Georgia’s recount is down to the final ballots. Will counties meet the audit deadline?
Georgia election officials said Wednesday that county election boards will likely meet their recount deadline with only tens of thousands of presidential ballots left to tally.
Gabriel Sterling, the state’s voting system implementation manager, said that as of 11 a.m. more than 4.9 million of Georgia’s almost 5 million votes have been recounted by hand, and data checking work is underway. County election officials must complete their audit by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, and the state must certify its election results by Friday.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” Sterling said. “They look like they are on a good path. We still have to go through the quality control process. ...No one has said to me ‘I’m sending up a red flare that we’re not going to be able to make it.’”
Finding human error
President-elect Joe Biden’s lead statewide is nearly 12,800 votes. He gained a net total of about 30 votes after an Election Day memory card in Douglas County was found. The county will upload the votes and recertify their results.
Douglas is one of four counties where election errors forced local officials to fix their final tally. The audit in Walton County found that a memory card of nearly 284 votes had not been uploaded. Floyd County workers had to rescan early and provisional ballots after 2,600 uncounted votes were found. Fayette County election officials found a memory card of nearly 2,800 votes that they had to upload to its final tally.
The errors in these counties cut Biden’s lead by more than 1,000 votes statewide. Barring issues like these, the scanned totals from counties will not change. The purpose of Georgia’s audit under current law is to confirm the outcome of the election, not the exact margins.
These issues were the result of human error, election officials said. Georgia’s Secretary of State office has gone to great lengths over the past several weeks to debunk conspiracy theories about widespread voting irregularities, machines flipping votes and election tampering.
No machine tampering
Pro V&V, a U.S. Election Assistance Commission-certified testing laboratory, audited a random sample of the state’s voting machines. They found no evidence that the machines were tampered with, according to a news release from Raffensperger’s office Tuesday.
A majority of counties have reported no or slight vote differences. As of 11 a.m., 112 of Georgia’s 159 counties reported single-digit differences between their initial totals and the number of ballots found during the hand audit. A total of 58 reported zero difference, Sterling said.
High-ranking national and state Republicans continue to call the integrity of the state’s audit into question.
David Shafer, chair of the Georgia Republican Party, tweeted Wednesday morning regarding a Republican monitor finding a 9,626 vote error in DeKalb County in favor of Biden during its local audit.
However, the error was introduced during the hand recount and corrected during the audit process. It does not affect the current presidential margin in Georgia. The error would have been caught during data checks following the hand recount, Sterling said.
Trying not to ‘feed the beast’
President Donald Trump, who has tweeted false or disputed claims about alleged election fraud, called Georgia’s recount a “joke” Wednesday morning and later shared a video of Floyd County election workers during their rescanning of early and provisional ballots. County workers rescanned those ballots Tuesday.
“That’s why you don’t release interim audit reports,” Sterling said of the DeKalb County recount. “You’re going to have wild swings like this that, for conspiracy theorists, just point to problems. We’re trying not to feed the beast on that.”
The Trump campaign could request a formal recount if Biden’s margin of victory is within 0.5% after the state certifies its election results. Counties will pay for both the cost of the audit and a recount if Trump requests it, Sterling said.
Georgia election officials moved races set for Dec. 1 — including a runoff for the Public Service Commission and a handful of local races — to Jan. 5. The move saves counties millions of dollars, Sterling said. The state is also looking for ways to use some federal funds to offset audit and potential recount costs for local governments.
“We are continuing to remain as transparent as we can through the process,” Sterling said.
This story was originally published November 18, 2020 at 1:26 PM.