Georgia data is preliminary, state says 12 weeks after primary

In large red letters atop a Georgia Secretary of State’s office web page featuring precinct-by-precinct vote tallies from the May 22 primary election stand the words: “Official Results.”

But the data is hardly official. Two and a half months after the primary, many of the voter turnout figures are wrong — in some instances wildly wrong, excluding totals from the Democratic races in the red state.

A spokesperson for Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the Republican nominee for governor, said the data is “preliminary,” because the state’s system lacks computer programming to add totals from multiple parties’ primaries.

If so, some data on the site has been preliminary for quite awhile. Some 2016 data on the site is still inaccurate for the same reason, a review by McClatchy found. The errors have provided fodder for a lawsuit alleging the state’s electronic voting system has failed catastrophically and asking a federal judge to order the state to scrap the equipment and switch to paper ballots in time for the November election.

Kemp spokeswoman Candice Broce said correct data is located elsewhere on the site, in a tab labeled “Voter Turnout by Demographics,” that is compiled “at least a couple of weeks” after the election.

“It is not an error,” Broce wrote in an email, referring to the problematic data. She said the state’s system is not designed for primary elections.

A separate error cited in the suit, which was found on a similar web page, initially indicated 670 people voted in this year’s Republican primary race in Habersham County’s Mud Creek precinct. That number, even without counting the 69 Democrats who voted, was nearly 2 1/2 times greater than the 276 people whom the county reported had registered to vote. Calling the latter figure “a typo,” the county election supervisor last week ordered the number of registered voters corrected to 3,704.

Disclosures of the inaccuracies have prompted election watchdogs to level harsh criticism toward Kemp’s office.

“It is a completely bogus and ridiculous answer to pretend that the [turnout] numbers are somehow OK and legitimate because they are only reporting one party,” said Marilyn Marks, the executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, which filed the suit last year. “They are on a web page that says official results.”