Fulton County, Georgia is knee deep in an election fraud investigation, and things just got murkier. RealClearInvestigations (RCI) has learned exclusively that “state investigators quietly broke the seal on one suspicious box and inspected the hundreds of votes it contained for signs of fraud.”

However, the so-called inspection occurred despite the fact that a judge had issued a protective order on the ballots in January. Additionally, the state officials never informed the judge that an inspection was taking place.

The ballots are at the center of possible election fraud in the Georgia presidential race, which Joe Biden won by a mere 12,000 votes. Chief investigator for the secretary of state’s office, Frances Watson, confirmed to RCI in a statement that she did indeed send investigators to inspect the sealed ballots.

“Our investigators looked into it and didn’t find anything” she said, yet added the investigation is “still ongoing.” Still ongoing is a loose term for the Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who urged Superior Court Judge Brian Amero to deny the election watchdogs’ requests to inspect the ballots in a nine-page amicus brief recently filed.

As RCI reports, “the watchdogs question why state officials did not disclose their activities to the court and fear they may have ‘tampered’ with the sealed ballots, which are at the center of their lawsuit seeking access to all 147,000 absentee ballots cast during the 2020 election in Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta.”

The court petitioners, led by longtime Georgia poll watcher Garland Favorito who founded VoterGA.org, says “if the secretary of state’s office did that, they tampered with the ballots and violated Georgia state law.”  And because Judge Amero had the ballots sealed, “they would have had to ask for a court order to unseal and inspect those ballots and they never did that” added Favorito.

Even thee attorneys for Raffensperger who filed the brief with Amero in April stated “the security and confidentiality of ballots is to be strictly maintained, and the court should be cautious in granting petitioners’ access to ballots that Georgia law requires to remain under seal, which makes it a felony as soon as petitioners were to lay hands on them.”

Clearly the secretary of state, who did not respond to questions as to why it kept the “inspection” a secret from the court, knew ballots were “to remain under seal.”