GA county finds 2,800 votes on memory card not uploaded during tally, election officials say
State election officials said Tuesday that one Georgia county initially failed to upload 2,800 ballots, which when tallied cut President-elect Joe Biden’s lead by 500 votes.
Biden currently leads Trump in Georgia by almost 13,000 votes.
Gabriel Sterling, the state’s voting system implementation manager, said Fayette County election workers will upload those votes and recertify their election results. Of the 2,755 early in-person votes, about 1,600 were cast for Donald Trump and 1,100 were cast for Biden.
Unlike the issue in Floyd County, these ballots were scanned on to a memory card. However, Fayette election officials didn’t upload the scanned votes, Sterling said. The issue was found during the county’s by-hand audit of Georgia’s presidential race.
“Because of the audit, we found this,” Sterling said. “There were several spots where the human beings who were running it didn’t follow the procedures.”
Despite some issues, a majority of Georgia counties have reported no or slight differences between their initial totals and the by-hand recount. As of Tuesday afternoon, 57 counties reported no difference and 21 reported a net one-vote difference. Roughly 32 counties reported single-digit differences, Sterling said.
In cases of errors like the ones in Floyd and Fayette, counties will update their election results. The purpose of Georgia’s audit under current law is to confirm the outcome of the election, not the exact margins.
There’s a potential vote issue in Walton County as well, Sterling said. There may be a memory card with 224 votes that were not uploaded.
“This is, for lack of a better word, normal,” Sterling said. “You have 159 counties with different levels of resourcing. ...All of this is normal. The abnormal thing is the presidential race is now within (less than 13,000 votes.)“
County election officials must complete their audit by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, and the state must certify its election results by Nov. 20.