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ATLANTA (AP) – After the Trump campaign called for a recount of the presidential polls in Georgia, county election officials have just over a week to complete the new tally, a senior election official said on Monday.
Election results certified last week Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has shown Democrat Joe Biden to beat Republican President Donald Trump by 12,670 votes out of about 5 million votes, or about 0.25 percent. Under state law, a candidate can request a recount when the margin is less than 0.5%.
The Trump campaign on Saturday sent an official request for a recount at the office of the secretary of state.
Counties can begin the recount at 9 a.m. on Tuesday and are scheduled to end at 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 2, said Gabriel Sterling, who oversaw the implementation of the state’s new voting system for the Secretary of State’s office. State, at a video press conference Monday. Counties need to let the public know when they will count during this time so that political party observers and any interested members of the public can be there to observe, Sterling said.
This will be the third time that the votes in the presidential race will be counted in Georgia. After the initial tally following election day, Raffensperger selected the presidential race for an audit required by state law. Because of the small margin, he said, the audit required that every vote in that contest be recounted by hand.
County election workers completed the count last week. As some previously un-counted ballots were discovered during the audit, several counties had to recertify their totals. Next, the Secretary of State certified the results and Governor Brian Kemp certified the list of the state’s 16 presidential voters.
A state electoral council rule requires that the recount requested by the Trump campaign be done by machine. County election officials will create test sets of 100 ballots – 75 marked by touch-screen voting machines and 25 hand-marked – and count those ballots by hand, Sterling said. Then they run those ballots through a scanner to make sure the results match. Once they determine that each scanner counts accurately, each ballot will be scanned again, he said.
Sterling also addressed a request that the State Republican Party made on Sunday, urging the Secretary of State to order an audit of missing ballots in the 2020 election, including verifying the signature matching process.
When Georgian voters return a postal ballot, they must sign an oath on the outer envelope. County election office workers are required to ensure that the signature matches the signature on the mail-in ballot request and the voter registration system, Raffensperger said. Once the signatures are verified, in order to protect the secrecy of the ballot enshrined in Georgian law, the ballot papers are separated from the envelopes and cannot be compared to individual voters.
Sterling said the Secretary of State’s office was still reviewing whether some sort of investigation was appropriate, but said there were no specific claims that the signature matching process was no had not been performed correctly.
“We can’t really see a legal path that makes sense because if you open investigations into a widespread grievance without any evidence, it leaves someone else in the future with an opportunity to do the exact same thing.” Sterling said.
Also on Monday, the state electoral council held a special meeting and approved an extension of two emergency rules intended to take into account the large number of postal votes expected due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. A rule allows absent ballot boxes in each county. The other allows counties to start opening and scanning mail-in ballots about two weeks before the election, and the council added a requirement for them to start processing one week before election day.
The election commission had planned to discuss another possible emergency rule on verification of residency during the voter registration process. But Secretary of State’s Office General Counsel Ryan Germany told council members it turns out state law already addresses the issue, and the Secretary of State’s office has instead decided to send instructions to county election officials reminding them of their authority and responsibilities under this law.
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