[ad_1]
A manual recount of the U.S. presidential race in Georgia has yielded more than 2,500 votes in a county that were not previously counted, but election officials said today that will not alter the overall outcome of the race.
Cobb County elections officials handle ballots during an audit in Georgia. Source: Associated Press
Nearly 5 million votes were cast in the presidential election in Georgia, and Democrat Joe Biden had led Republican President Donald Trump by about 14,000 votes.
The unofficial breakdown of votes not previously raised was 1,643 for Trump, 865 for Biden and 16 for libertarian Jo Jorgensen, according to Gabriel Sterling, who oversaw the implementation of the new state electoral system for the secretary of state’s office.
“The reason you do an audit is to find this kind of thing,” Sterling said.
He said the issue appeared to be an isolated problem and that “there are no fundamental changes” in other counties.
County Elections Board Chairman Tom Rees said the roughly 2,500 ballots appear to have been cast during early voting in person, but election officials weren’t sure how they were bypassed.
The county elections office suffered several setbacks, including a senior official infected with the coronavirus, and it appears that proper procedures were not followed when the results were machine tabulated, Sterling said.
But the county had the paper ballots and detected the problem during manual counting, he said.
The manual counting comes from a state law that requires a race to be audited to ensure that new voting machines accurately count votes. It was not the result of any suspicious problem with the results or an official recount request.
Once the recount is complete and the results are certified, the losing campaign can request a recount, which would be done using scanners that read and count the votes.
It is up to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to select the race to be audited, and he said the presidential race made more sense because of its importance and the narrow margin that separates the candidates. Because of that small margin, Raffensperger said a full manual count was necessary.
Trump, who has made unsubstantiated claims of voting irregularities and fraud, and his campaign have taken to social media to criticize the way the state’s manual count was being carried out. Raffensperger responded in social media posts of his own disputing his claims.
Biden’s campaign officials, meanwhile, say that while the recount may slightly alter vote counts, the overall result would be “imperceptible.”
“We continue, after two and a half days of this audit, to agree with the secretary of state that there is no reason to believe that widespread wrongdoing has been found,” Biden’s campaign attorney Patrick Moore said yesterday in a call with journalists.
County election officials were ordered to begin the count at 9 a.m. last Friday and end it at 11:59 p.m. Wednesday (local time). The deadline for the state to certify the election results is this Friday, November 20.
Raffensperger acknowledged last week that manual counting would be “heavy lifting” for counties.
A vast majority of the 159 counties in the state had completed the physical manual count by today and were working on data entry and quality control measures, making sure they had counted each batch of ballots and only counted each batch once, before. to send the results to the secretary. state, Sterling said.
State election officials have said they will not release any results from the recount until the entire process is complete.
As the count unfolded across the state, it seemed to go smoothly in most places.
The masked workers divided into two-person audit teams sorted the paper ballots into stacks for each candidate and then counted each stack by hand. There were bipartisan panels to review certain ballots, including those where the auditors could not agree on the voter’s intent and those with written candidates.
The monitors, appointed by the local Democratic and Republican parties, were allowed to circulate between the auditing stations, but could not touch the ballots or record anything. The media and public were also able to watch, but were asked to do so from a designated area.
Fulton and DeKalb counties, two of the most populous in the state, spent Saturday preparing for the recount, and then workers began sorting and counting the ballots on Sunday. Both counties had hundreds of workers available and said they managed to finish counting last night.
During peak hours, Fulton County had more than 170 two-person audit teams working at the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta to count more than 528,000 ballots. Divided into two shifts each day, about 300 workers in DeKalb County counted the roughly 370,000 votes cast in the November 3 election.
Cobb County Elections Director Janine Eveler said in a video posted on the county’s Twitter account yesterday that workers had completed about half of the county’s nearly 400,000 ballots and were on track to finish on time.
Some of the ballots counted on Saturday should be counted again because workers sorted the ballots by hand and then ran them through counting machines, rather than counting them by hand, he said.
Raffensperger’s office has consistently said that the results are likely to differ slightly from those previously reported by the counties, but that the difference is not expected to be enough to change the result. The tally resulting from the audit is what will be certified, election officials said.
The AP has not declared a winner in Georgia, where Biden leads Trump by 0.3 percentage points.
There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law provides that option to a candidate who falls behind if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points.
AP’s practice is not to call for a race that is, or may be, subject to a recount.
