In Floyd County, Georgia, more than 2,600 uncounted ballots for the 2020 presidential election were found during the state’s recount.
Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is placing the blame on Floyd County election officials who failed to upload votes stored in a memory card from a ballot-scanning machine.
Georgia officials began the recount of nearly 5 million votes on Friday after President Donald Trump and the Republican Party challenged the election results and requested a statewide audit.
The thousands of previously uncounted ballots in the county marks the first significant mishap uncovered in the recount process thus far. Floyd County Republican Party chair Luke Martin called the issue “concerning” but maintained that it “doesn’t appear to be a widespread issue.”
“I’m glad the audit revealed it,” Martin told the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, “and it’s important that all votes are counted.”
So far no other counties have found any discrepancies in ballot counts, with recount numbers closely matching their original figures.
Though President Trump has made claims of voter fraud these newly discovered ballots will likely do little to close the 14,000-vote gap between the incumbent and President-Elect Joe Biden. If Biden is declared victorious, which seems highly likely at this point, he will have clinched the state’s sixteen electoral votes, therefore, flipping a historically Republican southern battleground.
Gabriel Sterling of the Secretary of State’s office told a local news station that the newly counted ballots will only give Trump an additional 800 votes leaving Biden still in the lead. Later at a news conference, Sterling called for the election’s director of Floyd County to step down.
“The secretary of, since this was such an amazing blunder and they had issues in August, would like to see that elections director in Floyd County step down from his position,” he said.
Thousands of county and poll workers in Georgia’s 159 counties have until midnight on Wednesday, November 18 to meet the deadline for the recount.
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