they were stamped.”

The veteran poll watchers found no plausible explanation for the anomalies other than possible fraud.

However, election officials have offered an explanation for why the mail-in ballots examined in the stacks did not have folds or creases. They say ballots are sometimes copied onto other paper when they are too damaged to be fed through one of the scanning machines during tabulation. The mailed ballots can be torn or crumpled by postal workers during delivery or by poll workers while opening them and removing them from envelopes, which could prevent the machines from reading them.

From controversial video at State Farm Arena, Atlanta, showing ballots being pulled from under tables. WSB-TV/YouTube

But Favorito suspects the hundreds, if not thousands, of allegedly duplicate absentee ballots for Biden might be connected to spikes in votes for Biden he observed late on election night in Fulton County after election officials cleared monitors from State Farm Arena and pulled cases full of ballots out from under tables and began scanning them.

“There’s always the chance it was an inside job,” said Favorito, a career IT professional who’s been a leading advocate for Georgia election integrity over the past two decades.

On Nov. 3, Fulton County elections officials informed monitors that they were shutting down the State Farm tabulation center before midnight, only to continue counting throughout the night while no one was watching.

“Election workers don’t bring ballots in after the supervisor has delayed processing until the morning, hide them under a table and then bring them out for scanning and tabulation after the supervisor tells [monitors] they are done scanning for the evening and they go home,” Favorito said.

“Once scanning [was] completed, an election line feed showed an unprecedented vote spike that turned the election in favor of Biden,” he added. In fact, “just over a half hour after workers scanned the potentially fraudulent ballots, an election line feed showed a 100,000-plus vote spike for Biden.”

“Where did those ballots come from and why did they handle them so suspiciously?” Favorito asked.

Voyles noted that the county elections supervisor who oversaw the secret scanning of the cases full of ballots also helps run the warehouse where the suspect ballots are being stored.

Phone calls and emails to Fulton County went unanswered.

Similar Anomalies, Other Counties

Favorito pointed out that the potential for counterfeit ballots exists in other Georgia counties, not just Fulton.

In fact, two Democrat poll workers blew the whistle on similar anomalies they witnessed in neighboring DeKalb and Cobb counties, where the election process also is controlled by Democrats.

Carlos E. Silva, for one, declared in a Nov. 17 affidavit that he observed a similar “perfect black bubble” in absentee ballots for Biden during the recount he worked in DeKalb County. And while overseeing the Cobb County recount, he swore he “observed absentee ballots being reviewed with the same perfect bubble that I had seen the night before in DeKalb. All of these ballots had the same characteristics: they were all for Biden and had the same perfect bubble.”

Added Silva, a registered Democrat: “There were thousands of [mail-in] ballots that just had the perfect bubble marked for Biden and no other markings in the rest of the ballot.”

Another registered Democrat, Mayra Romera, testified that while monitoring the Cobb County recount, she noticed that “hundreds of these ballots seemed impeccable, with no folds or creases. The bubble selections were perfectly made … and all happened to be selections for Biden.”

In a recent article pooh-poohing complaints of fraud in Georgia, as well as Arizona, the New York Times portrayed Favorito as “a known conspiracy theorist” and suggested he was a 9/11 truther. As evidence, it cited a 2002 book he published “questioning the origin of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

Asked about it, Favorito responded: “My book did not propose any theories on what happened on 9/11. I don’t mention anything about explosives” planted in the World Trade Center, as truthers have baselessly speculated. Rather, he said, he questioned Bush family business connections with the bin Laden family and other wealthy Saudis, and argued that the war on terror benefited the Bushes. He also faulted the Bush administration for “obstructing” FBI investigations into the attacks.

Favorito says he is a “constitutionalist” and neither a Republican nor a Trump supporter.