Chatham County has 100,000 votes audited, officials plan to finish recount ahead of deadline
A few days ago, the Chatham County Board of Elections annex was bustling with poll watchers, poll workers and protesters. But on Tuesday, the fifth day of Georgia’s hand audit, it was quiet.
A few poll workers were double checking ballots at three tables. The plexiglass viewing area held a couple of public onlookers, a far cry from Sunday, when it was packed with reporters and those who came out to watch the process unfold.
Recount Manager Billy Wooten, Diet Coke in hand, walked around the annex, answering questions where he could. He said there wasn’t much of an update from Monday, just “crossing t’s and dotting i’s” on a few batches of ballots they decided to recount before the deadline to upload the results of the audit to the Secretary of State.
On Tuesday, they were entering information from the hand audit into the system. They were up to around 100,000 of the 133,496 total votes cast, on pace to be finished by the Wednesday deadline.
“We’re taking our time, because we’ve got time,” Wooten said. "Unless something happens that absolutely comes out of left field, we will very easily finish everything before tomorrow, but again, we're not trying to rush it. We don't want to be in a hurry."
As the BOE team finishes the audit process, the results are put into a database and uploaded to a tool called ARLO. Once uploaded, the results from the hand audit will be compared with the certified Chatham results already on file with the Secretary of State's office.
“The whole intent of the audit is not a new set of results. The audit is a test of the certified results,” BOE Supervisor Russell Bridges said.
The results of the audit aren’t expected to change the results of the presidential election for the state, though thousands of votes favoring President Donald Trump were found in Floyd and Fayette Counties since Monday.
State Voting System Manager Gabriel Sterling said around 2,600 votes were found through the audit in the Republican-leaning county when poll workers realized they had failed to upload a memory card containing electronic counts of those votes on Election Day.
Sterling said the election in Floyd County was run by a volunteer after the director contracted COVID-19 and another election official broke a hip, having to be hospitalized.
Locating those 2,600 votes cut president-elect Joe Biden’s lead over Trump by a small margin. With Trump’s net gain of 778 votes from Floyd County, he is still 13,278 votes behind Biden statewide ahead of the election’s formal certification later this week, Sterling said.
Additionally, Fayette County failed to record 2,755 votes on a single memory card, Sterling said, a top official in the secretary of state's office.
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.
Sterling also addressed claims of illegal votes being cast in the election, noting that “in every single election in the history of mankind,” illegal votes have been cast. He said the SOS office will investigate any claims of illegal voting.
“There have been illegal votes cast. We know that,” Sterling said. “We have not seen any evidence of 13,378 of those cast.”
The deadline for the Secretary of State to certify the election results will be Friday by 5 p.m. Sterling said they are on track to meet that deadline.
“It's going to take some time to get through all of this, but we have seen nothing that indicates that there is a such a high percentage that it would change the outcome of the vote.”