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ATLANTA (AP) – Masked election workers in teams of two began counting ballots in Georgia counties on Friday, a record of the presidential race that stems from an audit required by new state law .
The law requires that a race be checked to verify that the new voting machines counted the ballots accurately, and not because of suspicious issues with the results. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger chose to audit the presidential race and said the narrow margin – Democrat Joe Biden leads Republican President Donald Trump with around 14,000 votes – meant a manual tally was needed.
Statewide, audit teams worked with batches of paper ballots, dividing them into stacks for each candidate, before counting each stack by hand. Biparty panels were on hand to review some ballots, including those where verifiers could not agree on voter intent and those with registered candidates.
The monitors, appointed by the local Democratic and Republican parties, were allowed to move between the checkpoints but could not touch the ballots or record anything. News media and members of the public were also allowed to observe, but were required to do so from a designated area.
In suburban Atlanta, Cobb County, several dozen audit teams sat at tables in a large room at an event center in Marietta as they began counting ballots. vote of absent. One auditor picked up a ballot, read the candidate’s name aloud and then passed it to the other auditor, who also said the name before placing the ballot in a bin marked with the name of the candidate. candidate.
While they worked the room was quiet apart from the shuffling of papers and listeners saying “Trump” or “Biden.”
A similar scene occurred in all 159 counties of Georgia as the count of nearly 5 million votes began.
At the Chatham County Election Board Annex, a cavernous warehouse on the south side of Savannah, about 60 listeners wearing face masks listened as a supervisor explained how the process would work, then watched a training video before to start the count a little after 10 am
At the Floyd County Administrative Building in Rome, northern Georgia, pairs of masked listeners seated at eight plastic folding tables were sworn in at 9 a.m. and the ballots arrived minutes later.
Some counties were using Fridays to settle in before starting their counts on Saturday.
In Fulton County, the state’s most populous, 110,000 square feet of space at the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta was being prepared for 125 two-person teams, the chief electoral officer said. , Rick Barron, on a video conference.
The county has 528,777 recount ballots, Barron said, adding that he estimates it will take teams two or three days to complete if they work from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day.
The county’s election department has been hit hard by the coronavirus. Two people in the postal voting section were infected in the spring before the primary elections, one of whom died. Twenty-six other workers at a warehouse where election materials are prepared and supplies stored tested positive last month.
It was on their minds as they planned the space for the audit, Barron said.
“We’re in a very large facility, but there are risks when you have so many people gathering anywhere,” he said. “If we couldn’t disperse like this at the Georgia World Congress, then we wouldn’t have so many people there.”
The secretary of state’s office instructed county election officials to complete the audit by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. The deadline for the state to certify the results is November 20.
Even as the count began, Raffensperger self-quarantined himself as a precaution after his wife tested positive for the coronavirus on Thursday. Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs told The Associated Press that Raffensperger had tested negative for the virus and said the secretary’s quarantine would not affect the audit.
The audit is part of a 2019 law that also sets guidelines for purchasing a new $ 100 million electoral system from Dominion Voting Systems. It was up to the Secretary of State to choose the race, and Raffensperger said the presidential race made the most sense because of its narrow margin and national significance.
But critics accused him of caving in to Trump after the president’s campaign and Republicans across the state called for a recount. Raffensperger’s office has strongly denied this.
Critics have also argued that a full manual recount was not foreseen as part of Georgia’s audit requirement and places an unnecessarily heavy and costly burden on county election officials.
The final audit tally numbers will almost certainly differ from the numbers previously reported by counties, but the overall result is expected to remain the same, said Gabriel Sterling, who oversaw the implementation of the state’s new voting system for the secretary of state’s office.
The results will not be released on an ad hoc basis when the counties finish counting, but will be announced once the full tally is complete, he said, adding that the audit result is what will be certified.
The PA did not declare the winner in Georgia, where Biden leads Trump by 0.3 percentage point. There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law provides this option for a candidate who follows if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage point. It is the practice of the PA not to call a race that is – or is likely to become – subject to a recount.
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 photographers Mike Stewart in Marietta, GA, Stephen B. Morton in Savannah, GA, and Ben Gray in Rome, GA, contributed reporting.
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