The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
How Fulton counts its absentee ballots
At warehouse, workers take pains to determine each voter’s intention.
On the second floor of State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta on Tuesday, a man surrounded by glass windows slid envelope after envelope through a machine that cut them open.
Inside each were ballots — pebbles of the bedrock of democracy — that were still being counted nearly 24 hours after Georgia polling locations closed on one of the most contentious elections in the nation’s history.
The envelopes were then handed in batches to elections workers who removed them one by one, and checked the signatures on the ballots against signatures on the envelopes to ensure a match.
From there, the envelopes went into boxes lining the walls, in some cases six feet high with some buckling under the weight. Then came the real work — scanning the documents so they could be counted, which happens at a warehouse off English Avenue. Those that couldn’t be read by
machine undergo a bipartisan review at the warehouse.
Welcome to the end of Fulton County’s 2020 election.
As people across the nation watched Georgia and a handful of other states that will determine the presidency, the count of decisive mail-in ballots lumbered into a second day.
Most experts laud mail-in vote counting process as transparent and fair.
But it hasn’t been without controversy, sometimes stoked by President Donald Trump, who has made unsubstantiated claims of fraud and threatened legal action.
On Wednesday, Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer tweeted that he filed a lawsuit in Chatham County to “prevent the unlawful counting of absentee ballots” after he alleged an observer saw an “unidentifiable woman mix over 50 ballots into the stack of uncounted absentee ballots.”
But the counts march on. As of 7 p.m. Wednesday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that there were about 131,000 absentee ballots still uncounted, with about 48,000 of those from Fulton County voters. Fulton elections director Rick Barron said Tuesday night that his staff would finish the count sometime past midnight. “As long as it takes, we’ll be here,” Barron said.
These mail-in ballots are noteworthy and controversial for all sorts of reasons, but they all go through the same process in Futon.
The noisy elections warehouse is where difficult ballots receive more scrutiny, by a Republican and a Democrat sitting together and reviewing the ballots in question. They try to determine the intention of the voter. The rare tie is broken by a county elections official.
Halsey Knapp, a Democratic attorney who has fought in notable Georgia election cases, said the most common issues have been in the U.S. Senate special election for Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s seat in which there were 21 candidates.
Because that race takes up more room on the ballot, there’s a greater chance for errant marks, Knapp said. He added that some people bubbled in multiple candidates, which isn’t how Georgia’s voting system works.
He said ballots come in batches of 100 voters. Of those, he said roughly 2% need to be adjudicated — but until they are finalized, the entire batch is held up, which delays results.
Gwinnett County is set to begin its adjudication process today at 9 a.m.
Charles Bullock, a University of Georgia political science professor who has studied Georgia politics for decades, said the heavy focus on the absentee ballot count in metro Atlanta is a sign of how close the race is in the state.
“The fact that we don’t have them all counted, that’s not at all surprising,” Bullock said. “That it matters maybe is.”
Fulton received roughly 142,000 mail-in ballots — compared to just over 58,000 people who voted in person on Tuesday.
This shift has likely put “tremendous pressure” on county elections officials in Fulton and DeKalb, because of the possibility of a recount or litigation over the tight election results, Bullock said.
Georgia remained uncalled Wednesday afternoon, along with the more predictable swing state Pennsylvania.
While much of the national focus was on the counting of absentee ballots in heavily populated metro Atlanta counties, there were thousands of ballots also being counted around the state.
In Houston County, election officials were busy adjudicating several hundred absentee mail-in ballots that counting scanners required human review.
Houston elections supervisor Debra Presswood said they were hoping to have their review process finished by the end of Wednesday, which would mean a total of roughly 20,000 Houston ballots added to the state totals on Wednesday.
“We realize people want the numbers,” Presswood said. “We wanted to make sure everything is reported correctly and then we can explain what we reported.”