A Georgia county recounted thousands of ballots on Nov. 17 after up to 2,700 votes were found missing. Election officials say they aren’t sure whether the mistake was a machine malfunction or human error. An investigation is underway to find out how it happened.
At the Floyd County Board of Elections, officials suspect the problem might have derived from a scanner issue they had early on.
Melanie Conrad, a member of Floyd County Board of Elections said that “the first step is to handle the recount, the next step is to get a message out to our citizens and say we’re going to make this right now.”
“We know a box of around 5,000 ballots was taken from the location where a scanner malfunctioned during early voting. Those ballots were moved into the elections office. The question that’s on the table now, is how did half of those 5,000 get counted while the other half didn’t. Some suspect it could have been a poll worker not doing their job properly,” she added.
While investigators work to uncover what happened—Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has called on the county elections director to step down. Conrad told us she can’t say if that will happen, but the board will meet this Thursday to discuss this issue.
This is a deep red county, and the majority of the ballots found were cast for Trump. Elections officials insist that these updated numbers will not affect the overall results.
But one poll watcher from Gwinnett County told NTD if there are a handful of relatively small mistakes like the one here in Floyd county that go unnoticed, it could pile up to be a major problem—with just a 14,000 vote margin between Trump and Biden.
Floyd County will finalize the results, along with the rest of Georgia. All recounts must be finished by the night of Nov. 18.
