Georgia Monitor Catches 9,626-Vote Error in Hand Recount

Gwinnett County election workers handle ballots as part of the recount for the 2020 presidential election at the Beauty P. Baldwin Voter Registrations and Elections Building in Lawrenceville, Georgia, on Nov. 16, 2020. Megan Varner/Getty Images

A recount monitor in Georgia discovered a 9,626-vote error in the hand recount in DeKalb County, according to the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.

“One of our monitors discovered a 9,626-vote error in the DeKalb County hand count. One batch was labeled 10,707 for Biden and 13 for Trump—an improbable margin even by DeKalb standards. The actual count for the batch was 1,081 for Biden and 13 for Trump,” David Shafer wrote on Twitter on Nov. 18.

“Had this counting error not been discovered, Biden would have gained enough votes from this one batch alone to cancel out Trump’s gains from Fayette, Floyd, and Walton,” Shafer added, referring to the three Peach State counties that discovered memory cards with uncounted votes on Nov. 16 and 17. The discovered votes favored President Donald Trump and cut former Vice President Joe Biden’s lead in the state by more than 1,400 votes.

Shafer said that two official counters signed off on the miscounted batch. Republican attorneys turned over an affidavit (pdf) on the incident to the Georgia secretary of state and requested an investigation.

“We were limited to one monitor for every 10 counting tables and we were kept some distance from the tables. There is no telling what we missed under these unreasonable restrictions,” Shafer said.

Georgia’s deadline to complete the recount is 11:59 p.m. on Nov. 18. The state is scheduled to vote on whether to certify the results of the 2020 election on Nov. 20.

The recount in progress was initiated by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, based on a new law that calls for an audit of one race after each election. The Trump campaign has challenged the recount process, asserting that it is meaningless unless it includes an audit of the voters’ signatures.

The office of the secretary of state didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

Georgia officials are probing the handling of the presidential election in the state’s largest county. Officials are seeing “managerial sloppiness” and “chain of custody” issues in Fulton County, which has a population of about a million and includes Atlanta, Gabriel Sterling with the secretary of state’s office told reporters on Nov. 17.

Raffensperger said on Nov. 17 that an audit of voting machines was completed with no signs of foul play. Voting systems testing company Pro V&V conducted the audit and “found no evidence of the machines being tampered.”

The Trump campaign has alleged that voting machines and software by Dominion Voting Systems switched votes from Trump to Biden. Dominion has denied the allegation.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.