Elections board meeting called for Thursday
♦ Officials have completed recounts of all races.
The Floyd County Elections Board called meeting on Thursday will likely focus on a call from Georgia’s Secretary of State for chief elections clerk Robert Brady to step down, after an audit found over 2,500 ballots in the presidential race weren’t counted.
The board is scheduled to meet at the county administration building at noon, and will go directly into closed session to discuss a personnel matter, according to Elections Board member Melanie Conrad.
Brady is currently in quarantine after a
COVID-19 exposure, but has been in touch with county officials concerning the findings of the audit.
Fayette County officials also found just over 2,700 ballots that had not been counted in their election, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. The additional votes from Floyd and Fayette are expected to trim presidentelect Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the state to around 13,000 from 14,000.
Elections workers in Floyd County recounted all races Tuesday to include the early votes cast during the Nov. 3 election at the Floyd County Administration Building, Conrad said.
They also tabulated the number of people who filled out paperwork to vote early at the site, to compare that total with the number of ballots cast. The recount of those specific ballots took under four hours, ending
just a little after 5 p.m. While the number hasn’t been confirmed yet, it matches up with the number of applications counted earlier that day, Conrad said.
Poll observers from both the local Republican and Democratic parties were at the recount location.
An investigator with the Secretary of State’s office arrived around 11:30 a.m. to help determine what happened to throw the presidential election count off by 2,500 ballots.
Conrad characterized the issue as a “technical issue caused by human error.” She
said, “The machines only do what we tell them to do.”
The additional votes aren’t likely to affect any downballot local races — all of which had large margins. They also aren’t enough to change state level runoff races.
On top of Tuesday’s investigation, Floyd County was included in an outside voting machine audit that confirmed there had been no tampering.
Secretary of State
Brad Raffensperger last week ordered Huntsville, Alabamabased Pro V&V — a U.S. Elec
tion Assistance Commission certified testing laboratory — to do an audit of a random sample of machines statewide.
“Pro V&V found no evidence of the machines being tampered,” Raffensperger said in a statement.
The company conducted a random sampling of Dominion Voting Systems machines and, according to Raffensperger, confirmed the assessment of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that there are no signs of cyberattacks or election hacking.