With recount looming in presidential race, Columbus election officials push to certify votes
With Georgia’s contentious 2020 election still far from over, the next few weeks could be as hectic as the run up to Election Day and its immediate aftermath.
That’s why the Muscogee County Board of Elections and Registration decided it needed to certify local election results Friday night, rather than waiting until a meeting that had been scheduled for Nov. 12.
Georgia election officials have been watching state tallies not only to decide the apparent winner in a tight presidential race, which could trigger a recount, but to determine whether a close Public Service Commission contest could force a December runoff, which soon would be followed by a registration deadline and then early voting for two U.S. Senate runoffs expected in January.
Besides all that, the state is preparing for what it calls a “risk-limiting audit” of Georgia’s new ballot marking devices, which replaced its old voting machines with a system that produces printed ballots to be fed into optical scanners. The audit essentially is a statistical sampling of the votes cast to test whether the count is accurate, said Nancy Boren, executive director of the county elections board.
Before the state officially can declare any runoffs, or call for a recount, the vote in all 159 counties must be certified locally before state election leaders can certify the overall results.
“That’s why they’re pushing so hard for us to certify,” Boren said Friday evening as Muscogee County’s five-member elections board met to sift through hundreds of provisional and overseas military ballots to certify the final vote totals.
Ballot review
One of the tasks involved was reviewing 324 provisional ballots, which voters cast when they encounter some issue at the polls that precludes their voting as usual. The issue could be that their names didn’t show up on the voter rolls, or they didn’t have the required identification, or they went to the wrong voting precinct and didn’t have time to get to the right one.
Such issues can be resolved if election workers find the voter was duly registered or the voter later produces the required ID, in which case the workers recommend the board count the vote in any race in which the voter was eligible to cast a ballot.
First those ballots are examined by what are called “adjudicators,” who include representatives from the two major parties as well as a neutral appointee designated by the board. Each swears an oath to conduct the review truthfully, without misrepresenting the votes.
The board also had to handle 386 ballots sent from overseas, most from people deployed with the armed forces. Those come through what’s called “electronic ballot delivery,” and the elections board has to examine each and transfer the votes onto a standard paper ballot, like the ones used for mail-in absentee votes. Once transferred, the votes are fed into an optical scanner to be counted.
Looking ahead
The thin margin in Georgia’s presidential race between Democrat Joe Biden and incumbent Republican Donald Trump appeared headed for the half a percentage point that by law could trigger a statewide recount.
The recount would not be done by hand, with election workers eyeballing each ballot, but it would require that the marked ballots again be fed into optical scanners. Typically recounts shift a few votes in the final tally, but rarely change the outcome of an election.
Boren said the Muscogee elections board finished certifying its results at 10 p.m Friday.
Some key dates to come, should runoffs be set as anticipated, are:
Dec. 1: The date for a possible state Public Service Commission runoff between Republican incumbent Lauren Bubba McDonald and Democrat Daniel Blackmon, for which mail-in ballots would be sent out and early voting would begin as soon as possible.
Dec. 7: The deadline to register to vote in the expected U.S. Senate special election runoff in January between incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler and Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock, and a second Senate runoff between Republican incumbent David Perdue and Democratic challenger John Ossoff.
Dec. 14: The date early voting’s to begin for January runoffs.
Dec. 19: The date set for mandatory Saturday early runoff voting.
Jan. 5: The day the runoffs are to be held.
This story was originally published November 7, 2020 at 7:00 AM.