By Bruce LeVell

The results of a free and fair election should be held as sacred in any functioning democracy. The results of an election marred by widespread lawlessness, favoritism, and other irregularities, on the other hand, are worse than worthless.

With a razor-thin margin like the one in Georgia’s presidential election, even small discrepancies loom large. The discrepancies outlined in the latest litigation filed by The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society are absolutely enormous, making it impossible to accurately discern the true will of the people.

Extensive, on-the-ground investigations conducted by attorneys and investigators for The Amistad Project over the course of many weeks identified a pattern of unlawful conduct on the part of state and local election officials that cast grave doubt on the validity of current vote tallies. Expert analysis of government data indicates that these violations resulted in more than 200,000 potentially fraudulent votes, including more than 130,000 illegal ballots that were counted and tens of thousands of legal ballots that were not counted.

If Democrat candidate Joe Biden held even a slight edge in these votes — and in all likelihood they skewed heavily in his favor, based on the nature of the votes in question — then there is a high probability that the outcome would have been reversed had the tabulation been based only on legal votes.

Much has been made of concerns about signature-matching for absentee ballots — and rightly so, given the fact that Georgia’s secretary of state instituted a new procedure without legislative authority as part of a settlement agreement with the Democratic Party, which The Amistad Project lawsuit describes in detail. However, the lawsuit identifies another, even more disturbing pattern of misconduct: a coordinated public-private partnership that created a two-tiered election system and effectively put Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in charge of administering elections in some of the most populous parts of the state.

Through a formerly obscure leftist nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), Zuckerberg funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to local election officials all over the country, with a particular emphasis on Democrat strongholds in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia. Fulton County alone received $6.3 million from CTCL, which also gave smaller amounts to more than a dozen other counties with a history of voting reliably for Democrat candidates.

The grants themselves were illegal under state law, which prohibits election officials from receiving monies from any source other than tax revenues. But the real threat emanated from the strings-attached grant agreements, which paid the salaries of election workers and funded the purchase of voting equipment on the condition that the recipients adhere to a number of stringent requirements designed to encourage absentee voting and reduce the likelihood that defective or flawed absentee ballots would be rejected. Failing to abide by the terms mandated by CTCL would require election officials to forfeit the full amount of the grants.

One of those conditions involved the number of ballot drop boxes in each county. In four Democrat-dominated counties that received CTCL funds, there was one drop box for every 14 square miles. In the other 155 counties, where Republican voters are more prevalent, there was one drop box for every 294 square miles.

Just as significantly, the CTCL funding and associated conditions created an illegal two-tiered voting system that violated Georgians’ rights to due process and equal protection under the law, giving voters in predominantly Democratic parts of the state crucial advantages that were not available to voters in counties that did not receive CTCL funding.

The impact of these actions shows up clearly in the rejection rate for absentee ballots, which fell from 6.4% in 2016 to just 0.2% in 2020, despite the massive increase in the number of absentee ballots submitted this year.

The U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures sole discretion over the administration of elections, but Zuckerberg and CTCL usurped this authority in a manner that was clearly tailored to benefit Joe Biden, thereby violating both state and federal law.

Unfortunately, the misconduct was so pervasive as to make it impossible to sort out the mess in a timely fashion. We don’t know for certain who really won the most valid votes in Georgia, but we do know for certain that the results presented to the public are not the result of a free and fair election. Accepting those results for the sake of convenience would be a grave disservice to democracy, setting a dangerous precedent that would undermine public confidence in future elections.

Bruce LeVell is the Executive Director of National Diversity Coalition for Trump. He is the former chair of the Gwinnett County, Georgia, Republican Party and a frequent contributor on Fox News, One America News, Newsmax TV, MSNBC, and CNN.