Columbus elections office closes to public after worker tests positive for COVID-19
A worker in the Muscogee County elections office has tested positive for COVID-19, just a day after employees there finished recounting votes in the Nov. 3 presidential election.
The worker was not among those staffing the recount that took place this week in the Columbus Council chambers of the City Services Center off Macon Road, but those who handled the recount had been in the unidentified employee’s company and could have been exposed to the coronavirus, said Nancy Boren, executive director of the Muscogee County Board of Elections and Registration.
As a result, the elections office is closed to the public until it can be sanitized, and the council chambers will be as well, Boren said.
The news comes as the Monday registration deadline nears for Georgia’s Jan. 5 U.S. Senate and Public Service Commission runoffs. Boren said anyone who wants to register at the elections office will be able to do that downstairs in the services center.
Meanwhile, everyone who works in the office will have to be tested, she said Thursday as the elections board met in the council chambers to certify the results of this week’s recount.
“We are in the process now of getting a sanitizing service to clean the elections office, to clean council chambers,” she said. “That will begin at 3 p.m. today. We have scheduled employees to have testing Saturday from 8 to 11 (a.m.), and we’ll have those results Monday.”
Having just been informed of the worker’s test results, Boren said other steps were yet to be determined.
“Right now the elections office is closed for public access,” she said. “We have notified everyone we know who has been in contact with either the elections office employee or an elections office employee in the council chambers.... We’re still in the process of determining what further actions we take. We know the sanitizing. We know employees need to go be tested, and we’re limiting contact among each other and board members and any other people.”
Both major political parties had monitors observing the recount that began Monday, but the room was not as crowded as it was earlier, when volunteers from those parties participated in an audit of the presidential election, sitting close together as they conducted a recount by hand.
The worker who tested positive would not have been in contact with the recount monitors, Boren said. “But again, we were in contact, so we were back and forth in the office, and of course we work all in the elections office together.”
This story was originally published December 3, 2020 at 3:20 PM.