Republicans temporarily block certification of Detroit’s election results
Election officials in Georgia said Tuesday that about 2,755 early in-person votes were not included in initial results from Fayette County – a mistake that was uncovered during the ongoing audit of the state’s presidential election.
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting systems implementation manager, said the ballots were scanned but local election workers failed to complete the final step of uploading the votes onto a memory card. The missing votes were discovered because the number of voters who checked-in to vote did not match the number of votes that were publicly reported by the county, said Sterling, who added that this was an isolated mishap and not intentional.
President Trump will net 449 votes from the new ballots, slightly narrowing President-elect Joe Biden’s statewide lead.
This is the second batch of previously uncounted votes that were found during the audit – the other came from Floyd County, where about 2,600 ballots were never counted after election night. Both batches of new votes helped Trump, but he is still trailing by more than 12,000 votes, which experts say is an insurmountable deficit.
Sterling said that Walton County “may also have a memory card with 224 votes from an Election Day polling location that have not been uploaded,” and therefore were not counted. Officials are still looking into this.
Sterling said that 78 of Georgia’s 159 counties already finished the audit and uploaded results to the state. Of those, 57 counties found no discrepancies, and 21 counties were only one vote different than the original tally.
“We have 159 counties and the vast majority are doing everything right,” Sterling said.
After top officials said there was no widespread fraud, Trump started attacking the audit and pushed baseless conspiracy theories about voting machines changing millions of votes. He also spread false claims about the signature-matching process that was used to verify the legality of absentee ballots before they were counted.
Responding to Trump’s claims about signature-matching, Sterling said, “he’s just flat-out, 100 percent, four-square wrong,” adding, “It’s just confusing to people, because people want to believe it, because the President is saying it.”
