Presidential ballot recount begins in Floyd County
♦ The count may take a Thanksgiving break, but it must be done by Dec. 2.
Floyd County election officials started the local recount of the Nov. 3 presidential race a little past noon on Tuesday and expect it to be completed by Dec. 1 at the latest.
For this recount, the elections office only has one Dominion Voting Systems technician on site and one scanner to process over 41,000 ballots.
According to election board member John Scott Husser, they’ll begin with absentee ballots, then do early in-person ballots, election day ballots and finish with the provisional ballots.
Under state elections board rules, an official recount must be conducted by machine, specifically high-speed scanners that read and tabulate the votes.
Before beginning the recount, election workers must test the scanners to make sure they’re counting accurately.
To do that, they create test decks of 100 ballots — 75 marked by touchscreen voting machines and 25 marked by hand — and count those ballots by hand before running them through a scanner. If the scanned tally matches the hand tally, it means the scanner is working correctly and they can begin rescanning every ballot.
“We only do one box at a time, put them all back in there, reseal them and mark they’ve already been counted,” Board Chair Tom Rees said. “And we’ll do the next box and the next box ... We’ll be doing that for quite a while.”
Accounting for adjudicating ballots again, Husser and Rees believe they won’t have the official results ready before the holiday weekend. However, all of the adjudicating will be done on the computer, which should make the process go faster.
“We’re just doing the presidential race and there just weren’t that many writeins for the race,” Rees said.
Both elections board members clarified that they will not be checking signatures during the recount.
Rees explained that in order to check signatures, they would need the envelopes the absentee ballots came in. They still have the envelopes but there is no way to connect one to a specific ballot.
Wednesday will be a short day for the recount, with the Dominion technician leaving at either noon or 2 p.m. for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
“We’ll start back up 9 a.m. Monday morning so I think we’ll be done sometime Tuesday,” Rees said. “We have until midnight Wednesday (Dec. 2).”
Rees said Elections Clerk Vanessa Waddell is overseeing office operations after last week’s termination of the chief elections clerk, Robert Brady. Rees said the recounts gave kept them busy and they haven’t begun officially discussing plans for the Jan. 5 U. S. Senate runoffs.
The recount was requested by President Donald Trump after certified results showed him losing the state to Democrat Joe Biden by 12,670 votes, or 0.25%. Under state law, the losing candidate can request a recount when the margin is less than 0.5%. Trump’s campaign on Saturday formally requested the recount.
State election officials have said that it’s possible the results of the recount could be slightly different from the original tally, but they’ve said it’s very unlikely it would be enough to change the overall outcome of the election.
Biden’s campaign echoed that in a call Tuesday with reporters.
“Georgia voters have selected Joe Biden to be their next president,” Biden campaign attorney Patrick Moore said. “We’re confident that this second recount, which is in fact a third time the votes have been counted, will simply reaffirm Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia.”