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ATLANTA (AP) – As Georgia counties prepare for a manual count of the presidential race, top state election officials plan to quarantine after his wife tests positive for coronavirus, a his office declared Thursday.
The tally stems from an audit required by new state law, not because there are questions about the integrity of the Georgia election or the results. Democrat Joe Biden leads Republican President Donald Trump by 14,000 votes. There are no examples of similar recounts that have overturned leads of this magnitude.
“The purpose of the audit is to show that the machines counted the ballots fairly,” said Gabriel Sterling, who oversaw the implementation of the state’s new voting system for the Secretary of State’s office.
County election officials must begin the manual count by 9 a.m. on Friday and complete it by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, state officials said. The state certification deadline is November 20.
Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s wife Tricia tested positive on Thursday, Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs told The Associated Press. Brad Raffensperger was going to get tested and plans to self-quarantine as a precaution even if his test is negative, Fuchs said, adding that the secretary’s quarantine would not affect the audit.
Raffensperger has been criticized by his fellow Republicans since the results swung in favor of Biden.
US Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler called for his resignation on Monday, saying he had mismanaged the election, but not citing any specific incidents of wrongdoing. The two senators face a second round on January 5 which will determine which party controls the Senate.
Raffensperger has said he will not resign and has defended his office’s handling of the election.
U.S. Representative Doug Collins, who heads Trump’s recount team in Georgia, and Republican Party Chairman David Shafer on Tuesday sent Raffensperger a letter asking him to order a manual recount of the nearly 5 million ballots from Georgia before certifying the results, among other requests.
This has led to criticism accusing Raffensperger of giving in to Trump. A race audit is required by law but it is up to the Secretary of State to choose the race. Sterling has categorically denied that the choice of the presidential race and the subsequent decision to take a full count was the result of pressure from the president.
“Before the Trump campaign even talked about the possibility of a recount or a recount, we knew there was a specific purpose for an audit in the law. This specific goal was to instill confidence in the outcome of this election, ”Sterling said at a press conference Thursday.
The audit is a new requirement that was included in a 2019 law that also provided guidelines the state was using to purchase a new electoral system from Dominion Voting Systems for more than $ 100 million. Doing a manual tally of the nearly 5 million votes cast in Georgia in the November 3 election is a colossal task.
“It is an extremely daring endeavor to hand-count all the ballots cast in a presidential contest, on an entirely new voting system, in the midst of a pandemic. It’s not a small business, ”said Mark Lindeman, interim co-director of Verified Voting, a non-partisan group that tracks voting technology and provides technical support for Georgia’s audit.
Chris Harvey, chief electoral officer for the secretary of state’s office, sought during a training call Thursday to allay any apprehension county election officials might be feeling.
“Keep in mind that what we’re doing is relatively simple,” he said. “We identify the votes and count the pieces of paper.”
For the audit, county election officials will work with the paper ballots in batches, dividing them into stacks for each candidate. Then they’ll count each stack by hand, Fuchs said. Sterling had said on Wednesday that the ballots would be counted by machine.
During the training call, county election officials saw a video with children showing how it would work.
For the count, the ballots are distributed in batches to teams of two auditors. The first auditor takes the ballot, reads the presidential race selection aloud and passes it to the second auditor who also reads the name aloud before putting it in a stack that matches that candidate, according to the video.
Some ballots are set aside for verification by a bipartisan review committee, including those where the verifiers cannot agree on the voter’s intention and those with candidates registered.
After the verifiers have finished sorting the ballots into piles, the first verifier takes a ballot and counts it out loud before passing it to the second verifier who does the same sorting the ballots for each candidate. in stacks of 10 for easy counting, according to the video.
After counting all the votes, they record the total for each candidate and return the ballots to their ballot box.
The process of deliberately saying the candidate’s name and counting out loud is meant to avoid mistakes, said Ginny Roest of VotingWorks, a non-partisan nonprofit that focuses on building a voting system and audit and assists the Secretary of State’s office.
Sterling said the final numbers found in the audit tally will almost certainly be slightly different from the numbers previously reported by counties, but the overall result is expected to remain the same. Results will not be released on an ad hoc basis when counties finish counting, but will instead be announced once the full count is complete, he said. The results of the new audit count are what will be certified.
There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law provides for this option for a candidate who follows if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage point. Biden’s lead was 0.28 percentage points on Thursday afternoon.
Once the results of the audit are certified, the losing campaign can request that recount, which will be done using scanners that will read and count the votes, Raffensperger said.
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Associated Press writer Ben Nadler in Atlanta contributed reporting.
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