A second Georgia county has uncovered a trove of
votes not previously included in election results, but the additional
votes won't change the overall outcome of the presidential race, the
secretary of state's office said Tuesday.
A memory card that hadn't been uploaded in Fayette County, just south
of Atlanta, was discovered during a hand tally of the votes in the
presidential race that stems from part of a legally mandated audit to
ensure the new election machines counted the votes accurately, said
Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the secretary of state’s office.
The memory card's 2,755 votes are not enough to flip the lead in the
state from Democrat Joe Biden to Republican President Donald Trump. The
breakdown of the uncounted ballots was 1,577 for Trump, 1,128 for Biden,
43 for Libertarian Jo Jorgensen and seven write-ins, Sterling said.
Election officials on Monday said Floyd County, in north Georgia, had
found more than 2,500 ballots that hadn't been previously scanned.
Both counties will have to recertify their results, and the margin
between Trump and Biden will be about 13,000 votes when those previously
uncounted votes are accounted for, Sterling said.
County elections workers have been working on the hand tally since
Friday. State law leaves it up to the secretary of state to choose which
race to audit. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger selected the
presidential race and said the tight margin meant the audit would
require a full hand recount.
The counties have until 11:59 p.m. Wednesday to complete the hand
count. The secretary of state’s office originally said the results of
the hand tally would be certified. But Sterling said Tuesday that the
state would instead certify the results certified by the counties.
Once the results are certified, if the margin between the candidates
remains within 0.5%, the losing campaign can request a recount. That
would be done using scanners that read and tally the votes and would be
paid for by the state, Raffensperger has said.
State election officials have consistently defended the integrity of
Georgia's vote count and have said the audit is expected to affirm the
results. They have conceded that there may be wrongdoing — people who
vote twice or people who vote despite not being eligible — and have
pledged to investigate any cases.
“We have not seen widespread voter fraud," Sterling said. "We do know
there's going to be illegal voting, but it's going to be down in the
low hundreds, not in the 12,929 range.”
The Associated Press 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 trailing
candidate if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points. It is AP’s
practice not to call a race that is – or is likely to become – subject
to a recount.
Also on Tuesday, Raffensperger announced that a random audit of a
sample of Georgia’s new voting machines found no evidence of hacking or
tampering.
Raffensperger last week asked Pro V&V, an Alabama-based testing
laboratory, to do the audit, his office said in a news release. The
company “found no evidence of the machines being tampered.”
“We are glad but not surprised that the audit of the state’s voting
machines was an unqualified success,” Raffensperger said in the release.
The new election system the state bought last year from Dominion
Voting Systems for more than $100 million includes touchscreen voting
machines that print paper ballots that are read and tabulated by
scanners.
The audit was done on a random sample of voting machines from Cobb,
Douglas, Floyd, Morgan, Paulding and Spalding counties. The equipment
tested included the touchscreen voting machines, precinct scanners and
absentee ballot scanners.
The company took the software and firmware out of the equipment to
check that the only software and firmware present was that certified for
use by the secretary of state's office, the release says.
Pro V&V is a voting system test laboratory that is certified by
the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which sets voluntary guidelines
for election management and certification.
